Specifically, the Communist style “Reeducation Camps” that popped up in places such as Vietnam after the 1975 Victory, Cuba after the Cuban Revolution, and the various Soviet Reeducation Camps throughout its existence.
I’ve noticed a weird trend where some people REALLY don’t seem to think they were all that bad, a “Stuff You Should Know” podcast in an episode about Refugees from the Vietnam War referred to a Reeducation Camp as basically being like a Refugee Camp which seems incredibly wrong. I’ve seen seen a few posters on this very SMDB gleefully want to return to Reeducation Camps to “throw all the redhats in when Biden wins”.
So what’s up with Reeducation Camps? Were they concentration camps? Were many people killed in them? Or was it just a fun learning experience for a year?
You don’t volunteer to go to a re-education camp to spend a fun summer holiday. You are imprisoned there indefinitely without trial and subject to political indoctrination, strict discipline, and hard labor under the pretence of turning you into a productive member of society. And, no, not everyone made it out alive.
Not sure if there was/is any essential difference between Communist and Anti-Communist reeducation camps.
Read the Jack Chalker novel Dancers in the Afterglow for a science fiction based description of a re-education camp. I assume the description comes from things he’d heard or read about (in his everyday life, Chalker had been a history teacher. Sometimes it showed)
Not pleasant. And he didn’t even add any SF-like touches to most of it. Break people up into small groups, make them uncomfortable, limit their food, force them into activities, then have them forced into class sessions where you force them to think the way you want. Drugs sometimes help.
I remember reading a book written by a Cuban refugee who was thrown into a Communist Cuban Reeducation Camp because his father had a low level government job at some point, and he claimed that every night he would hear the sounds of people getting tied to posts in the back and getting shot.
However I’ve also heard that was a lie and there wasn’t a death toll at these Cuban Reeducation Camps so I’m very confused.
This is an old trick - mock executions and pretending to kill prisoners - presumably they wanted to intimidate the subjects but they also needed their manpower so they couldn’t just kill all of them. Some people probably DID get killed, but they probably wouldn’t just execute people every night, or else they’d have no one to “re-educate.”
A relatively rosy picture of a Chinese re-education facility and experience is the depiction of the Fushun War Criminals Management Centre in the film The Last Emperor.
I had an uncle who was sentenced to Re-Education Through Labor during the Cultural Revolution (he fell for the ruse of the Hundred Flowers Campaign and was critical of Mao during a faculty meeting). He was a sickly academic (engineering professor) and was sent to work as a laborer on a pig farm. Completely destroyed his health; he died in the mid 1970s a few months before my father was finally able to return to China for his first visit since 1949.
So yeah, doubleplus ungood (at least anecdotally).
Anyway, in reply to the OP, think about the camps in Xinjiang for the Uighur Muslims in China now for being “insufficiently patriotic.” That’s pretty much what a reeducation camp is.
A number of my wife’s friends/classmates disappeared after Tiananmen 1989 for 6-18 months and then re-emerged “redder than red”. They will not talk about what happened. Even the two people who have now lived in the US for almost 30 years.
One of them supposedly reported my wife to the Overseas Chinese Bureau (or something) for being too friendly with members of the Taiwanese Students Organization on campus. My in-laws in China got a visit from some scary people.
He had a lifestyle that was inconsistent with the income of a post-doc. So perhaps his conversion involved less pain and more bribery. Or perhaps both.
Bit of a sidetrack, but should point out “brainwashing” is not a thing. Its a completely invented phenomenon. It originated during the Korean war where some British and American POWs (very small number 1-2 individuals IIRC) defected to the Communist side, and it was blamed on “brainwashing” in the west. The fact is there never was any such thing, POWs were treated incredibly badly by the Communists, both physically and mentally, but at no point did anything like “brainwashing” successfully take place (though that didn’t stop the CIA and others trying to replicate this non existent phenomenon)
Brainwashing (also known as mind control , menticide , coercive persuasion , thought control , thought reform , and re-education ) is the concept that the human mind can be altered or controlled by certain psychological techniques. Brainwashing is said to reduce its subjects’ ability to think critically or independently,[1] to allow the introduction of new, unwanted thoughts and ideas into their minds,[2] as well as to change their attitudes, values and beliefs.[3][4]
The term “brainwashing” was first used in English by Edward Hunter in 1950 to describe how the Chinese government appeared to make people cooperate with them. Research into the concept also looked at Nazi Germany, at some criminal cases in the United States, and at the actions of human traffickers.
So “brainwashing” is real, altho not quite as imagined.
It was my understanding brainwashing was successfully and routinely practiced by the Hare Krishnas (formally the International Society For Krishna Consciousness), the Moonies (The Unification Church of Reverend Sun Yung Moon) and other cults.
“Brainwashing” by cults is a different animal. Cults “brainwash” people who have voluntarily joined them. They seduce vulnerable people, give them comfort and and a sense of belonging while simultaneously grinding down their ego and cutting off outside influences. For successful cults, the process is often insidiously subtle, and a vital element is that it doesn’t seem like “brainwashing” to the participants. Prolonged physical imprisonment of even the most recalcitrant cult members is actually pretty rare, even for the most abusive cults. The successful ones make it clear that you’re free to leave at any time while also ensuring that you feel like you have no where else to go, and are too psychologically dependent to make leaving a realistic choice.
That’s a far cry from the type of “brainwashing” that supposedly happened to POWs, or to what goes on in a “re-education” camp.
I think the TL;DR is they were very bad places, in which people were horribly mistreated, tortured and killed. In some cases (e.g. Soviet Union and North Korea) they were actual death camps (in that most of the people sent there ultimately die)
Even those cases like Vietnam and Cuba where most of the people sent there survived that doesn’t make them holiday camps. They were terrible places even compared to prisons in the US (and unlike those the people sent to them had committed no crime). People were worked close (or to) death, executed, starved, and tortured.
Some were temporary prisons for political prisoners. People were not indoctrinated nor were they tortured or shot. Conditions were bad, but about the same as any prison.
Nazi concentration camps like Dachau were similar, only worse. Still, once your term was up, you could be released (with the warning that if you told anyone what it was like, you’d be back again).
What people call Nazi Concentration Camps were called “Extermination Camps” like Auschwitz. They did not let anyone out alive.
I’m thinking that, based on the mentality of the people who designed and ran these assorted camps for various regimes, there was no deep psychological design involved. They were designed by sadistic thugs aided by terrified collaborators. They rely on repetition and fear to indoctrinate a viewpoint and suppress countervailing viewpoints. Intimidation and requiring people to betray others, respond with the “correct” answers, etc. are typical methods. I assume the stronger victims recognize this and conform, the weaker break down and conform, but rarely does it create die-hard fanatics; simply it creates people who have learned how to act like that if they want to avoid pain, and built that conditioning so strong it becomes hard to overcome.
While those were clearly death camps, and Soviet propaganda described then as “reeducation” camps. That was just propaganda, no one was spending any time trying to re-educate anyone.
They were described that way as there was a communist principle that forcing lazy bourgeois enemies of the state to do hard proletarian labor will “reeducate” them. Even in that sense its hard to describe them as reeducation camps, as most of the lazy bourgeois enemies of the state (aka millions of random Soviet citizens of all classes who were caught up in the purges) were worked to death.