The ‘Brainwashing’ Dilemma

Once an emblem of Cold War paranoia, the term ‘brainwashing’ continues to appear in serious conversation. Recently, for example, it has been used by a witness to describe the kidnapping of Nigerian school girls by Boko Haram,¹ by former members of scientology to criticize that religion,² and by an independent filmmaker, in a documentary now being screened at film festivals, to explain the effects of right-wing media in the United States.³ To invoke ‘brainwashing’ seems a consistently reliable way to inflame debate, though not always one that will cast both heat and light on an issue.

And yet historians should not disregard the term, or its multiple meanings, as a harmless echo of the past. The so-called War on Terror has given us a chilling example of what a naive understanding of brainwashing can permit. We now know that the Bush Administration’s programme for the ‘enhanced interrogation’ of suspected terrorists was not based on the proven practices of law enforcement or military interrogators, but rather the simulated tortures used in training elite U.S. military personnel. This curriculum was first introduced during the Korean War to inoculate servicemen against communist ‘brainwashing’. Its foundational philosophy was that a human being could be made to co-operate by systematically increasing his ‘debility, dependency and dread’. What Bush Administration officials failed to see was that this ‘co-operation’ meant telling the interrogator what he wanted to hear, whether it was true or not.

It is tempting to cut through this semantic thicket with historical explanation, to trace a clear genealogy from the coinage of ‘brainwashing’ as a way to describe conversion to communism, through its adoption during the Cold War in social debates and popular fiction, to its present uses in a period when fears of communism no longer apply but fantasies of mind control abound. However, as the growing historical literature on ‘brainwashing’ makes clear, it is a myth that ‘brainwashing’ ever had a specific, widely accepted definition, or that its potential for ambiguity could ever be safely ignored. This point is convincingly argued, in different ways and with different implications, by the three monographs under review in this essay. These books suggest a new approach in the historiography of brainwashing as a Cold War cultural phenomenon. While previous histories tended to treat Americans’ fascination with brainwashing as a case study of other intellectual developments (see, for instance, Abbott Gleason’s Totalitarianism, Ron Robin’s The Making of the Cold War Enemy, and Susan Carruthers’s Cold War Captives), the new wave offers perspectives on brainwashing in and of itself.⁴ The books under review here emphasize how the concept drew its plausibility from the specific social, political and cultural circumstances of the 1950s, and how the peculiar logic of ‘brainwashing’ continues to shape American popular thought in the present.

Admittedly, ‘brainwashing’ – when understood as a cultural construct rather than a set of techniques – has a fairly standardized origin story. The term was brought into popular discourse in 1950 by the journalist Edward Hunter, who had ties to the CIA and may have been writing under CIA direction. It reached national recognition during the Korean War, when a small group of American military personnel being held by communist forces as prisoners of war (POW) publicly confessed to war crimes; and when twenty-one American soldiers and one British marine, also POWs, defected to China. These POW scandals sowed confusion about whether ‘brainwashing’ meant the interrogation methods used by Chinese and Korean captors (which included solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, and forced standing), or sinister ‘Pavlovian’ techniques that could rewrite a person’s memory and identity. By the late 1950s, fears of brainwashing were being conjured not only in discussions of communism...