The 'Brainwashing' Dilemma

Once an emblem of Cold War paranoia, the term ‘brainwashing’ continues to appear in serious conversation. Recently, for example, it has been used by a witness to describe the kidnapping of Nigerian school girls by Boko Haram, 1 by former members of scientology to criticize that religion, 2 and by an independent filmmaker, in a documentary now being screened at film festivals, to explain the effects of right-wing media in the United States. 3 To invoke ‘brainwashing’ seems a consistently reliable way to inflame debate, though not always one that will cast both heat and light on an issue. And yet historians should not disregard the term, or its multiple meanings, as a harmless echo of the past. The so-called War on Terror has given us a chilling example of what a naive understanding of brainwashing can permit. We now know that the Bush Administration’s programme for the ‘enhanced interrogation’ of suspected terrorists was not based on the proven practices of law enforcement or military interrogators, but rather the simulated tortures used in training elite U.S. military personnel. This curriculum was first introduced during the Korean War to inoculate servicemen against communist ‘brainwashing’. Its foundational philosophy was that a human being could be made to co-operate by systematically increasing his ‘debility, dependency and dread’. What Bush Administration officials failed to see was that this ‘co-operation’ meant telling the interrogator what he wanted to hear, whether it was true or not.

Communism · Conversation · Criminology · Dilemma · Interrogation · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Witness · Law · Philosophy · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence · Torture, Ethics, and Law · War, Ethics, and Justification

• Brain Warfare

  Timothy Melley•Grey Room•2011

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