Brainwashing & "Education Reform"
Strategies used in China and other Communist countries as described by Edward Hunter in his 1956 book:
Edward Hunter based most of the following observations on personal interviews with victims of the Chinese "education reform".
Quotes from some of the victims regarding their experiences:
"Meetings were being held in vacant rooms and open spaces wherever a group could gather to discuss, self-criticize, and confess."
Others had confessed the same as he. Everyone couldn't be wrong. Could they? Weren't they all one team A collectivity."
"They work then on persuading the prisoner to rid his mind of the 'bourgeois poison' he had been carrying about of seeing good on all sides! That is patently ridiculous, they point out to this weary mind. Their patient then is taught that there is good only on one side, that the other is 'all bad' and the enemy."
"Even when he stands by himself, the truly indoctrinated communist must be part of the collectively. He must be incapable of hearing opposing ideas and facts, no matter how convincing or how forcibly they bombard his senses."
"So long as the individual submits unquestioningly, he is what is referred to as a "disciplined Party member."
"Brainwashing is a very intricate manipulation, more like a treatment than a formula."
"'Learning' and 'confession' are inseparable from brainwashing. Everyone has to participate in them, whether a party member or not. Learning means only political teaching from the communist standpoint. Confession is an integral part of the rites. In China there are no exceptions from it for anyone, any more than for attendance at "learning" classes. The retention of his own individuality by a single person is recognized as a deadly menace by the whole monolithic structure."
From an interview with the author (mr. Hunter):
"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.
Confession is a form of submission, and was so recognized in early language. Confession accustoms the individual to surrender his integrity as well as his body.
The inquisitors gave our men nothing to think of except communism. How were out boys to know that this was one of the Red techniques to break them down?
They deprived all these men of reading matter except what was pro-Red...
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, 1984.
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 hunter 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.
So long as people do what they are told, and go through the verbalisms and motions attached to belief, that is satisfactory to a power faction such as the Kremlin constitutes. This is the immediate short-range objective.
A certain element must become deeply indoctrinated, especially those who have thrown their interests irrevocably into the Red camp, and these constitute the activists, the hard core of the party. They are a small minority, and the constant purges even in their ranks shows how untrustworthy even these are.
Indoctrination in the majority of cases does not bring about true belief, but only submission."