I agree that it’s difficult to distinguish between fear-driven expressions of support and genuine belief, but it can be possible to an extent to people who look closely enough.
And as for cult-of-personalities, I think they are successful to a large extent. From what I’ve seen, it appears most people who follow these matters believe that most people in NK genuinely believe in the almost God-like powers of Kim Jung Un, however ridiculous this may seem to us.
[In general, there’s a tendency among Westerners to assume that most people in other cultures and political systems share their beliefs and values and any indication otherwise just means that those others are being suppressed by Evil Leaders, whose removal would allow Western values to assume their natural place. This is incorrect, and can lead to disastrous political decisions, most notably in Iraq but also Haiti and other similar situations.]
In Cuba they would re-educate the gay out of you “la revolución no entra por el culo” (you don’t get the revolución up the ass). They’d make you work until you “stopped being gay”.
Sure, but then that’s not really “re-education”. If you start with people who want to believe you, you can convince them of things that seem utterly ridiculous to an outsider.
If you start with people that don’t want to believe you, I’m highly skeptical that any sort of “indoctrination” or “re-education” is particularly useful beyond enforcing superficial, fear-based compliance.
In the case of Russia, the Soviet Communist Party spent decades engaged in an unprecedented (but tragically not unparalleled in the 20th Century) campaign of literally industrial mass indoctrination and re-education. They didn’t succeed. The “New Soviet Man” never existed, he was always a myth. The same peoples that didn’t want to be part of the Russian Empire in 1917 were the same peoples that didn’t want to be part of the USSR in 1991 and are the same peoples that don’t want to be part of a “soft” Russian neo-empire in 2020.
The people that wanted to be part of Russia temporarily accepted the Communist Party as the rulers of Russia, until they didn’t. As long as the Soviet Communist Party could maintain a credible facade of control and competency and monopoly of force, people acquiesced. As soon as that facade started to crumble, even the ultra-indoctrinated apparatchiks in the deepest recesses of the Party-State abandoned it. Did they ever really believe in it? I don’t know. Probably, some of them, on some level. But if your “indoctrination” only works as long as someone is using the gulags to enforce it, I don’t think that really counts as “indoctrination”.
And again, I’ve yet to see any evidence that any of this ever worked on people who didn’t want to be indoctrinated.
What are the actual examples of actual re-education camps or similar programs that started with people opposed to a doctrine or regime and that coerced them into genuinely changing their minds? What actual evidence is there that any form of mass coercion has ever actually enforced more than superficial conformity out of fear?
Again, I could be wrong. I’m genuinely asking for counter-evidence.
I wanted to circle back around to this when I had a little more time.
So, torture is worthless for interrogation, but it can force people to give up their beliefs? How does that work?
Was the problem with the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” just that they were trying to interrogate prisoners rather than “re-educate” them? If only they had interspersed waterboarding sessions with civic lessons and Disney movies, do you think they would have forced Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to abandon his beliefs and profess his new faith in Truth, Justice, and the American Way?
If that’s true, then it sure seems like torture is actually an extremely effective interrogation technique. Just “re-educate” your subject into accepting your doctrines, and they’ll gladly give you all of the cooperation and information you could ever want.
I’m not sure what type of evidence might be cited if you’re going to claim that people believed in it because they “want[ed] to be indoctrinated”.
Couple of points:
brainwashing is not the same thing as torture.
No one is claiming that anyone can be brainwashed into believing anything. Only that quite a lot of people can, and that being successful at brainwashing quite a lot of people can have a major societal impact. But I would think you’re least likely to be successful with die-hard opponents such as captured terrorist leaders.
Fair enough. Clearly, there were, and apparently still are, people that genuinely believe in Communist ideology. I still don’t think that coercive indoctrination had much to do with that.
Show me someone that was opposed to a doctrine/regime/whatever, went through coercive “re-education”/indoctrination/“brainwashing”/whatever, and came out the other side supporting that doctrine/regime/whatever, even in the absence of a continuing credible use of force.
I’ve only seen two actual concrete examples so far.
American POWs during the Korean War. Again, only 21 out of over 7,000 changed sides. I think the numbers during the Vietnam War, which lasted far longer, involved far more prisoners, was far more unpopular among Americans by the end, and therefore which should have resulted in far more successful indoctrinations, were even worse for the “brainwashers”. I can’t find any solid numbers, but as far as I can tell, no more than a handful of Americans defected.
Patty Hearst. As I discussed above, I think claims that she was brainwashed by the SLA are problematic, but even if we accept them at face value, that shows at best that “brainwashing” can be temporarily successful for specific individuals, not that “re-education camps” work on a mass scale, or beyond the point at which a credible threat of force remains.
I was specifically responding to DrDeth there, who did seem to me to be explicitly saying that torture can force people to give up their beliefs.
It’s definitely a reasonable argument that brainwashing doesn’t always work, but that it can and has worked. So what are the examples?
If all you’re saying is that people can be convinced of things that seem outlandish to outsiders, even objectively counterfactual, I don’t disagree.
But this discussion started with “re-education camps.” All I’m saying is that I haven’t seen any evidence that “re-education” camps and similar methods of coercive mass indoctrination are actually useful in changing peoples minds. Changing behavior, yes, absolutely, as long as the credible threat of force remains.
I don’t know. Maybe we’re talking past each other, and not really disagreeing.
It doesn’t even seem to have really worked in those 21 cases.
You know what? I concede. If all anyone is this thread is saying is that “brainwashing” potentially can work in 0.3% of all cases, I’m not confident enough that it can’t possibly ever work to argue against that.
Ok, then how do you explain the “jack mormon” compounds, where young girls are taught from birth that their place in life is a ‘sister wife’, being “married” at a young age perhaps even to their own fathers?
That is indeed 'brainwashing" unless you think that is a choice they really want to make.
Being taught social norms from birth is different, though. By that metric, we are ALL brainwashed, we just only call it that when we disagree with the teachings.
At that point, how is that “brainwashing”? If they’re raised from birth in a community where everyone accepts “sister wives” and child marriage as perfectly natural, then of course they accept it. But at that point, all forms of socialization are “brainwashing”, and the term ceases to be meaningful.
I’ve got to admit, I don’t understand the question. If they go along with it because the feel they don’t have a choice, then they haven’t been brainwashed, only coerced. If they go along with it because they believe in it, then that’s their choice. You seem to be saying that they’ve raised to accept things that they wouldn’t accept if they had been raised not to accept them. I mean, that’s true, but…
If you define “brainwashing” as “people can be raised to believe things that I don’t”, then, yes, I agree that brainwashing exists and is wildly successful, and once again I concede.
Well, I haven’t found a transcript on-line of my 11th grade history teacher’s lecture from 1968, so I can’t give a link. Sorry, what I wrote is what I’ve got. Take it for what you think it’s worth.
Seems to me that neither you nor anyone else here really has a sharp precise definition of what “brainwashing” is (hence its persistent appearance in quotes), thus nobody is really agreeing on which of the described scenarios is really it.
My sense is that everybody here is saying “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it (and what someone else described here ain’t quite it).” Your own response to my 11th grade history teacher possibly fits that.
ETA: I guess we might conclude, as Winston Smith learned the hard way, that “Room 101 is different things to different people”.
I wasn’t asking you for evidence that your 11th grade history teacher actually told you that story, I was asking for evidence that 1) the events described actually happened, and 2) those techniques actually worked.
If we’re discussing what people believe about how “brainwashing” works and what people believe about what U.S. POWs experience during the Korean War, your anecdote is point.
If we’re discussing if brainwashing actually works, and what U.S. POWs actually experienced, then I just don’t see how an anecdote of a 50+ year old memory of what a high school history teacher asserted happened to U.S. POWs 15+ years before that really addresses that.
That’s an excellent point. I’m personally putting “brainwashing” in scare quotes because I don’t think it really exists, at least not in the form that’s the ostensible subject of this thread, re-education camps. But there does definitely seem to be a disconnect in this thread about what any of us are taking about.
Here’s Merriam-Webster’s first definition:
a forcible indoctrination to induce someone to give up basic political, social, or religious beliefs and attitudes and to accept contrasting regimented ideas.
I think that’s a reasonable operational definition, and basically the one I was implicitly using. I fully accept that “re-education camps” and similar mass brainwashing procedures can successfully create superficial compliance with “contrasting regimented ideas.” I don’t think that there’s any evidence, certainly none I’ve seen so far, that these means can actually “induce someone to give up basic beliefs.” I’m still skeptical it even works on an individual level, or even for a tiny minority of a mass audience, but I’ve conceded I’m not confident enough to absolutely rule it out.
My response to your 11th grade history teacher is that I’m skeptical that the events they described actually happened as they described them, and I’m even more skeptical that those techniques, if they were actually employed, would have actually brainwashed the POWs, rather than merely enforcing temporary compliance through fear.
