Daily Advice Friday the 13th of November, 2020

Today's advice comes from a more recent Old Thing, a study of American POWs returned from the Korean war in 1956 by an American sociologist named Albert Biderman. Biderman's work focused on brainwashing techniques and attempts to elicit false confessions of war crimes by the Chinese. Nearly every word of it is relevant to our present-day situation. 

The full report may be read here (warning: pdf link).

Biderman writes:

I would like to discuss first the measures used by the Communists to induce compliance: to undermine the resistance of the prisoner. The experiences of American Air Force prisoners of war in Korea who were pressured for false confessions, enabled us to compile an outline of methods of eliciting compliance, not much different, it turned out, from those reported by persons held by Communists of other nations. I have prepared a chart showing a condensed version of this outline. It shows our analysis of these techniques into eight general measures (...)

Here is a partial reproduction of the chart: 

General Method                               Effects

1. Isolation                                      Deprives Victim of Social Support of His ability to resist
                                                       Develops an Intense Concern with Self
                                                       Makes Victim Dependent On Interrogator

2. Monopolization of Perception    Fixes Attention upon Immediate Predicament; Fosters Introspection
                                                      Eliminates Stimuli Competing with those Controlled by Captor
                                                      Frustrates all Actions not Consistent with Compliance

3. Induced Debilitation;                 Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist
    Exhaustion                  

4. Threats                                      Cultivates Anxiety and Despair

5. Occasional Indulgences           Provides Positive Motivation for Compliance
                                                     Hinders Adjustment to Deprivation

6. Demonstrating "Omnipotence  Suggests Futility of Resistance
    and "Omniscience"

7. Degradation                              Makes Costs of Resistance Appear more Damaging to Self Esteem than Capitulation 

8. Enforcing Trivial Demands       Develops Habit of Compliance

 

Biderman goes on to discuss the specific methods used to elicit false confessions of guilt. Pay close attention:

The kind of "confession" we are discussing consists of considerably more than the signing of a piece of paper which says: "On such and such a date I committed such and such a crime-signed John Jones." It consists of considerably more than making an equivalent oral statement in a court. These "confession"-extortion efforts involve the attempt to manipulate the individual so that he behaves over an extended period as if:

(a) he actually committed certain concrete acts which he can "describe" with meticulous detail;

(b) these acts were "criminal", in the sense of being violations of the most fundamental standards of human decency;

(c) these acts were not isolated transgressions but manifestations of a "criminal" pattern in his thought and action;

(d) his "crimes" were part and parcel of a larger nefarious political Conspiracy;

(e) his "criminal" role was motivated by a self-seeking alignment with this political conspiracy, of which he was only a pawn;

(f) he is now remorseful and repentant;

(g) his changed attitude is due to new-found political conviction for which he is indebted to his patient captors.

In this extreme form of "confession"-elicitation, as encountered by our men, the objective was not merely having the prisoner "confirm" that certain acts were committed, but rather to have his behavior confirm the entire world-view of the Communists relevant to those acts.

 Finally, Biderman concludes by discussing those elements of Communist brainwashing that were mysterious to his audience and that remain mysterious to us to this day. It would have been far easier to simply put a gun to the American soldiers' heads and say "Confess to war crimes or you will be shot." But the Communists never did this. Instead, they followed elaborate procedures designed to force the soldiers to figure out what they were supposed to be guilty of, to confess their guilt, and to do so in a way that confirmed their own interrogators' worldviews. 

The one remaining question is why the Communists proceeded in this strange way. It is not, I am convinced because they were guided by some esoteric knowledge and rationale which give them unprecedented ability to bend people to their will. Insofar as "confessions" for propaganda use arc concerned, these could have been elicited much more quickly and easily by coupling the standard measures for inducing compliance with explicit demands for the false statements they required. False confessions were in fact extorted from Air Force personnel more quickly and economically by North Koreans who apparently had not yet learned the Communist way of doing things. The self-castigation and ideological ranting which the Communists sought, and at which almost all of our people balked, I would think, detracts rather than adds to whatever propaganda value "confessions" might have. All this assumes that some purpose as rational as propaganda is always the major reason for extorting "confessions," and this appears quite definitely not the case.

The mystery associated with the things I have discussed stems not from their rationality but from their irrationality. Unlike the cynical Nazis who merely perpetrated the Big Lie, the Chinese Communist personnel whom our prisoners encountered in Korea were required to to live the Big Lie.

I suggest that we keep Biderman's work in mind when considering three interlocking contemporary phenomena:

1. The Coronavirus lockdown;

2. The Black Lives Matter movement;

3. "Racial Sensitivity" trainings that rely on Critical Race Theory and that have been mandated by governments, schools and private employers around the country;

4. Our current media environment, considering news, social media, and entertainment, as it relates to the foregoing; 

5. The plans for a "Great Reset" being touted by the World Economic Forum, a condensed version of which may be seen here. 

I furthermore suggest that, considering all of the foregoing, we keep in mind the advice from Emperor Marcus Aurelius, King Solomon, Odin and Manly Hall that I posted over the last week.