Love Beat Brain-Washing
ECKARDT, W. V.
Love Beat Brain-washing Corporal Batchelor's story points a moral to local vigilantes By W. V. Eckardt Washington, D. C. The first cheering blow for freedom in 1954 was struck by a simple...
...You can go for your own ideas living with me...
...Simple love conquered confusion...
...We owe knowledge of this to a valuable, if unfortunately all too sketchy, bit of journalistic enterprise on the part of the Boston Globe, which conducted a home-town survey of the defectors' pre-Army background...
...This account could be continued with little effort...
...To guard against further such damage, no textbooks will henceforth be used in Alabama until the author has filed an affidavit about his political past...
...He enlisted at eighteen . . .", "mother a twice-divorced holiness preacher . . .", ". . . one of nine children, father did not work for fourteen years . . .", ". . . went to seven grade schools in three states before he was twelve...
...Now only 21 out of 4,600 young Americans who have been exposed to Communist "persuasion" remain sufficiently damaged to stay with the Communists...
...It turns out that none of the twenty-one went to college and most of them quit school early to find a home in the Army...
...You used to sing the Tennessee Waltz," she answered instead...
...The dog, Rassi, is dead...
...No matter how good they are, abstract words and theoretical training can never instill the sense of values which only the process of growth in a secure environment can offer...
...Nor can the Army efforts at troop education and information be blamed...
...The one exception to this pattern, a boy of an average American middle-class family, was an Episcopal Church worker with "an overwhelming desire for world peace...
...The rest apparently did not even have that much of a suggestion of a political motive...
...As for his new creed, which Claude thought must separate him from his lovely bride, she wrote: "Why don't you come back right now and explain to us from your mouth your ideas...
...In fact, there is reason to believe that every one of them would be hard put to spell Malenkov's name...
...In the shadows of the sensational spy probes, cultural vigilantism is still gaining ground...
...If the author "is dead or cannot be located," the publisher must do it for him...
...Anti-Communism in many minds is rapidly turning into anti-intellectualism...
...The Issue, an excellent new publication of the non-partisan National Issues Committee, reports further that authors of textbooks used in Texas schools are now required to sign loyalty oaths...
...The survey of their backgrounds, in fact, reads much like some of the dossiers of typical juvenile delinquents which are now so frequently published in the course of the current investigations into that subject: "The oldest of eight children . . .", ". . . did odd jobs in a poor environment . . .", "no home to come back to . . .", "born out of wedlock and brought up in a foster home . . .", "long police record . . .", "mother was a clothes checker at a local laundry...
...These underprivileged American youngsters deserted our free society because our society had deserted them in the first place...
...To judge from the loving tone of her successful letter to Claude, she seems quite capable of helping him build the kind of home in the free world which he is not likely to desert again...
...None of these boys ever nibbled at Communism while gulping cocktails in fund-raising parties for Loyalist Spain...
...For the frustration and basic insecurity of these soldiers, combined with their poor schooling and near-illiteracy, cannot be removed or even mitigated by indoctrination lectures...
...As Malvina Lindsay, the Washington Post columnist, put it the other day: "The long-range answer to all know-nothingism is to try to develop people with enough inner security who will think for themselves and let others do likewise...
...All but one of Corporal Batchelor's ex-comrades hail from the bottom of the social scale and were brought up in emotional and material insecurity...
...If this picture is correct, the report that a few of these adamant POWs are homosexuals does not change it...
...For neither Corporal Batchelor nor the comrades he left behind the Iron Curtain were in any way tainted by sociology textbooks or radical college teachers before they crossed the Thirty-eighth Parallel...
...Yet it seems that Kyoko was right, at least as far as the twenty-one youths who chose Communism in Korea are concerned...
...Please, my darling, come back to me," Kyoko Araki wrote her 24-year-old husband, Corporal Claude J. Batchelor, who had chosen to stay with the Communists in Korea...
...Nor can vigilantism...
...Distrust and the stifling of mental creativity is supposed to shield our youth against dangerous and un-American influences...
...They never argued "Browderism," "factionalism," "socialism-in-One-country," or the treason of Leon Trotsky...
...In Arkansas, the State Legislative Council is making a survey of secondary school and college textbooks in sociology to sniff out subversive ideas...
...Love Beat Brain-washing Corporal Batchelor's story points a moral to local vigilantes By W. V. Eckardt Washington, D. C. The first cheering blow for freedom in 1954 was struck by a simple Japanese girl who had learned to sing the "Tennessee Waltz...
...Psychiatrists are more and more inclined to view homosexuality not as an organic defect but as one possible manifestation of neurotic anxiety and inner insecurity such as the case histories of these men must undoubtedly have produced...
...Communism, it seems, provided what our schools, social workers and institutions had failed to provide...
...That also goes for making young people immune to Communism...
...Our cat, Tama, is now an old grandmother...
...None of them came near giving as much as a dime for a front organization, or signed a resolution to help put a Red councilman on the ballot...
...It seems the book-burners are barking up the wrong tree...
...I can now sing it well...
...In Texas, the home state of Corporal Batchelor, there was a hot fight over the inclusion of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in history textbooks...
...One other is a Belgian immigrant whose mother was sent to a forced-labor camp by the Nazis...
...After pondering her letter for two weeks, Corporal Batchelor told his Indian guards at Panmunjom one hour after the new year started that he chose freedom after all...
...What a subversive letter that Japanese girl wrote: ". . . You can go for your own ideas living with me...
...Kyoko's faith and the old-fashioned virtue of tolerance succeeded where the blaring loudspeakers failed...
...Which brings us back to our heroine, Kyoko Araki...
...Wisely, she did not argue with the pompous Commie gobbledygook about "the shackles of war and capitalist exploitation," which he had served her in his letter...
...It seems that Communist promises—in addition to whatever coercion and "brain-washing" may have taken place—enhanced their egos and gave diem a sense of belonging and a purpose...
Vol. 37 • January 1954 • No. 3
