| "We entered the study of returned prisoners from Korea with some fairly well established ideas of our
own s to what "brainwashing" was, and we were surprised to find, contrary to our belief, that it wasn't a
system of torture, or punishment, or degradation or brutality, designed to destroy the will to resist of
such unshakable people as Cardinal Mindszenty. This very excellent educational system is and
was designed specifically as a weapon, a weapon in a very real and very current war. A war that
is giong on all over the world today. This war, we are not spectacularly winning at the present time.
Call it a war of ideas, or a "Cold War", or what you will, but the fact remains that this weapon is a good
one, and an effective one, and it requires that we must develop defenses of a new kind against it.Against
this weapon, we can't rely upon Air Defense Radar Systems, guided missiles, and submarines that go around
the world without coming up, or upon any material weapon or fortification. The fortifications on this
battlefield must be moral and spiritual and psychological. Anything else is not only useless against
the excellent weapon of the type they devised but is daily becoming increasingly pointless. This
weapon has the same general characteristics of any other weapon, be it a nuclear device, or be it a shotgun.
In the first place, it can be dissected, taken apart, laid out on a table, understood, as long as you
understand it's a weapon and go about it on that basis.We had been attempting to do this even before the
first prisoners got back from Korea. Secondly: Once we understand this or any other new weapon we
start contriving defenses. We have in the services something called the "Code of Conduct," one of the
most widely misunderstood, underrated documents in history. We have attempted other things in our
training, to serve as defenses against what we understand about the Communists' best weapon. Finally,
we can usually come up with better weapons, and in this case we have one already made which, when it comes
to an ideological conflict on its merits, exceeds anything that anybody else has ever created. Certainly it
beats on every point, anything the Communist world has to offer. But, again like any other
weapon, even a shotgun, this weapon of our ideas and our ideology and system and concern for the individual,
and so on, this weapon is totally useless to you if you don't understand it, if you don't know how it works,
or what your duties are in relation to making it work, or if you put it aside temporarily when you go
overseas, like some of us have done, or if you just allow it to fall into disuse. This idea was
expressed by a great many returning prisoners from Korea who said, "You know, those Communists knew more
about our country than we did. They would tell us things which were obviously true and we couldn't
refute it, even in our own minds," and we would say, "Well, do you think just a formal education in
democracy would possibly have helped you?" The Soldiers would say, "Well, not necessarily, it's not
exactly that simple." It isn't that simple. It goes a lot farther than a course in
civics. When these people first came back after being subjected to this excellent ideological weapon of
the Communists, we started our study by making comparisons with what had happened to other Americans in
other Prisoner of War situations, in other wars. We have our largest body of data, of course, from the
prisoners of the Japanese, and the Germans in World War II. We could do this for the simple reason
that even though the conditions of captivity in Korea were extremely severe, particularly in the first six
months, food, clothing, shelter, were all inadequate, medical care was non-existent; still we could compare
these people and their reactions, their behavior with other prisoners, because such factors are constant,
such factors have obtained in every prison camp that we have ever studied, almost without exception.
Leaving those considerations, which are definite, and which are real, and which make it difficult for men to
behave as they would like, still we could compare behavior. In so doing, we came up with some
startling things. We found, for example, that the prisoners coming back from Korea were almost totally
unable, or unwilling to communicate with one another. They were willing to communicate with us, but
not with each other. They would sit in the ward in the Tokyo Army Hospital, eighty men who had spent
three years of community captivity, who knew each other intimately; you could walk in the ward any time of
the day or night and there was silence. They just weren't talking to one another. That was a
very interesting thing. We started prying and trying to find out why it was. We found there was
no "buddy" system among these people, none to compare with previous wars. We found there had been no
organized resistance of any significant kind. We found there had been no organized escape committees.
We found, in general, an abandonment of any system of internal organization, or military justice, even
approaching in any remote way, what had occurred among Americans in previous kinds of captivity. So we set
to work to analyze how this had been accomplished. We first utilized some documents which we
intercepted, which were written by Communists, and which expressed the Communists' point of view about this
raw material with which they had to work--the average American, if there is such an average thing.
The Communist viewpoint was very clearly, and categorically expressed, to the effect that you and I, we
average Americans, are: first, materialistic and opportunistic; and, of course, you recognize this as being
a common Communist complaint against the capitalistic societies. But he went further, he said the
American "will make a deal always, he has a price, you can buy this guy; make it attractive enough and he
will do what you want." That was the first premise. The second premise was: "You can teach these
people what you want because they are ignorant. The average American not only doesn't know anything
about his own system, or about his enemy, he doesn't know anything about how his system works, what his
position really is in it, what it guarantees him. He thinks the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom from
fear, and freedom from want." I think this is the current version. "He doesn't know the problems
of other countries in the world or what they are fighting for. He has been fed a pap which is a
combination of capitalist, imperialist mouthings in the newspapers, and the comic books which he prefers to
read--so he is ignorant." Third, he said about Americans, "The average American," you and I, "are not
loyal." He wasn't talking about disloyalty from a patriotic standpoint, he was talking about loyalty
as a human character trait, about loyalty as a value in your system of values. He says that loyalty
was not a principal concern of our people. Loyalty to each other, loyalty to organizations, or ideas,
or communities, or religions--or anything of that sort. He had some other ideas: He expressed, in glowing
terms, the attitude of the average American toward military service, and in some ways he hit the nail right
on the head. He said that many American soldiers consider their military service to be an involuntary
servitude to be escaped from as rapidly as possible, after the least possible expenditure of energy.
all of this is quite an indictment. It's the Communist point of view. I don't subscribe to it,
and I'm sure you don't either. However, like any such analysis, there may be elements of truth or
degrees of truth in it, and it would appear from our experiences with these people in Korea, and how they
responded to a Communist approach based upon these ideas, that to whatever degree any of these ideas are
true about any of us, to that degree we expose a vulnerable area to this magnificent Communist weapon. The
weapon they used was deceptively simple. Before they could put it into effect, they had to segregate
leaders, which they did very simply by putting them into what was called "reactionary camps." They put
into these reactionary camps "reactionaries," people who tried to be leaders, people who showed what the
Communists called "poisonous individualism." If you had the temerity to try to organize anything, off
you went to the reactionary camp. You were obviously hopeless. Other reactionaries were people
with a higher education, who were considered automatically reactionary unless they volunteered to cooperate.
Some did. Other reactionaries were overtly religious people. The Communists also felt they
couldn't do much with them. They segregated all these people in reactionary camps, and you know what
percentage of the total group this was? Five. When they had taken five percent of the people
away, there were no leaders left. This is an interesting point to think about. You and I,
both, although in different fields, are primarily concerned with technical achievements. We are
concerned in training people, training them to be technologically excellent. We assume as Americans
that leadership among us is the thing it has always been, the thing that has made America great.
Leadership underlies our entire industrial plant. It's something we talk about all the time.
Everybody knows rules for being good leaders, and so, why was it that it only took the segregation of five
percent to deprive the entire rest of adequate leadership? It's one of the problems that I am going to
present to you today, with no attempt at making a solution for you. While this may be in some ways
intellectually indefensible, the fact is, I don't think any one of us does have a solution, and that's why
you are hearing this. We need a little help. A lot of help. |
