Does this testimony on American POWs in Korea explain why so many people on the Right today are becoming retarded?

I think so

Found this very interesting congressional testimony from Edward Hunter, an anti-communist journalist/propagandist who worked for the CIA.

Hunter wrote two books on the “brainwashing” that occurred in communist POW camps during the Korean War. The topic (and the war itself) is largely forgotten today and was somewhat taboo to talk about at the time: American POWs during the Korean War cracked in larger numbers than ever before. They confessed to war crimes that never happened and were convinced to condemn their own country and fellow soldiers in propaganda broadcasts. The POW camps themselves were devoid of the discipline and contempt for the enemy that characterized American soldiers in captivity during preceding and future wars.

American POWs in Korea collaborated with their captors freely and were largely not punished for it by their peers, even as Chinese guards/“interrogators” engaged in increasingly outrageous behavior, murdered prisoners regularly (I read that all American chaplains captured by the Chinese during the Korean War were killed, 0% survival rate), and failed to provide basic food and medicine.

The public was genuinely shocked that its own soldiers could be reduced to this kind of behavior. Several American POWs were court-martialed for their actions in the camps. Some American prisoners refused to be repatriated to America at all after the war’s end.

Hunter wrote two books about the processes that the Chinese employed to break these men. It wasn’t black magic, it was a general disregard for the truth and crude psychological tricks that work on weak-willed, ignorant, embittered, psychologically vulnerable, or just stupid people.

I think you’ll notice that many of these same tactics are today deployed to great effect against right-wingers online, who are often far more weak-willed, ignorant, embittered, psychologically vulnerable, or just stupid than American soldiers in the Korean War were.

Just as these problem remains the same, solutions remain largely unchanged as well: Demanding discipline while also helping people to develop a comprehensive worldview and solid informational foundation rather than a patchwork collection of memes that can and will be easily swept aside.

Although anything Hunter says should be taken with a grain of salt, he was an CIA agent, I do think he’s being honest here. He has a very effective way of condensing this information, which matches up with everything else I’ve read on this topic. Hunter wrote about psychological warfare for nearly 30 years and observed these things firsthand. Aside from his own experiences, his wife was a White émigré, forced out of her country by the Bolsheviks. He’s a good source.

A selection from Hunter’s testimony before Congress about brainwashing can be found below. His best book, Brainwashing: The Story Of Men Who Defied It, is available for free on archive.org.

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[Begin selection]

Mr. Arens. And now will you kindly recount your experiences and observations of brainwashing in Korea?

Mr. Hunter. The Korean war began after my discovery of brain- washing. That is very significant. Before I went to Korea, I had engaged in intensive research directly related to this word “brain- washing,” because I wanted to know exactly the content of the word. [ found it was a strategy for the conquest of the world by communism, that it was not merely another tactic, but was the framework for the entire activity of the Communist hierarchy. I was so impressed with the importance of this discovery that I wrote a book on it called Brain-Washing in Red China, in which I made no effort to do any special interpreting, but merely outlined as plainly as I could the various elements that went into brainwashing. For the first time, our side now had the pattern through which the international Communist movement had made its advance throughout the world. I wrote about brainwashing in newspaper articles and for a magazine before I did the book. Then I went to Korea, where I found that the same pattern that I had seen everywhere else was being followed by the Communists. I heard of American captured personnel broadcasting denunciations of their own country and confessing to a nonexistent germ warfare in a manner and in a language that fit exactly into the brainwashing pattern that I had found in China and the rest of Asia.

Mr. Arens. Exactly what is this brainwashing?

Mr. Hunter. A more exact term in the military lexicon would be “mind attack.” We are accustomed to such terms as infantry attack, naval attack, air attack. Mind attack simply recognizes a new dimension to the kinds of war used against armies on the field or against peaceful populations.

Brainwashing consists of two processes, a softening up and an indoctrination process. Each of these is formed out of a set of different elements. I listed them in my second book, Brainwashing: The Story of Men Who Defied It - as hunger, fatigue, tenseness, threats, violence, and in more intense cases where the Reds have specialists available on their brainwashing panels, drugs, and hypnotism.

No one of these elements’ alone can be regarded as brainwashing, any more than an apple can be called an apple pie. Other ingredients have to be added, and a cooking process gone through. So it is in brainwashing with indoctrination or atrocities, or any other single ingredient.

The moment we think of brainwashing as only one of the elements of which it is composed, we no longer have brainwashing, any more than we have a pumpkin pie from pumpkin alone.

Mr. Arens. Now, specifically what happened to the American prisoners in Korea?

Mr. Hunter. Let me quote from a newspaper dispatch from the New York Times of January 6, 1957, sent out from Washington by the Associated Press 2 days before. The subject was our new troop indoctrination program, based on the Code of Honor that President Eisenhower proclaimed on August 17, 1955. The figures were taken from official accounts.

Here is what the article says:

Never before in history had so many captured Americans gone to the aid of the enemy.

For 2 years the services studied the records of the prisoners. What they found was not pretty.

A total of 7,190 Americans were captured. Of these, 6,656 were Army troops, 2G3 were airmen, 231 Marines, 40 Navy men.

In every war in American history some men have managed to escape. Korea was the exception.

Roughly 1 of every 3 American prisoners collaborated with the Communists in some way, either as informers or as propagandists.

In the 20 prison camps, 2,730 of the 7,190 Americans died, the highest mortality rate among prisoners in United States history. Many of them died unnecessarily. They either did not know how to take care of themselves or they just lay down and quit. Some sick or wounded died of malnutrition, abandoned by their comrades.

Discipline among Americans was almost nonexistent. It was a case of dog eat dog for food, cigarettes, blankets, clothes.

For the first time in history Americans— 21 of them— swallowed the enemy’s propaganda line and declined to return to their own people.

This is only part of the picture. A glimpse.

Mr. Arens. What were the techniques used?

Mr. Hunter. The Communist inquisitors in the POW camps depended first of all on a screening process to provide them with the men most likely to succumb to brainwashing. They picked the ones they figured would be most useful to them from among these. Cunning was all that was needed, along with a complete disregard for ethics; no special intelligence. This should be stressed. They have based their technique primarily on the complete abandonment of morality. That is their contribution to world thought.

There can be no doubt that they had Communist underground guidance in this work in the United States, through the party and Red agents. They were well prepared ahead for all phases of the Korean war, while we allowed ourselves to be caught unawares, as if by intent.

They sized up each prisoner’s character to find out whether he carried a grudge against his superiors, his neighbors, or society in general, or whether he made an intellectual fetish out of objectivity, indoctrinated by his own side in concentrating on the good points on every side, so he could “get along” with everybody and not be “anti-social.” The most effective trick in the Communist indoctrination process was to exploit this quack liberal and make-believe tolerant approach by equating what was the exception on the one side with what was typical on the other, and reaching the conclusion from that basis that both were alike. If the prisoner was the quite usual type we had been developing, who had been brought up just to ask, “What’s in it for me?” he was considered particularly a fine prospect.

The Communist interrogators, as the brainwashers called themselves, sought to remove a man’s trust in his own side, and to convince him that he was being let down and even betrayed by his own country and relatives, especially by his wife or girl friend. The Reds sought to deprive him of all hope. Once they could accomplish this, they presented themselves to him as his new friends, as “Big Brother,” who would always stand by him through thick and thin, who would always love him. The cruelties they had perpetrated on him they now interpreted as the discipline of a kindly father.

They took sly advantage of our shocking failure even to make an attempt to communicate with our captured men, or to try to free any of them. Even a failure would have been better for morale than utter silence which, under the circumstances, looked as if we didn’t care. The Red indoctrinators built up this impression and fit it into their pattern of selfish, imperialist America led by bloated Wall Street financiers who were using our people as cannon fodder.

They had a Roman holiday over our failure even to tell our men why they were being sent to Korea to fight. When I was in Korea as a foreign correspondent, a high Army officer once came to me and pleaded with me to tell him what he was doing in Korea. He knew that the Red propagandists were spreading their reasons for him to be there, even among his own men, and he had no answers to their questions. “Nobody tells me anything,” he said. This man had a heroic fighting record in the Normandy landings and was a career officer. There was no question of his sincerity and patriotism. Yet how could he have been expected to stand up against brainwashing? He was typical of those who were captured, who had not been told why they were fighting in Korea, or anything about the nature of communism. The Red inquisitors filled the gap for these men, as possibly their most effective work.

The Reds presented their version of why the Americans had come and in default of any other information it upset many of the men. Even when they kept quiet, they couldn’t stop worrying over what the Reds said. Half-truths and even entire lies sounded convincing to men who had no knowledge of the situation at all. The inquisitors gave our men nothing to think of except communism. How were our boys to know that this was one of the Red techniques to break them down?

The Reds selected Americans who had fine intelligence quotients, but with poor education. Their heads were like a good, solid but empty bucket, only waiting to be filled. The Reds did so with their own slanted material. They deprived all these men of reading matter except what was pro-Red, and gave them plenty of that, and lots of time in which to read it. They especially fed the boys the writings of pro-Communist Americans. One of the most corrosive publications was a magazine called The China Monthly Review, published by American pro-Communists at Shanghai. The men couldn’t get over the shock of an American-edited magazine being put out in Red China. They read it out of indignation or curiosity, and because they had nothing else to do. The smoothly written poisons caught them by utter surprise, leaving a deep impression on their minds. In a number of cases, it was the decisive factor in their softening up.

The enemy didn’t neglect the indoctrination process, but used it simultaneously. The one thing the prisoners least expected was to come into a classroom atmosphere. Yet this was what the Communists endeavored to create. Americans respect learning and have been taught to gather it everywhere they can, and also to see all sides of every question. Unfortunately, they have been taught this objectivity in a salesmanship context in which the principal axiom is, “The customer is always right.” They were first seduced into accepting something superficial about communism with which they agreed, which they would admit was good. They had no way of checking up. The indoctrinators depended on their one-sided control of information and their doctrinal skill in subterfuge and doubletalk to soon have these men admitting that white was black, and war was peace, in the semantics of the Newspeak language described with such genius by George Orwell in his book, 19S4.

Perhaps the best illustration of the pressures put on our troops was given to me by an Air Force officer named Capt. Zach W. Dean. He was taken on a “death march” and put in a Korean hut and left to hunger and freeze while the Reds harassed him with threats and propaganda and what they called “learning,” until he became so weak and sick that he felt he was going to die. At once the Communists changed their tactic, providing him with vitamin tablets and injections, good enough food, and kindly words, until they saved his life. A few weeks passed and the cat-and-mouse game switched back once more. He was again put under the brainwashing pressures. He became sick again, catching pneumonia on top of another case of freezing. Deprived of all attention, he was positive he was going to die this time. Then once more they switched moods, and he was given the best available of everything, and again his life was saved. Zach knew what a deep study I had made of all this. I can never forget the look he gave me when he told me about it, saying, “Mr. Hunter, I don’t believe you’ll be able to understand what I’m going to tell you now. After the Reds do that to you a few times, you are grateful to them for saving your life. You forget that they are the people who almost killed you.”

That is the Red technique used on all occasions under every sort of circumstance, from a POW camp to a United Nations session or a Geneva conference.

No man has ever been brainwashed whose mind has not first been put into a fog. That is the objective of all the Red pressures from group hunger to a “study group.” The patient first has to be deprived of his bearings, to be shaken loose from whatever belief and convictions he formerly held, until he loses faith in them entirely. We contributed to the enemy’s success by bringing up our young men and women without real convictions except to “get ahead.” The obvious way to “get ahead” in POW camp was to play along with the Communists. Hungry, tired, sick, worried, and hopeless, the prisoner’s mind could not be expected to work well. He was caught off guard. The Reds first lured the individual into believing the Red tenet in the pseudo-scientific Marxian philosophy which teaches constant change, even in such basic conceptions as. truth and falsity, good and bad. The Reds were helped in putting this across by comparing it to our tolerance and liberalism. Where convictions were already worn thin by their upbringing, the line became blurred until these noble traits were twisted out of shape by becoming tolerance for evil and the inability to distinguish between a college huddle back home and a brainwashing session in a POW camp.

Note that I use the word “patient” in referring to the prisoner. I do so deliberately, because brainwashing can only be properly understood from the clinical viewpoint; it is a treatment, as evil as a black mass.

Brain-Washing in Red China had been published in sufficient time to warn our troops about this procedure. It was recommended for the book kits and approved by all concerned. Somehow, influences from the woodwork prevented it from being distributed to the men. After the release of the POW’s, I felt sick at heart to hear them tell me how much suffering it could have saved them, and how many could have preserved themselves from falling into a treasonable situation, if they had only read that book. “Why wasn’t I told?” was their agonizing question to me.