Brainwashing: The Fictions of Mind Control—A Study of Novels and Films since World War II (review)

David Seed, a professor of American literature based at the University of Liverpool, is one of Great Britain’s leading authorities on U.S. Cold War culture. In 1999, Seed produced American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film (London: Routledge, 1999), one of the best single-volume accounts to date of American Cold War science fiction, his chief area of expertise. He has now followed up with a fascinating exploration of the literary and cinematic representations of brainwashing during the Cold War. His focus is mainly on American material, sprinkled with analysis of important novels written in Europe.

Seed begins where we might expect, by looking at George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Written in the aftermath of the Second World War and published in 1949, Orwell’s final novel has long been regarded as the West’s classic Cold War text. Borrowing from the recent work of Frances Stonor Saunders and others on the support given by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to writers on the non-Communist left during the early Cold War, Seed shows how Nineteen Eighty-Four was quickly adopted and adapted by official propagandists keen to emphasize the Soviet regime’s Big Brother–like qualities. What really interests Seed, however, are the novel’s torture sections, in which an incarcerated Winston Smith imagines, witnesses, and finally experiences politically-motivated brutality. These harrowing scenes, according to Seed, anticipated the paradigm of brainwashing that emerged in the 1950s and beyond—a pattern of physical and psychological duress resulting in the victim’s “confession” of his ideological guilt.

Fiction and fact blurred dramatically a few years after Orwell’s death in 1950. During the Korean War, the first direct military clash between East and West, Americans were shocked and appalled by reports that U.S. prisoners were collaborating with their captors, “confessing” that they had used germ warfare against the enemy, and, in a few cases, even refusing repatriation. The term “brainwashing” was coined to explain all of this and soon took hold in the American psyche. Innocent U.S. soldiers, it seemed, had fallen victim to secret Communist techniques of psychological manipulation, thereby confirming White House warnings that the Cold War was nothing less than “a battle for men’s minds.” Seed shows how journalists like Edward Hunter, who worked part-time for the CIA, played a significant role in popularizing this theory through such books as Brain-Washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951) and The Black Book on Red China: The Continuing Revolt (New York: The Bookmailer, 1958). Seed then traces the assimilation of the notion of brainwashing into other areas of political commentary and into science fiction and conspiracy narratives at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s.

Seed devotes a whole chapter to the most famous novel/film to emerge from the brainwashing scare in the wake of the Korean War, The Manchurian Candidate. Richard Condon’s 1958 novel, with its story of a Communist-programmed assassin called Raymond Shaw who guns down an American politician, fused several important political and cultural themes of the early Cold War era: alien Communist conspiracies, “Momism,” political assassinations, red-baiting, mind control, and espionage. By the time Hollywood’s version of the book appeared in 1962, directed by John Franken-heimer and starring Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra, Condon had become a widely acknowledged “expert” on brainwashing. When the American U2 reconnaissance pilot Gary Powers was shot down by Soviet air defense forces and brought to trial in the USSR in 1960, Condon was invited by one magazine to write an article about the sort of conditioning Powers might expect from his Soviet captors. (Condon declined, insisting that it was far more important to examine the effects of national advertising, McCarthyite demagoguery, and the whole ethos of the...