How China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique

http://atroche.org/post/61633164818/how-china-brainwashed-american-pows-using-a-classic

by atroche • 13 years ago

162 157 13 years ago

gruseom3• 13 years ago

Cialdini's book is one of the best and most readable pieces of popular science writing ever. It's fascinating from start to finish, frequently hilarious, and pretty hard to summarize because there's so much cool stuff in it.

The brainwashing scare from the Korean War is central to at least one classic movie, The Manchurian Candidate (1962). It was unavailable for 25 years, which rumor had it was because of its similarity to the JFK assassination (it's not that similar, really). If you like old thrillers and haven't seen it, see it—it's just great!

asveikau• 13 years ago

For the record The Manchurian Candidate was a book before it was a movie. I read the book once long ago but don't remember much about it. In contrast the imagery of the movie is very hard to forget.

gruseom3• 13 years ago

I never read the book but apparently it was a favorite of JFK's and he was instrumental in getting the movie made. That explains how something so politically edgy could have come out of Hollywood in 1962—it had the President vouching for it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/movies/film-a-co-productio... <-- Contains Spoilers

coob• 13 years ago

Also if anyone is thinking of watching the 2004 remake/'re-imgainging' … don't bother.

firstOrder• 13 years ago

If an American POW comes back to the US and says the US was the aggressor in the Korean War, he does not have an opinion, he has been "brainwashed". What kind of mental gymnastics do I have to perform to think this way. It's about a step removed from saying someone who denies Jesus Is Lord has been possessed by a demon. Or the same thing really.

StavrosK• 13 years ago

What kind of mental gymnastics do I have to perform to think this way.

They probably used the foot-in-the-door technique on themselves.

nostromo• 13 years ago

The key here is the delta, not what opinions are right or wrong.

compared to the POWs in North Korea, their beliefs had changed massively since they’d left home

The title does color the outcome by calling it brainwashing, but that word is not used in the actual article.

marshray4• 13 years ago

Soldiers didn't have the internet. They didn't often get up-to-date newspapers and magazines. If they were lucky, they could sometimes get news/propaganda from shortwave radio, e.g., "Voice of America". Mainly they got news from their military and letters from home.

So go for a year or two like this in a horrific combat zone in an utterly foreign Asian country. Then get captured and spend a few years writing essays about Communism in a Chinese-run POW camp (if you're lucky).

It is both reasonable and compassionate that, when they get out, that individual should not be held to account for whatever documents they may have signed or political statements they may have made during that time.

Whether 'brainwashing' was complete fiction or not, it was a concept which let broken men put the past behind them and have a welcome return to their home country.

liopleurodon2• 13 years ago

I wonder if the 'foot in the door' technique was just used on me to get me to buy the book....

liopleurodon2• 13 years ago

because if it was, it worked....

jimzvz• 13 years ago

If the techniques described in the book have been used to make me buy the book then it is a good purchase.

Volpe11• 13 years ago

I thought america WAS the aggressor? (Korea isn't really near the US), and it was quite apparent the US wanted satellite states near russia/china, to potentially launch further attacks.

Also did the communists do a bad job in china? That is at most controversial... not "brain washed".

mikegagnon3• 13 years ago

"Brainwashing" isn't a precisely defined word. I believe the word is often used to describe persuasion via psychological vulnerabilities. In this sense, the article is correct in calling the technique a form of brainwashing.

dsrguru• 13 years ago

Interestingly enough, it comes from the Chinese word 洗脑 (xǐnǎo), literally meaning to "wash brains", which was used to describe the 1984-like attempts Mao used to re-educate dissident intellectuals.

seanmcdirmid5• 13 years ago

Let me give you a tl;dr: the North Koreans started it by rolling over into South Korea, McAuthur went too close to the Yalu in the counter attack, Chinese entered the war, Truman fires McAuthur. Stalement ensues, borders preserved, Kim Jong Un has ex-girlfriend executed.

The communists of the 50s were busy starving their own people in great leaps forwards, in the 60s they innovated on that with a cultural revolution; Mao finally dies; China didn't start to stabalize until Deng brought back capitalism.

RodericDay• 13 years ago

I can't wait til I get to downvote

rayiner2• 13 years ago

I love the rationalization people have to use to explain China's economic success. If what Deng brought was capitalism, then Obama is an anarcho-libertarian.

Volpe11• 13 years ago

Capitalism is part of the progression to communism. You have to have generated capital in order to distribute it. Marx saw communism as a progression from capitalism, not a genesis form of government in and of itself.

China had the unfortunate luck of being left in ruins when it becoming "Communist". Deng rebooted the whole thing, it remains to be seen whether they will continue communism into the future. To call it "capitalism" is a bit rich (no pun), given all major industries are owned by the government (the people).

The 50s they also brought health care to vast majority of the population. The 60s they increased literacy across the country by simplifying the language, and standardising education.

Should we both just keep cherry picking information to paint our own narrative, or admit this isn't a black and white subject?

mynameishere• 13 years ago

Also did the communists do a bad job...

Compare West and East Germany. Compare North and South Korea. Compare Mainland China and Taiwan. And once you've done those comparisons ask yourself about what kind of job the communists have done. Many millions dead. Many more millions in poverty. That's the job they've done.

rxin• 13 years ago

What about comparing mainland and Taiwan? I don't think there exists an obvious conclusion from this comparison if you look at status quo. If you are judging based on the situation before 2000s, I agree with you that there is an obvious conclusion.

spikels• 13 years ago

Brad Delong an economist at UC Berkeley once gave a good prsentation on the comparison between communist and market economies.

http://delong.typepad.com/files/20091103-115.pdf

oddx• 13 years ago

If you want understand what communists did in China it's better look on other numbers. For example, rise of life expectancy was incredible (especially if you look at comparable country like India) http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&c...

Child mortality http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&c...

anologwintermut• 13 years ago

America was in almost no way the aggressor.

North Korea Invades South Korea on June 25th 1950. The UN, for probably the first,last, and only time, takes military action (at American behest and because the Russian's were boycotting the UN) led by a US General and primarily American troops. This force and the South Korean Army repel the North Koreans and drive into North Korea (which was suppose to hold open elections but didn't as part of unification), the Chinese enter the way as the UN forces approached (but did not cross) the Chinese boarder.

EDIT: This is not to say that the UN forces crossing the 38th Parallel was the best idea or that they were not happy to occupy North Korea or that they didn't have ambitions to do so from the outset , but aggressor is really a misleading term when they did not fire the first shot.

w1ntermute2• 13 years ago

Nobody has explained to me why Korea was even divided up into the North and South in the first place. It should have been left to its own devices after the Japanese empire collapsed at the end of WW2. That is, the US/UN shouldn't have been occupying the South and the USSR/China shouldn't have been occupying the North. Seems to me that the fault should be assigned to all of those countries/organizations.

Aloisius3• 13 years ago

Also did the communists do a bad job in china? That is at most controversial... not "brain washed".

Controversial? Good lord, Mao's Great Leap Forward killed between 23 and 42 million people in just a few years.

Volpe11• 13 years ago

Okay, so Mao could be argued to be a bad idea, but there was and has been a lot of communism since Mao.

Could you say the same for Deng Xiaoping (also a communist)?

yetanotherphd• 13 years ago

Only by a very loose definition of "kill" - that is, by looking at total population numbers. And overall, the communist regime saved many more people from starvation (you can also see this in the total population numbers).

Starvation was common before communism (this is second hand "communist propaganda" from my father, probably originally from a similar source to the information the Korean POW's were given), but it wasn't concentrated into a few years like in the great leap forward.

wisty2• 13 years ago

The Great Leap Forward - 1958 to 1961.

The Korean War - 1950 - 1953.

Until the Great Leap, Mao had done a fantastic job. Life expectancies shot up by about 15 years, as he dismantled feudalism, and established a relatively functional and stable state. Then he undid all the good he'd done, in the 1958, sending life expectancies back to ~35. Then things improved again, when Deng and co managed to contain Mao a little better (though they sometimes had ... issues).

tl;dr - Mao had done a fantastic job, up to 1958, which was well after the Korean War ended.

rmason• 13 years ago

Here's a list of the worst cases of genocide in world history and Mao is on the very top of the list.

http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html

alokm• 13 years ago

This foot-in-the-door techniques and many other things have been covered beautifully in an ongoing course https://www.coursera.org/course/socialpsychology. It is about to be over. I do recommend going through the videos. There is a lot to learn.

mikegagnon3• 13 years ago

Corollary: sales techniques are often a form of brainwashing. I mean this seriously.

samineru2• 13 years ago

It's mental violence. You're exploiting human nature to impact their free will. Perhaps part of "being an adult" is shouldering the responsibility of propping up your own illusory free will, I can't say.

001sky• 13 years ago

So is blind indocrination to "obey" (or be drugged) in grade school?

contravert• 13 years ago

For this reason, I try to avoid ads and marketing as much as possible, although it seems almost impossible. Although any individual advertisement is trivial to dismiss, I don't trust myself to resist the ubiquitity of these messages.

andyl2• 13 years ago

Brainwashed? If that is brainwashing, then it seems like there's brainwashing everywhere you look. For example: - http://www.foxnews.com/ - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBbBfrKsVqY

samineru2• 13 years ago

Yes.

daenz• 13 years ago

It sounds more like de-brainwashing to me. If those soldiers go in with this perfect idea of America, how we can do no wrong, and how everything we do is justified, then turning that on its head seems more like...rational thinking.

comex• 13 years ago

If an opinion is being slowly but inexorably pushed on you from all sides by your captor over a long period of time, as part of an explicitly designed program of of propagandizing, it's brainwashing, regardless of the opinion's merit!

6d0debc071• 13 years ago

If you have a mistaken belief, then the inverse of that belief is not necessarily correct. I find it hard to believe those soldiers were in a position - in a prison camp - to reliably determine whether America had used germ warfare, or to assess whether Communism had 'done a fine job in China.'

philwelch11• 13 years ago

The reasonable perspective is that America isn't perfect, America can do wrong, and not everything America does is justified. The brainwashing occurs when you go past this reasonable perspective straight to: Communist China is perfect, America can only do wrong, and nothing America does is justified while everything the Communist Chinese do is.

And when you're comparing the US of 1950 to the Communist China of 1950, frankly, if the pro-US viewpoint is naive, the pro-Mao viewpoint is utterly deluded.

You still run into the kind of people who try to draw moral equivalence between the Japanese internment and Dachau to this day. I'm not saying this to deflect criticism, because I hold the US to a much higher standard than the rest of the world and the way to do that is to be critical. But coming to the conclusion that the US used chemical weapons in Korea (we didn't) or that Mao was a positive force for China in the 1950's (he wasn't) just because America falls short is a very long way on the opposite side of reasonable.

pessimizer• 13 years ago

There's no such thing as brainwashing. It was a piece of propaganda to use against the Communists during the Korean War, and the fantasy of a bunch of shadowy government agencies that only seem to be able to poison a bunch of people or get them high during brainwashing experiments.

pintglass5• 13 years ago

I'd say most news media and many T.V. shows reinforce ideas that oppose accepting that there is an alternative viewpoint. Are you sure you haven't been brainwashed to hate Fox News and anything that shows a flag and an eagle with patriotic music in the background?

Let's try this on for size:

Is Fox News racist, elitist, sexist, and homophobic? My guess is that you just answered yes to at least 3 of those, however if I asked you for specific proof, you'd have a hard time making your argument in short order. Why is that? Perhaps because you didn't make up your mind for yourself. Someone else made it up for you.

Sure you can go Google and find whatever evidence you want to support those 4 viewpoints, but I'm 100% positive you didn't have evidence for all of the things you thought when I first asked the question.

pintglass5• 13 years ago

To provide the other side of that coin, I also think that some of what Fox News, the Tea Party, etc. push is bologna.

Consider the conservative view that we need to secure our border because illegal immigrants take jobs away from Americans.

Jobs aren't taken, they are given. Those jobs are not specifically given to illegals. You could have one, too. If they can live off of those jobs and send money home to their folks, it should be enough to live on. Maybe not enough to send your kids to college, but that isn't a guaranteed right.

Higher taxes and loopholes lead to U.S. companies hiring offshore workers, but that isn't the same for immigrants. We need more of them, like we had in the 1800-1900s, to boost our economy. I have never known a lazy, undedicated person to sneak over the border and work summers to send money home to their families. Those families should instead be in the U.S. and not in Mexico, etc. Then not only would the U.S. have a great labor force, but they would be spending that money on food and goods in the U.S.

andyl2• 13 years ago

I guess I regard nearly all cable news as brainwashing. Maybe even all news. Fox is the worst example (IMHO), but I don't like any of it.

Turn off all news for a year or two. Then watch for a few minutes. With fresh eyes, the news looks like a clown show - all emotion and advocacy.

marshray4• 13 years ago

Really? A sappy slide show set to Lee Greenwood with 316,000 views over 4 years is comparable to a Communist POW camp.

If that's brainwashing, then what do you call this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH2-TGUlwu4 101,912,811 views.

tokenadult4• 13 years ago

I see no one has mentioned so far in this thread that the term "brainwashing" originated in Chinese ( 洗腦 in the original language), and originated as an internal practice in China after seizure of power in China by the Communist Party of China.

I'll paste in here part of the history of the term from Chinese Wikipedia, which has some interesting differences from the parallel article in English Wikipedia:

中华人民共和国[编辑] 中華人民共和國執政黨中國共產黨成立以來，早期通過文藝、宣傳提出的「沒有共產黨就沒有新中國」、「穩定壓倒一切」等口號，被一些人認為是“洗腦”行為。中國共產黨操控媒體、民間沒有輿論自由，又透過教育，局部呈現現代歷史等方式進行“正面意識形態宣傳”也被認為屬於洗腦行為。有評論指，中华人民共和国文革時期大規模和連續的共產主義宣傳教育運動，明顯是洗腦行為；當時中共將視為反對者的人民劃定為「階級敵人」、將這些人強行施以「勞動改造」（勞改）、「思想改造」，強權和暴力使整個社會幾乎所有人都失去了獨立思考的自由意志。 [12]

中华人民共和国官方電視媒體中國中央電視台，被指責所播放的部分內容存在「洗腦」，有中國年輕學者指央視透過辮子戲灌輸皇權專制，打造奴才人格，是毒化了中國走向自由民主的氛圍，存在洗腦意義，而央視的《新聞聯播》選擇性「報喜不報憂」，像是「宣傳聯播」。 [13][14]但中國共產黨及其支持者並不認同這些批評。

英文「brainwash」意指「洗腦」，由中文「洗腦」一詞翻譯而來；沿於上世紀1950年代的韓戰，美國士兵被中国人民解放军俘虜之後，日夜接受中国共产党的思想改造，獲救之後回到美國，竟然幫中国共產黨講好話，於是美國記者Edward Hunter就用brainwash一詞來描述此事。[15][16]

walid2• 13 years ago

I hate staring at a wall of text without being able to read it. I'll just have to learn Chinese. Googling right now.

proofofconcept3• 13 years ago

If you actually want to have a discussion of those differences then you're going to need to point them out yourself instead of dumping a homework assignment in everyone's lap since: 1) I don't read Chinese, and I doubt I'm alone here when it comes to that 2) Google translate is far from perfect, and unless the differences are clear to someone who merely gets the gist of the Chinese article they probably won't come across

pintglass5• 13 years ago

It's amazing how easily one can translate something these days instead of complain about having to read Chinese (http://translate.google.com/):

People [edit] The People's Republic of China since the founding of the ruling Communist Party of China, early through art, propaganda's "no new China without the Communist Party," "stability overrides everything" and other slogans, considered by some to be "brainwashed" behavior. Chinese Communist Party controls the media, civil society without freedom of opinion, but also through education, partial rendering methods such as modern history "positive ideological propaganda" has also been considered to be brainwashed behavior. Some have commented that the PRC during the Cultural Revolution massive and continuous education communist propaganda campaign, obviously brainwashing behavior; when opponents of the CPC will be treated as people designated as "class enemies," these people forcibly impose "Labour transformation "(labor camps)," thought reform ", power and violence, so that the whole community lost almost everyone free will to think independently. [12]

People's Republic of China Central Television, the official television media, is accused of playing the part of the existence of "brainwashing" refers to a Chinese young scholars CCTV braids play through indoctrination autocracy, to create personality I was poisoned the atmosphere of freedom and democracy to China, there brainwashing significance, and CCTV "News Network" selective "glossy", such as "propaganda network." [13] [14] However, the Chinese Communist Party and its supporters do not agree with these criticisms.

English "brainwash" means "brainwashed" by the Chinese "brainwashing" translated from the word; in the late 1950s along the Korean War, American soldiers were captured after the People's Liberation Army, day and night to accept the idea of transformation of the Chinese Communist Party, were rescued after back to the U.S., even speak good words to help the Chinese Communist Party, then the U.S. correspondent Edward Hunter to use the term to describe the matter brainwash.

mrj• 13 years ago

Funny, the course I am in right now covers this book. It is well worth the read.

Cialdini, R. B. (2009). Influence: science and practice (5th ed.). Boston: Pearson Education.

stephenaturner• 13 years ago

This still seems to ignore the fact that even if the Chinese used these techniques differently and didn't explicitly threaten violence, they were still the captors and the prisoners were still the captives and held in confinement and the power relationship there had to contribute to the success of these techniques.

sp332• 13 years ago

This technique was something that came to mind when I heard about Occupy Wall Street's use of the "mic check". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microphone Getting lots of people to repeat borderline-reasonable things, even if they don't really quite agree with them, can make them change their position.

walid2• 13 years ago

It is so easy to make people with idealistic views switch those views. The reason being that such people attach their views to an unattainable standard clouding their judgement, then when they realize the flaws in their views they backlash. Add to that an environment that doesn't promote any opinion but allows such backlash to flourish and you get the perfect brainwashing technique. Self sustained brainwashing.

Pitarou• 13 years ago

This part shocked me:

They also collaborated. “When an escape did occur,” wrote one of the investigators, “the Chinese usually recovered the man easily by offering a bag of rice to anyone offering to turn him in.” This was extremely rare in German and Japanese prison camps.

It seems they achieved something more than just moulding the PoWs' political views: they broke their esprit de corps.

Still, I dislike words like "brainwash" and "mind control". It significantly understates the complicated dynamic between the washer and the washed. It would be interesting to learn how the Chinese were affected by their contacted with the Americans.

wjk• 13 years ago

Whats up with the column width of the blog? Am i getting sent to the mobile site on PC by mistake? A column is 1/5th of my screen, it looks quite silly.

marme• 13 years ago

yes it looks very strange. The entire content div is set to a fixed width of 35em so on a wide screen monitor it will look ridiculous. Even on standard ratio screen it looks strange as the content div does not even take up half the width of the screen

igl• 13 years ago

This is so much worse than the torture and rape we did on the Chinese! Keep highlighting this!

VanillaBooks2• 13 years ago

I disagree with the _utility_ of the article's conclusion - "keep the facts in mind when you are asked to do things". Basically it says - be in control of what you do. Or, we are always a step or two behind (we only realize later what happened in a certain situation). So what you do when somebody applies a technique on you, which you don't know yet, in a situation in which you are caught, which you don't yet realize it fully (this perhaps comes later, or never)? I hint that the solution is more about what you do in general when you don't know things, than what to do to know them beforehand (which i think it's impossible). How is one grown to deal with the unknown, without resorting to the "you must also recognize this situation as this or that"

atroche• 13 years ago

Good points.

Can you elaborate on what steps you might take to guard against unknown techniques?

VanillaBooks2• 13 years ago

Of course, that - i wouldn't really know. Perhaps if we attack it from the other side - what happens when a civilized society shifts its balance point from "we don't know a lot, we know only a few things" to "we know a lot, what we don't know isn't important". How is one grown in the first society is with a bigger openness, the need to be sharp in every situaton vs. the "life through recipes" which proliferates in the second society.

(sorry for my english and somewhat vague thoughts, i hope something gets through)

DominikR5• 13 years ago

I wouldn't categorize this as brainwashing. Or to be more specific: I wouldn't categorize the description in the blog post as brainwashing or torture.

To me, this looks more like some kind of group therapy since the POWs were not forced and the example statement they were asked to make ("The United States is not perfect.") is obviously a fact because nothing is perfect.

What I find interesting is to compare this to what is happening today in Guantanamo.

I mean they are trying to get information and cooperation, why always default to torture?

xerophtye5• 13 years ago

Well i think that stems from a indoctrinated hatred towards the captives. If you think rationally (albeit coldly/mechanically) you'd figure out that torture isn't that effective. In fact torture just makes the captives hate you more. So that makes your job even harder.

But if you could shake their beliefs... Show them the error of their ways. And they actually might help you stop the other terrorists.

But all that needs that you actually see the captives as human beings.

xerophtye5• 13 years ago

What I find interesting is that most terrorists are a product of brainwashing too. And i mean DELIBERATE brainwashing, not the kind of stuff you learn from society as you grow up. So why not fight fire with fire and deprogram them? Heck the violence actually reinforces their brainwashing that the captors are Evil people.

LeeHunter• 13 years ago

Saudi Arabia has apparently had considerable success deprogramming militants by engaging them in religious discussions.

mathattack• 13 years ago

Very different from Guantanamo. It's almost like after Vietnam we decided there was only one way to get information out of people.

helion• 13 years ago

Brainwashing it is, torture it isn't. By combining both words in your comment, you show that you see them as going together or being one and the same.

DominikR5• 13 years ago

I don't understand how you could possibly come to this conclusion.

I used both words together because it depends on how brainwashing is achieved if it qualifies as torture or not. (that's why I wrote "brainwashing OR torture")

madaxe4• 13 years ago

Hm, site is censored in the UK for being "violent pornographic and/or political material" :|

Celtis• 13 years ago

Censored by whom? It works fine for me on Virgin Media

madaxe4• 13 years ago

O2. They censor a really odd selection of stuff.

tekacs• 13 years ago

Fine on BT UK, too (see sibling comment).

DominikR5• 13 years ago

Probably the UK's strategy to prevent the Chinese from brain-washing you.

forgottenpaswrd• 13 years ago

It is not that hard when soldiers could discover that they had been lied by their own people and sent to die in order for others(that will never risk a finger) to profit.

All wars are full of lies, Roosevelt lied to the American people, "for their own good" of course, as the American public did not want to enter a world war.

The Lusitania was full of weapons as divers discover in 2008, the first American sub to be sinked attacked the Germans first before war(that was never said to American public) and Robert Stinnett investigated about Pearl Harbor and how they already knew about it, the reason there were not air carriers there and the radar "confusion". The soldiers in Hawaii were just pawns to sacrifice in order to win the match.

The same happened in Irak, US government wanted to get this oil, and they just needed a pretext. 20 people from Saudi Arabia(US tyrannical ally) crashing planes against US buildings somewhat became a pretext to invade Irak and Afganistan, countries that are 2000 miles apart from Saudi Arabia, killing millions in the process and thousands of Americans.

Now, Obama is doing the same with Siria. They want to invade a country and they just need to convince the public opinion to support it.

The problem with lies is that when you are outside the system that generates them, they are very easy to discover. People feel betrayed and never trust "big brother", that lies to you for your own benefit, any more.

philwelch11• 13 years ago

One of the most effective ways to persuade people is to mix lies with truth to give the mixture the flavor of truth. For instance, starting with some comfortable truisms (all wars are full of lies) combined with questionable implications (Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were inside jobs) supported by misleading details (the carriers weren't present at Pearl Harbor, but battleships were universally considered the more valuable strategic asset until the battles of Coral Sea and Midway; the 9/11 hijackers were mostly Saudi because they were dissidents against the US-supported Saudi government whose senior leadership moved to Afghanistan to avoid the Saudi authorities). Consider also the general theme of such arguments: always to attack and denigrate the United States' involvement without ever giving consideration to the wider context. Indeed it's easy for the US to come off as the "bad guy" for entering a war against the actual Nazis so far as you keep the focus squarely on what the US did wrong rather than considering a wider context.

How China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique

Related Stories