Origins of Brainwashing

The concept of brainwashing is often discussed, but rarely understood. Originating from the Chinese term Xinao, which literally means ‘wash brain’, the word first entered circulation in the west in the 1950s. However, to this day, few understand the origins of brainwashing, and to what purpose it served.

HISTORY

While brainwashing was first noted by Westerners in the 1950s, the Chinese communists had been using such methods for some time. In the decades prior to the Korean War, China had been in a state of domestic hostility. The Chinese Civil War saw the rise of Mao Zedong and the communist party. Upon seizing power, one of the first goals of the communists was to convert or eliminate potential political threats, those deemed ‘reactionary’ or ‘counter-revolutionary’. This would be achieved by thought reform and re-education.

KOREA

By the time of the Korean War, the technique of brain washing had been somewhat refined. Americans began noticing that some allied personnel who had been captured as prisoners of war, had completely changed. Some emerged from captivity guilt ridden, denouncing their own country whilst taking the side of the Chinese. Some became willingly compliant to their handlers. Initially, the claim that such things were happening in China was controversial in the West. Directly after word broke of such techniques, the Chinese alleged that this was a distraction, aimed at delegitimising the apparent admission of several captured US personnel of taking part in biological warfare against the North Koreans and Chinese. Whether or not such biological warfare took place - supposedly by the experienced Japanese forces at the behest of the Americans - is still debated, but what is for certain is that the US claims about brainwashing were true. This was verified when several British army personnel - who had been imprisoned by the Chinese during the war - revealed that the communists had attempted to use advanced interrogation and manipulation techniques on them, in order to force particular outcomes, be it admissions of guilt, restructuring of opinions, and so forth.

ROBERT JAY LIFTON

In 1953, an increasing number of prisoners from the north returned reporting the same thing. Soon after, having heard of this strange phenomena, American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton traveled to interview those who had experienced this new form of interrogation. Cataloguing his findings, he published ‘Thought Reform and Psychological Totalism; a study of brainwashing in China’. This book would have a profound effect, expanding the popularity of the term brainwashing, and exposing many in the west to what had been occurring in China for some time.

He also put to rest the fictional understanding of brainwashing which had emerged during the three years following the emergence of the term in the west. Initially, the public had been led to believe that the Chinese were capable of completely rewriting a person. Lifton noted that this was not necessarily the case when it came to thought reform, as the majority of POWs would eventually reintegrate into western society.

Regardless, his work brought forward the reality of thought reform, criticism, and self criticism which was occurring in China with dramatic consequences.

COMMUNIST THOUGHT REFORM

What Lifton had discovered was a concept which had been growing within Marxist circles for decades. It was the tip of an iceberg which dated back to the Bolshevik Revolution. The communists understood very early on that pure brute force (killings, torture, and the like) had its limitations. This became obvious during the early 1920s, when Russian communist revolutionaries - who demonstrated unparalleled brutality - attempted to spread their ideology across Russia. While brute force enabled them to retain control, any grassroots support towards communism which existed within Russia began to evaporate over the following decades.

This is because - as they noted - such barbaric acts as physical torture only damage the body, not the spirit. Motivated resistance can handle torture to the point of death, only to be replaced by another equally motivated fighter. Not only that, but physically wounding others in such a barbaric manner actually aggravated the population more. Thus, the communists realised early on, that the most efficient way to control a population was to break them mentally and spiritually.

Following the disaster of the October Revolution in 1917, Lenin contacted other Marxist theorists across Europe, in a bid to figure out why the revolution had failed to proliferate into a global uprising of the workers, as the Marxist’s had imagined. The initially criticism was damning to classical Marxism; Russia was essentially a feudal society, not a free market democracy like many other nations in the west. With this noted, Marxist intellectuals began rethinking their approach. Many schools of thought emerged out of this, including Critical Theory, Cultural Hegemony, and several others, which can all be placed under the label of ‘neo-Marxism’. What most of these schools of thought were unified on was the necessity to destabilise Western culture in order to bring about the preconditions for revolution. This included manipulating elements like religion, art, social relations, literature, film, media, and even such things as architecture. Everything could be manipulated to evoke a certain feeling. This would take time, and subtlety, but if done correctly, it would - as Willi Munzenberg, a Marxist theorist and friend of Lenin put it - ‘make the west unbearable’.

While it remains a mystery as to how many of these early post-Leninist Marxist Mao Zedong read, his ideology does allude to him having read the likes of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, and some of the Critical Theorists, including Marcuse and Horkheimer. This all played into his own view of thought reform, which included an emphasis on unifying society under a single belief, before which all other beliefs and so called contradictions had been destroyed.

Several elements were important when it came to what we now call ‘brainwashing’ in the Chinese Communist sense. These included criticism, self criticism, and destroying so called contradictions. The goal of all this was to create ‘socialist man’, a man with an entirely new spirit, new beliefs, and new abilities. To create the socialist man, the old man must be completely destroyed. This strange, baptismal concept was extrapolated by Herbert Marcuse, who explicitly stated that the socialist utopia could not exist, nor even be conceived of, until the old preexisting society had been completely destroyed. The socialist man concept in many ways was a microcosmic variant of this idea.

This was no longer merely about class, but about something broader. This was evident in the work of Herbert Marcuse, who popularised the move away from Marx’s classical idea of class consciousness being the prerequisite for organising a revolutionary group, to a new concept known as Critical consciousness. This was not limited to a particular economic class. Instead, the raising of a critical consciousness was possible with anyone from any background. The goal was simple; the target is to be educated in such a manner that he begins to see the world for what it - supposedly - actually is; a prison. This is his critical consciousness. This allows him to realise that everything he sees within the preexisting society is - in one way or another - upholding the hegemonic capitalist system. Be it the way particular groups speak, what they listen to, how they live, and so forth, an individual with a critical conscience is no longer happy with society. He requires change.

In a post revolutionary society such as Maoist China, these people were needed. Those with such a worldview would highlight the contradictions amongst the people. Or in simple terms, they would notice when other people would act in any way which contradicted the communist regime.

SELF CRITICISM

One of the primary elements of Mao Zedong’s thought reform method was self criticism. That is, convincing an individual that he must partake in self analysis.

Mao had generated his own method of criticism, which he labelled in the Little Red Book as the ‘unity, criticism, unity’ formula. As he puts it, there exists contradictions amongst the people. These contradictions lead to social issues and injustice. Thus, the resolution of the contradictions amongst the people is necessary. Mao notes that an individual has a desire for unity, and by utilising this desire for unity, he can be pulled into criticism and self criticism, until - as Mao puts it - the people have arrived at a ‘new unity or new basis’.

UNITY

The stated goal of much of this suffering was ‘unity’. The use of the word ‘unity’ is complex in this context. Essentially, it referred to a complete conformity to the prevailing ideas of the party. Hence, to achieve this so called unity, struggle, criticism, and thought reform were used to break and then rebuild the individual.

STRUGGLE SESSIONS

This thought reform continued to evolve in communist china, reaching its most extreme point during the Cultural Revolution, during which brainwashed university students and school children went about the country ‘resolving contradictions amongst the people’. This included putting their teachers, friends, and even family members through public humiliation trials, and in many cases executing them. The most famous example of this was the struggle session, the most outwardly brutal manifestation of Mao’s ideas of criticism.

The victims of this period of reform were forced to admit to their crimes. What were these crimes? Oftentimes, there were none. Victims were picked based on whether they appeared to support the communist Maoists, or not. If they did not show perfect conformity, they were targeted. Then, through 'struggle', they were forced into admitting their 'crimes' (which were often fabricated during the struggle sessions).

The technique was simple; through criticism and struggle, an individual would be pressured into making an admission of guilt, regardless of whether or not he was guilty of anything. Then, having admitted guilt, he was struggled again, told that his admission was not sufficient, but came from disingenuous motives, and further pressure was applied for a more 'honest' admission of guilt. By this point, the physically and mentally exhausted individual had nothing left to stand on; he capitulated, he had been defeated, and was now openly guilty of apparent crimes, which he himself now believed. The scene in George Orwell's 1984, where the protagonists finally believes that two plus two equals 5, is the very same psychological outcome of Mao's thought reform.  This became a highly effective tactic during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

THOUGHT REFORM

Oftentimes, those who had undergone struggle and criticism were indeed experiencing an attempt at brainwashing. One of the goals here was to get the individual to see things from the peoples standpoint. The people - in this case - referred to those who were onboard with the communist party. Mao himself outlines this in the little red book, when he differentiates between ‘the people’, and the ‘enemies of the people’. Mao says that to lack the correct political opinion is like not having a soul. Thus, if one was not in line with the parry, he was not one of the people, but an enemy of the people. He could not take part in the peoples republic, since he was not one of them. Thus, though reform would allow him perceive the peoples standpoint.

In practice, seeing the peoples standpoint meant realising the subjective nature of experience, and how such experience lined up with party philosophy. For example, an individual may have been a poor land owner. Despite being poor, he did indeed still own land, and was - from a party perspective - an oppressor, who represented feudal society. Or perhaps he was a university lecturer. Here, there are multiple issues; although he may have taught Marxist theory - a positive for the party - he may have also owned a car, held a 'bourgeois' job, or acted in some other way which could be interpreted as counterrevolutionary, no matter how small. Even if he held the correct ideology, through struggle it would be revealed that there was some inconsistency, meaning he couldn’t truly see things from the standpoint of ‘the people’.

If such criticism was successfully, the emerging individual would be spiritually broken, willing to serve the party. And more importantly, he would now have a critical conscience, meaning he would see inconsistencies in other people - no matter how small - and thus the cycle would repeat. Ultimately what this meant in practice, was that he - and everyone else who had been brainwashed - would execute the will of Mao and the party, and crush any sign of symptom of distrust, distaste, or dislike of the system that was spotted within another person.

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What the Maoist intellectuals did in China is important today. Similar tactics are employed to advance ideological agendas. Although the labels change and the specifics vary, Maoist brainwashing, criticism, and struggle sessions continue in the west. Individuals who do not agree with the prevailing socialist narrative are craftily coerced into a game - the rules of which they do not understand - and through this game, they are struggled into admitting some form of guilt, from which they are shamed, ostracised, and punished.

There is much more to say about Maoist brainwashing, criticism, and struggle, but perhaps these are best covered in detail in another video. These tactics must be studied and remembered for what they are, lest they should continue to aid in the overturning of society.