My gf has told me stories about the brainwashing that she experienced as a child in a catholic school. These cults are scary!
Brainwashing in the Manchurian Candidate sense is pure science fiction. It doesn’t exist.
Indoctrination, on the other hand, is very real and very common, and practiced successfully by religions, military forces, political parties, cults, gangs, schools and cable news channels around the world.
Here is a pretty in depth description of the Vietnamese Re-education camps (which every male South Vietnamese citizen was sent to after the collapse of South Vietnam).
The time of imprisonment was physically demanding and morally disheartening. “The Communists put people like me into the jungle so that we would get sick and slowly die off. That was their goal… Everyone was miserable. Many people died of sadness… One week I’d see one gravesite. As the weeks went on I saw more and more graves.”
. “I was very weak when I came home (from the labor camp in 1982). During the time I served for the South Vietnamese army, I weighed 53 kg. But after two years in the camp, I weighed only 39 kg!”
Many people couldn’t take the inhumane camp conditions and hoarded their rice rations and attempted to flee at night. Unfortunately, communist guards usually caught prisoners as they climbed the fence that surrounded the camps. “I never tried to leave. I had friends who tried to escape, who were shot dead.” If they survived, the punishment was severe. Five to six soldiers beat prisoners who were brought back. “I had a friend who was beaten until he vomited blood… (there were) welts all over his body.” Afterwards, guards jailed him in a small box for three to four months.
Very well put. What you refer to as “indoctrination” is exactly what I meant by “brainwashing” in my post yesterday. Not the sci-fi stuff, just extremely hard-sell convincing.
Indoctrination does work very well…on people that want to be indoctrinated.
It works great on members of a volunteer military. It works less well on conscripts. It works a lot less well or not at all on conscripts who don’t believe in the war they are fighting or the regime they are defending in the first place.
I think md-2000 got it exactly right. Like any form of torture, if you inflict enough pain, and don’t accidentally kill the person first, you can get them to say and do just about anything. You can’t really change what they believe, and any compliance you get is just whatever it is they think will get the pain to stop and avoid future pain, not an actual change in what they want to do.
As noted upthread, Vietnam had mass “re-education” camps. China had The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and mass re-education camps. Yet, a couple of decades later, they were booming quasi-capitalist economies that were only nominally “communist”.
As a terror tactic, re-education camps work, to the same extent that any form of torture “works”. But they aren’t actually that useful for actual indoctrination.
But note, it is not a given that a re-education camp is actually a straight death camp or labor camp, even if there have been lies about the latter. I daresay that if you visit a contemporary Chinese camp you really will learn the Mandarin language, Chinese songs, all about Chinese laws, etc.— or else.
Still not recommended as a fun way to brush up on a foreign language, practice arts and crafts, or lose some weight. Also, your planned stay of a few weeks may be unexpectedly extended.
My understanding - and I’m willing to be corrected - is that even without any pain or torture at all, the constant repetition of ideas will eventually affect most people. For example, consider Stockholm syndrome
I would speculate that cognitive dissonance also plays a role. Once a person decides that they are going to go along with the dominant ideology - even if it’s because they’re too tired of fighting or frightened or the like - cognitive dissonance will exert a psychological influence in bringing their thoughts in line with their actions.
Even according to that link, “Stockholm syndrome” is extremely rare, if it even exists. There’s been very little actual research done on it, and the results of what little research has been done have been contradictory.
But take a look at actual historical examples of “re-education” and indoctrination.
Look at China, as I mentioned. From the Chinese Communist Revolution, through the Great Leap Forward, to the Cultural Revolution, from “Education Through Labor” to re-education camps, with absolute control of education and the media, the Chinese Communist Party spent decades engaged in the largest scale mass indoctrination campaign in human history. They were quite successful in creating generations of Chinese terrified of being seen as disloyal to the Party. What they signally failed to do was create actual Chinese Communists.
Almost as soon as the Party publicly decided that maybe this “making money” stuff wasn’t so bad after all, millions of Chinese “Communists” started scrambling to make money. After it became clear that this wasn’t another “Let 100 Flowers Bloom” trap , hundreds of millions of Chinese joined the scramble. Four decades of totalitarian indoctrination made Chinese very good at using Communist Party doctrine to justify doing what they wanted to do. Not so much at actually making them believe in that doctrine.
Or take a look at the U.S.S.R. Once the credible threat of state violence vanished, so did the empire. Almost literally overnight. When a handful of diehards tried to carry out a coup, they found out that they had lost the KGB! The most heavily and carefully indoctrinated element of the regime, the people who were supposed to be enforcing doctrine on everyone else, didn’t actually buy the doctrine.
Or, go back to those infamous American and UN POWs in the Korean War. A handful defected. Out of over 7,000, almost 40% of whom died in captivity.
“Brainwashing”, “indoctrination”, “re-education”, whatever you want to call it, it just does not work on the unwilling, beyond superficial acquiescence enforced by the threat of violence.
My eleventh-grade (circa 1968) history teacher gave this description of “brainwashing” as practiced in North Korean POW camps:
In every group of prisoners, there would arise an “alpha” who was strong-minded, a “ram among the sheep”, who would give a feeling of strength and endurance to his fellow POW’s. The POW wardens watched the prisoners very carefully, and when they saw such a leader, they would quietly remove him from the group. Soon, a secondary “alpha” would appear, and he too would be removed. After just a few iterations, there would be no more alpha-potential members in the group.
When it came to that point, the remaining prisoners, now leaderless, would just curl up in a corner and psychologically waste away. Then they became mush in the North Koreans hands, ready to say, think, believe, and do whatever their captors suggested. (Which often included denouncing Americans.) That is how the North Koreans did their “brainwashing”.
The Russian Empire is still very much alive, and the KGB has just been renamed.
You forget the Stockholm syndrome where unwilling victims came to identify with their captors.
However, saying that people cant be forced to give up their beliefs is nonsense. They can and they have. yes, a few people refuse, but many just acquiesce after enuf pressure is applied. Torture, altho pretty much worthless as a interrogation technique can break someone mind. Of course they arent much good for anything afterwards.
There’s an interesting documentary film about this. All the defectors had their reasons, but few if any, defected because they believed in communism as laid down by Marx, Lenin, and Mao. At any rate, interviews with the defectors (most of whom eventually returned to the US) make it clear that they were not brainwashed; they just saw opportunities that they might not get in the US. They may have been wrong, and not known what they were getting themselves into, but their reasons for defecting are interesting:
I think Patty Hearst would disagree.
Russia as a nation-state is still very much alive. As an empire, not so much. There are tens of millions of people who consider themselves to be Russians. No one considers themselves to be Soviets. Chechnya is more of an an internal client state than a fully integrated Russian dominion. Many Russians consider Belarus and Ukraine to be core Russian territories, and Belorussians and Ukrainians wayward Russians. The majority of the people living there, not so much.
Armenia and Azerbaijan and on and on, tens of millions of “Soviets” abandoned that identity as soon as the credible threat of force disappeared, and there’s no sign that any of the peoples of the Caucuses or Central Asia who were subjects of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union ever really considered themselves “Russian” or “Soviet”, or that they’re ever going back.
The Warsaw Pact fell pretty much literally overnight. Not much successful indoctrination going on there.
And, sure, the KGB kinda still exists, there is a pretty direct continuity from the Checka to the SVR, but, again, when push came to shove, even the KGB didn’t support the U.S.S.R. and the Communist Party when it finally collapsed. And the current Russian security apparatchiks don’t seem “indoctrinated” in anything other than maintaining their own grip on power.
I didn’t so much forget it as directly address it:
Yes, torture can and will “break” people. Eventually. If you don’t accidentally literally break them and kill them. A “broken” person will say and do whatever it is that they think will get the pain to stop and to prevent more pain. And prolonged captivity can and will change people’s behavior and habits, as will prolonged abuse. Of course it will.
But what’s the evidence that it can actually change anyone’s identity and core beliefs to conform to the torturer’s? What examples are there of individuals continuing to conform ideologically to “indoctrination” or “brainwashing” after the credible threat of force has been removed? Even more, since we’re discussing “re-education camps”, what’s the evidence that this works on a mass scale?
Of course, I may be wrong. I’ve been wrong before about things I was dead certain I knew what I was talking about. So I’m genuinely asking: what’s the evidence?
I’m not entirely sure she would. Her story seems to have fluctuated between claims that she was brainwashed and claims that she was just going along with her captors out of fear. Either way, a court of law disagreed with her.
But for the sake of argument, let’s agree that Patty Hearst was “brainwashed” and indoctrinated* by the SLA. To what extent was she an unwilling victim who had her identity erased and rebuilt through violence and coercion? To what extent was she a psychologically and socially vulnerable individual who desperately wanted a sense of belonging and purpose, lacked it in her life, but found it in the SLA? To what extent was she a spoiled little rich girl who was acting out a fantasy of rebelling against her parents and Sticking It to the Man? I genuinely don’t know.
But at best, the example of Patty Hearst shows that under the right circumstance, an individual can be “brainwashed” temporarily. That “brainwashing” certainly didn’t hold for long after the credible threat of force was removed, and the “brainwashed” individual faced significant negative consequences for adhering to the “brainwashing.”
Take a look at the link @Spoons provided. Of over 7000 American POWs, with a death rate of 40%, a grand total of 21 defected. And few, if any of them, actually bought into the “indoctrination”. Most of them eventually returned to the U.S.
As I noted above, it’s certainly possible I’m wrong. If there is evidence that mass, coercive “re-education” is actually effective beyond instilling fear, I’d be interested in seeing it.
*As the SLA didn’t really seem to have a coherent doctrine, I’m not sure if that term really applies.
I don’t want to be a jerk, but do you have a cite other than a 50 year old memory of what a high school history teacher said? What’s the evidence that this 1) happened, and 2) worked? Again, look at Spoons’ link. 21 defectors out of over 7000 POWs. Over 2800 died rather than give in. It sure doesn’t seem like very many of them “became mush in the North Koreans hands, ready to say, think, believe, and do whatever their captors suggested.”
This was considered a travesty of justice at the time and now. She was locked in a closet for 57 days, blindfolded and gagged, repeatedly raped. But enough people felt somebody had to pay for her crimes, and couldn’t believe she could be coerced like that. And she was considered to be a spoiled rich kid, slumming with revolutionaries.
I don’t think your examples make your point. In the case of China, the Party’s position changed and the people changed along with it. More than the specific details of any particular position, people are brainwashed to believe in “communism” and defined by the Communist Party leadership.
In the case of Russia, people did indeed reject communism, but that was after 70 years. Nothing lasts forever, not even brainwashing.
All that said, I do agree with you that it’s frequently the case that external expressions are not accurate reflections of underlying sympathies, and this accounts to some extent for the remarkable fickleness of the public. This is true whether those external expressions result from brainwashing or from anything else. (The extreme swings during and after the French Revolution were an example of this, and had nothing to do with brainwashing.)
I certainly don’t want to defend the particular court decision, or the way the case was handled by the prosecutor, the judge, or her defense attorney. I don’t think there’s any dispute whether Patty Hearst was the victim of an awful, violent crime. I don’t think there’s any dispute that she was subjected to prolonged, awful abuse.
The dispute is, was she brainwashed by that treatment? What did that “brainwashing” actually amount to? It certainly didn’t seem to last long after her arrest. And I’ve yet to see any evidence presented that “brainwashing” or indoctrination or whatever you want to call it actually works on a mass scale.
Again, I could be wrong. If there’s evidence that re-education camps actually work beyond instilling a deep and abiding fear of re-education camps, I’d genuinely be interested in seeing it.
So, how do you distinguish between people making do and surviving within a brutal system and using “doctrines” to justify what they want to do anyway, on the one hand, and actually believing in that system on the other hand? If the only doctrine is, “Whatever the CCP said last is True”, I’m not sure that actually amounts to a doctrine, and I personally doubt anyone actually believes that. I think, all of the available evidence from history, including the recent history of China, is that people will say and do what they need to in order to survive.
Indoctrination certainly doesn’t seem to be working in Tibet. And now we’ve got a large scale natural experiment going on in Xinjiang. I wouldn’t be surprised if Xinjiang Uyghurs outwardly conform to the CCP’s dictates as long as the credible threat of force is maintained. I would be surprised if that credible threat of force is ever removed and Uyghur nationalism and ethnic and religious identity don’t immediately spring back to the surface.