Brainswashed! Conspiracy theory and ideology in the postwar United States

New German Critique

Volumn , Issue 103, 2008, Pages 145-164

  Melley, Timothy ^a  

^a MIAMI UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 40449089509     PISSN: 0094033X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/0094033X-2007-023     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Edward Hunter, "'Brain-Washing' Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party," Miami News, September 24, 1950;
2. Hunter, Brain-Washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men's Minds (New York: Vanguard, 1951);
3. Hunter, Brainwashing: The Story of Men Who Defied It (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956).
4. Hunter, Brain-Washing (1951), 302, 223.
5. Hunter, Brainwashing (1956), 12, 3-4.
6. Ibid., 24, 13.
7. H. H. Wubben, "American Prisoners of War in Korea: A Second Look at the 'Something New in History' Theme," American Quarterly 22 (1970): 3-19.
8. Edward Hunter, "The Effect of Red China Communes on the United States," hearing before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws on the Committee of the Judiciary of the United States Senate, 86th Cong., 1st sess., March 24, 1959 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959), 24.
9. Hunter, Brainwashing (1956), 309.
10. George Kennan, "861.00/2-2246: Telegram, The Charge in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State, SECRET, Moscow, February 22, 1946-9 p.m.," National Security Archive, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv /coldwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm (accessed December 31, 2006);
11. Edward Hunter, The Black Book on Red China (New York: Bookmailer, 1961), 134.
12. J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit (New York: Pocket, 1958), 175, 181, 153.
13. David Seed, Brainwashing: The Fictions of Mind Control: A Study of Novels and Films since World War II (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004), 48. I am indebted more generally to Seed's thorough and interesting study.
14. Lincoln Lawrence, Were We Controlled? (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1967).
15. Dick Anthony, "Pseudoscience and Minority Religions: An Evaluation of the Brainwashing Theories of Jean-Marie Abgrall," Social Justice Research 12 (1999): 421-56.
16. For more detail on this assertion see Seed, Brainwashing;
17. and Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
18. For an influential earlier account see Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction, 1950-1970 (London: Cape, 1971).
19. Joost A. M. Meerloo, "The Crime of Menticide," American Journal of Psychiatry 107 (1951): 594-98;
20. Meerloo, Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1956).
21. See also Meerloo, "Suicide, Menticide, and Psychic Homicide," AMA Arch Neurological Psychiatry 81 (1959): 360-62.
22. Further references to Rape of the Mind are cited as RM.
23. William Sargant, Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing (London: Heinemann, 1957), xiii.
24. John Marks, The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control (1979; rpt. New York: Norton, 1991).
25. Quoted in Seed, Brainwashing, 31.
26. Marks, Search for the "Manchurian Candidate," 24, 31, 23.
27. In his 1951 study Hunter in part attributes his discovery of brainwashing to the impression this trial made on him (see Brain-Washing, 10-11).
28. Marks, Search for the "Manchurian Candidate," 138.
29. Hinkle and Wolff's official CIA report, which Dulles forwarded to Hoover in 1956, concludes that "there is nothing mysterious about personality changes resulting from the brainwashing process," which is distinct from "thought-control or mass indoctrination" primarily insofar as it relies on "physiological deprivation" (see Allen W. Dulles, "A Report on Communist Brainwashing" [memorandum to J. Edgar Hoover, April 25, 1956], CIA Report on Communist Brainwashing, www.totse.com/en/conspiracy/mind_control/165615.html [accessed December 15, 2006]).
30. Albert D. Biderman, "The Image of 'Brainwashing,"' Public Opinion Quarterly 26 (1962): 547-63;
31. Edgar H. Schein with Inge Schneier and Curtis H. Barker, Coercive Persuasion: A Sociopsychological Analysis of the "Brainwashing" of American Civilian Prisoners by the Chinese Communists (New York: Norton, 1961);
32. Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing " in China (1961; rpt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
33. For a helpful overview of all these works see Anthony, "Pseudoscience," esp. 424-34.
34. Lifton, Thought Reform, 13-15.
35. Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959).
36. Hoover, Masters of Deceit, 256-57.
37. Ibid., 255.
38. See Philip Wylie, A Generation of Vipers (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942).
39. Lifton, Thought Reform, 422-23.
40. Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965), 3 -40.
41. David Riesman, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT Yale University Press, 1950);
42. William Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956).
43. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: Pocket Books, 1957), 1, 35.
44. Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2000), 12.
45. William S. Burroughs, "The Limits of Control," in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (New York: Arcade, 1985), 117.
46. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1963), 275.
47. See also Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963; rpt. New York: Perennial, 1999), 85;
48. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952);
49. E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel (New York: Random House, 1971);
50. and Ken Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (New York: Viking, 1962).
51. Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to "The X-Files" (London: Routledge, 2000), 124.
52. Hunter, Brain-Washing (1951), 11-12.
53. Lifton, Thought Reform, 4.
54. Joost A. M. Meerloo, "Pavlovian Strategy as a Weapon of Menticide," American Journal of Psychiatry 110 (1954): 809-13.