Engineering of the Soul

...The author devotes his major space to an array of case histories: elaborate reconstruction of the ordeals of specific men, on the basis of days and sometimes weeks of painstaking interviews...

...Edward Hunter has written an important book and made an invaluable contribution to our side in the struggle against Communism...

...It is in terms of "cortivisceral psychiatry" that we can come closest to understanding the self-betrayal of our educated classes with respect to Communism, and the complacency which has made suicidal concepts of coexistence with unmitigated evil so tempting to nearly the whole of the non-Soviet world...

...Under Hunter's firm but sensitive prodding, a number of officers and simple soldiers recall not merely the externals of what was done to them but the fantastic inner dramas played out in their minds...

...The present one reports in chilling detail how the same methods were applied to selected individuals under virtually laboratory conditions...

...And most of the credit should go to Edward Hunter, a valiant and perceptive American journalist who for a quarter of a century has specialized in Far Eastern affairs...

...Free men are far from that understanding of the Communist threat and its implements of cerebral manipulation which is the indispensable condition for defying it successfully...

...The initial book showed how the whole of China was being subjected to brainwashing...

...At another point he sums it up strikingly as "a combination of fake evangelism and quack psychiatry in a setting of false science...

...Where the pretensions and maneuvers of the Kremlin are concerned, we the victims require a special mental effort to recognize white as white and black as black...

...The most effective weapons against brainwashing, it is evident from the case histories, are religious faith, deep convictions, well-rooted certainties in both the moral and political orders...

...Whether used against individuals or great aggregates of people, he says, brainwashing aims "to make minds sick, to create frustrations and to fan them into hates...

...It is the essence of the psychological offensive by the Communists and has achieved extraordinary successes...

...Freedom says that "cortivis-ceral psychiatry" his label for brainwashing "can only be properly understood and dealt with as man-made illness...

...In line with these attempts at analytical definition, the book begins with a chapter on Professor Pavlov and his experiments in conditioned reflexes...

...It is not generally known that soon after the Bolshevik seizure of power Lenin took the great psychologist under his personal patronage...

...it seems to me...

...Whether he intended it or not, he has given us a set of keys to the understanding of processes which some future Gibbon, I fear, will sum up as the decline and fall of the Judeo-Christian civilization...

...Few of them came through entirely unscathed...

...But certainly it was Hunter who launched the word on its career, with an earlier book, Brainwashing in Red China...

...I can find small warrant for optimism, though the great majority of the Westerners subjected to brainwashing did manage to resist it...

...In this they have in some measure been discomfited by the worldwide acceptance of a more accurate description of the obscenity "brainwashing...

...What excited Lenin was the prospect of changing stubborn human nature by applying to human beings the lessons Pavlov had learned from dogs...

...This sequel analyzes those techniques with almost clinical precision...

...The Pavlovian flavor is strong in brainwashing...

...There is no doubt any longer that this type of mind attack is being waged against entire populations," Hunter warns...

...Hunter writes at one point: "The Reds had found out that the easiest way to subdue any group of people was to give its members a guilt complex and then to lead them on from self-denunciation to self-betrayal...

...We watch without blinking an eye as the lovely Queen of England not only entertains a pair of blood-stained Kremlin gangsters but brings in her innocent babies to meet the honored guests...

...Hunter's new book, Brainwashing, continues his self-imposed task of making mankind aware of that horror...

...Fogs of skepticism and "neutralism" becloud the minds and the consciences of men and nations...

...Both Moscow and Peking have sought to veil their "hideous pressures of the mind," as applied to individuals and entire nations, with beguiling talk of re-education, human engineering, corrective labor and the rest...

...The reference was to the groups in brainwashing compounds, but it holds true for vast segments of the free world...

...This time the victims were Westerners, chiefly Americans, and the laboratories were Chinese Communist prisoner-of-war camps...

...But these, unhappily, are precisely the weapons in tragically short supply today...

...The macabre quality of the diabolic enterprise seems even more frightening when thus translated into cold scientific terms...

...The process, as Hunter makes clear, is twofold "conditioning or softening-up primarily for control purposes" and "indoctrination or persuasion . . . for conversion purposes...

...Toward the end, the book offers a fascinating and awesome analysis of brainwashing by a competent psychiatrist, Dr...

...In itself a small episode perhaps, but a symbol of the swift erosion of moral sensitivity, the catastrophic decline of honor, which make our world maximally vulnerable to brainwashing...

...does not quite come off, and through no fault of the author's...

...That part of it...

...Today the term is standard in the political lexicon of the free world, though too few grasp the limitless horror of the sinister science the word represents...

...Hunter does not claim to have coined the word apparently it was being used by a number of foreign witnesses of the China tragedy at an early stage...

...And we have not even a glimmering of that "technique of mind defense" which Hunter himself considers essential to meet the enemy's offensive...

...Within these broad formulas are myriad devices ranging from the crudest to the most subtle...

...The earlier volume simply described the techniques of "upside-down talk and twisted thinking," backed by physiological pressures including plain torture...

...The gist of his findings, based on the evidence gathered by Hunter, is that the Communists are deliberately using modern psychiatric therapies in reverse not to cure sick minds but to make healthy minds sick...

...Leon Freedom of Baltimore...

...Brainwashing is a more pervasive danger than nuclear destruction because faith in the values of our civilization is at a low ebb...

...The sinister science, let there be no mistake about it, is not being applied merely to captive individuals in prison camps but to whole societies, among them our own...

...Taken together, these personal recollections and interpretations of experience provide a picture of brainwashing more comprehensive, comprehensible and terrifying than any heretofore available in print...

...The subtitle of the book "The Story of Men Who Defied It" is intended to add a touch of encouragement to the record...

...Reviewed by Eugene Lyons Author, "Assignment in Utopia," "Our Secret Allies" senior editor, "Reader's Digest" In our time, more than ever in the past, words are political weapons...

...What they had undergone," Hunter says of the victims, "was more like witchcraft, with its incantations, trances, poisons and potions, with a strange flair of science about it all, like a devil dancer in a tuxedo, carrying his magic brew in a test tube...