On 8/28/23, Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many
<gmkarl(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Part One
>
> Thought Reform and Cultism
>
> Part One Chapter 1
> Chinese Communist Thought Reform
>
> _ Chinese thought reform was the subject of my first research study,
> in a sense my initiation into the realm of psychological history. I
> was fascinated by the process on two levels. The first was the
> individual experience of each Chinese or Western person I interviewed,
> which raised questions about the ways minds could be manipulated and
> altered and about distinctions between coercive and therapeutic
> approaches to individual change. These were questions at the heart of
> my profession. _
>
> _ But I was equally impressed by the larger historical spectacle of
> hundreds of millions of Chinese people subjected to a vast compulsory
> movement of "re-education" -- universities, schools, special
> "revolutionary colleges," prisons, business and government offices,
> labor and peasant organizations, and neighborhood groups. What was the
> historical significance of such intense political "psychotherapy"
> applied to citizens of the largest society on earth? I came to
> recognize thought reform as a project of political purification on a
> scale never previously attempted anywhere. _
>
> _ Indeed, I have come to view the thought reform process as a form of
> psychological apocalypticism, of bringing about the "death" of all
> ideas and ideologies prior to those of Mao Zedong and providing a
> "reformed" remnant (in this case a very large one) to preside over
> further Maoist purification -- of China, and perhaps of the world. I
> was studying not only individual change in worldview and identity but
> a grandiose and coercive effort at a historical "new beginning." _
>
> _ In that way, thought reform had a cultist element of Chinese society
> turning inward on itself. From 1948 through the 1950s, several thought
> reform-driven national campaigns took place, such as the Suppression
> of Counterrevolutionaries, Three-Anti, Five-Anti, and Anti-Rightist
> campaigns. Of particular interest was the "Hundred Flowers Movement"
> ("Let the hundred flowers bloom[13], let the hundred schools of
> thought contend"), which encouraged intellectuals to speak frankly
> about their criticisms of the regime. But authorities were surprised
> by what they had let loose, and turned the event into a trap. Those
> who had spoken out critically were subjected to fierce condemnation,
> with their position in society newly imperiled. Those initial
> criticisms were significant: one professor, in his response, said, "I
> find the term _thought reform_ rather repulsive.... I am not aware
> that there is anything wrong with my thought." And another put it into
> language I use in this book: "I think a Party leading the nation is
> not the same as a Party owning the nation." Such critics made it clear
> that difficulties can occur for those who seek to "own" human minds or
> reality itself. _
>
> _ Yet, in the mid-1950s, at the same time I was probing these matters
> in my Hong Kong research, American travelers to Hong Kong told me
> about McCarthyism back home and its own assault on minds and on
> reality. Senator Joseph McCarthy and those who followed or were
> influenced by him were making wild accusations of Communist
> association against public figures, teachers, and writers. Subscribing
> to the wrong magazine might result in being fired from one's job. _
>
> _ That message, when combined with my everyday experience of thought
> reform's punitive distortions, gave me the sense that the whole world
> had gone mad, that there was a pandemic of assault on mind and
> reality. _
>
> _ Thought reform, then, is an extreme version of ever-present human
> tendencies to contrast one's own purity with the impurity of all else;
> and on that basis to justify one's claim to the ownership of reality.
> _
>
>
> Chinese Communist Thought Reform
> _First published in 1961_
>
> When confronted with the endless discussion on the general subject of
> "brainwashing," I am sometimes reminded of the Zen Buddhist maxim:
> "The more we talk about it, the less we understand it."
>
> Behind this web of semantic (and more than semantic) confusion lies an
> image of "brainwashing" as an all-powerful, irresistible,
> unfathomable, and magical method of achieving total control over the
> human mind. It is of course none of these things, and this loose usage
> makes the word a rallying point for fear, resentment, urges toward
> submission, justification for failure, irresponsible accusation, and
> for a wide gamut of emotional extremism. One may justly conclude that
> the term has a far from precise and a questionable usefulness; one may
> even be tempted to forget about the whole subject.
>
> Yet to do so would be to overlook one of the major problems of our era
> -- the psychology and the ethics of directed attempts at changing
> human beings. For despite the vicissitudes of brainwashing, the
> process that gave rise to the name is very much a reality: the
> official Chinese Communist program of _sixiang gaizao_ (variously
> translated as "ideological remolding," "ideological reform," or as we
> shall refer to it here, "thought reform") has in fact emerged as one
> of the most powerful efforts at human manipulation ever undertaken. To
> be sure, such a program is by no means completely new: imposed dogmas,
> inquisitions, and mass conversion movements have existed in every
> country and during every historical epoch. But the Chinese Communists
> brought to theirs a more organized, comprehensive, and deliberate -- a
> more total -- character, as well as a unique blend of energetic and
> ingenious psychological techniques.
>
> When I began my study of Chinese Communist thought reform in the
> 1950s, the Western world had heard mostly about "thought reform" as
> applied in a military setting: the coerced bacteriological warfare
> confessions[14] and the collaboration obtained from American (and
> other United Nations) prisoners during the Korean War. However, these
> were merely export versions of a thought reform program aimed not
> primarily at Westerners, but at the Chinese people themselves, and
> vigorously applied in universities, schools, special "revolutionary
> collages," prisons, business and government offices, and labor and
> peasant organizations. Thought reform combined this impressively
> widespread distribution with a focused emotional power. Not only did
> it reach one-fourth of the people in the world, but it sought to bring
> about in everyone it touched a significant personal upheaval.
>
> Whatever its setting, thought reform consists of two basic elements:
> _confession_, the exposure and renunciation of past and present
> "evil"; and _re-education_, the remaking of a man in the Communist
> image. These elements are closely related and overlapping, since they
> both bring into play a series of pressures and appeals --
> intellectual, emotional, and physical -- aimed at social control and
> individual change.
>
> When I arrived in Hong Kong in late January 1954, I soon found out
> that those who had undergone this experience fell into two broad
> groups: Western civilians reformed in prisons, and Chinese
> intellectuals who had undergone their reform in universities or in
> "revolutionary colleges." As I immersed myself in interviews with both
> groups, I was fascinated on two levels. The first was the nitty-gritty
> experience I studied with each Chinese or Western person I talked to,
> which led immediately to fundamental psychological questions about
> ways in which minds can be manipulated and changed, and about
> capacities to resist such manipulation. Also involved were important
> distinctions between coercive and therapeutic approaches to bringing
> about change. These questions are at the heart of my profession and
> have significance for the way we live in general.
>
> But there was another level to thought reform: its visionary or
> transcendent characteristic, the specter of hundreds of millions of
> Chinese people -- in their neighborhoods, schools, and places of work
> -- caught up in a compulsory movement of purification and renewal.
> What did it mean for such an extreme ethos to dominate an entire vast
> society?
>
> As I proceeded with the work, I realized that one of the main causes
> for confusion about thought reform lay in the complexity of the
> process itself. Some people considered it a relentless means of
> undermining the human personality; others saw it as a profoundly
> "moral" -- even religious -- attempt to instill new ethics into the
> Chinese people. Both of these views were partially correct, and yet
> each, insofar as it ignored the other, was greatly misleading. For it
> was the combination of external force or coercion with an appeal to
> the inner enthusiasm through evangelistic exhortation which gave
> thought reform its emotional scope and power.
>
> Coercion and breakdown were, of course, more prominent in the prisons,
> where brutal treatment that constituted torture was frequent, while
> exhortation and ethical appeal were especially stressed with the rest
> of the Chinese population; and it becomes extremely difficulty to
> determine just where exhortation ends and coercion begins. I could
> observe that thought reform was by no means a casual undertaking but
> rather a systematic and widespread program that penetrated deeply into
> people's psyches.
>
> I found it very important to consider what was behind thought reform,
> what impelled the Chinese Communists to carry out such extreme
> measures on such an extensive scale. The complexities of their
> motivations will be discussed later on; but it is necessary for us now
> -- before getting to the prison experiences of Westerners -- to know
> something about the Chinese Communist philosophy or rationale for
> their program.
>
> The leading Chinese political theorists, although reticent about
> technical details, have written extensively on general principles. Mao
> Zedong himself, in a well-known speech originally delivered to party
> members in 1942, laid down the basic principles of punishment and cure
> that are always quoted by later writers. To overcome undesirable and
> "unorthodox" trends, he specified that
>
>> two principles must be observed. The first is, "punish the past to warn
>> the future"
>> and the second, "save men by curing their diseases." Past errors must be
>> exposed
>> with no thought of personal feelings or face. We must use a scientific
>> attitude to
>> analyze and criticize what has been undesirable in the past ... this is
>> the meaning
>> of "punish the past to warn the future." But our object in exposing errors
>> and
>> criticizing shortcomings is like that of a doctor in curing a disease.
>
> The argument continues as follows: the "old society" in China (or any
> non-Communist society anywhere) was (and is) evil and corrupt; this is
> true because of the domination of the "exploiting classes" -- the
> landowners and capitalists and bourgeoisie; everyone has been exposed
> to this type of society and therefore retains from it "evil remnants"
> or "ideological poisons"; only thought reform can rid him of these and
> make him a "new man" in a "new society." And long philosophical
> treatises emphasize the need to bring the "ideology of all classes"
> into harmony with "objective material conditions" -- or in other
> words, to blend personal beliefs with Communist-implemented social
> realities.
>
> In prison environments, Western civilians (and their Chinese
> cellmates) encountered a special penal version of these principles:
>
>> All crimes have definite sociological roots. The evil ideology and evil
>> habits left
>> behind by the old society ... still remain in the minds of some people to
>> a marked
>> degree. Thus if we are to wipe all crimes from their roots, in addition to
>> inflicting
>> on the criminal the punishment due, we must also carry out various
>> effective
>> measures to transform the various evil ideological conceptions in the
>> minds of the
>> people so that they may be educated and reformed into new people.
>
> Penal institutions were referred to as "re-education centers,"
> "meditation houses," or even "hospitals for ideological reform."
> Westerners spent most of their time -- one to five years of
> imprisonment -- essentially devoted to "solving their cases"; and they
> were not tried or sentenced until just before their release. The
> large-scale policy of "reform through labor" -- the use of prisoners
> in labor battalions -- was mostly reserved for the Chinese themselves.
>
> In the penal institutions it was made clear that the "reactionary spy"
> who entered the prison must perish, and that in his place must arise a
> "new man," resurrected in the Communist mold. The environment did not
> permit any sidestepping: the prisoners were forced to participate,
> drawn into the forces around them until they themselves began to feel
> the need to confess and to reform. In all of this it is most important
> to realize that what might be seen as a set of coercive maneuvers, the
> Chinese Communists viewed as a morally uplifting, harmonizing, and
> scientifically therapeutic experience.
>
> This penetration by the psychological forces of the environment into
> the inner emotions of the individual person is perhaps the outstanding
> psychiatric fact of thought reform. The milieu brings to bear upon the
> prisoner a series of overwhelming pressures, at the same time allowing
> only a very limited set of alternatives for adapting to them. In the
> interplay between person and environment, a sequence of steps or
> operations -- of combinations of manipulation and response -- takes
> place. All of these steps revolved around two policies and two
> demands: the fluctuation between assault and leniency, and the
> requirements of confession and re-education.
>
>
> [left off page 29] [this is as far as i got before the next book
> started, which is “opening our minds” by jon atack. 2023-08-28]
>
>
> 13: "Let the hundred flowers bloom": See the pamphlets "Contradiction"
> and "The Storm" (China Viewpoints: Hong Kong, 1958); Benjamin
> Schwartz, "New Trends in Maoism," _Problems of Communism_ 6
> (1957):1-8.
>
> 14: the coerced bacteriological warfare confessions: A later study
> argued that America actually engaged in experimental biological
> warfare. Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, _The United States and
> Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea_
> (Bloomington and Indianapolis Indiana University Press, 1998).
>
