On an early spring day in 1959, Edward Hunter testified before a US Senate subcommittee investigating “the effect of Red China Communes on the United States.” It was the kind of opportunity he relished. A war correspondent who had spent considerable time in Asia, Hunter had achieved brief media stardom in 1951 after his book Brain-Washing in Red China introduced a new concept to the American public: a supposedly scientific system for changing people’s minds, even making them love things they once hated.
But Hunter wasn’t just a reporter, objectively chronicling conditions in China. As he told the assembled senators, he was also an anticommunist activist who served as a propagandist for the OSS, or Office of Strategic Services — something that was considered normal and patriotic at the time. His reporting blurred the line between fact and political mythology.
Related:
The Color of Brainwashing: The Manchurian Candidate and the Cultural Logic of Cold War Paranoia (PDF)
Contrary to the populist notion that brainwashing originated from the sinister Asian communists, the concept of brainwashing was a peculiarly American one and was propagated by the U.S. military and intelligent agencies.
…
In his 1959 review essay titled “Brainwashing and Totalitarianization in Modern Society,” Edgar H. Schein writes regarding the American preoccupation with brainwashing: There are probably many reasons for this preoccupation. First because our struggle with the communist world is partially an ideological one, we need new terms for ideological weapons － e.g., “brainwashing.” Second, because the Chinese communists were successful in stalemating the Korean conflict and in eliciting germ-warfare confessions and other collaborative behavior from their American prisoners of war (POWs), we have had to find someone or something to blame. The conclusion that the collaborator and confessor were “brainwashed” is one convenient way of assigning such blame. Third, our own society has become increasingly concerned about the ethics and implications of techniques of overt and covert persuasion […]. Fourth, our changing international position has led us to an attitude of tense doubt about our supremacy and our capacity to cope with international problems. Given these and doubtless many other factors, it is no wonder that we have begun to question where the limits of the integrity of the human mind lie, and increasingly to entertain concepts like “brainwashing” which express graphically our loss of confidence in our capacity as individuals to master our world. When things go wrong, it is far less ego-deflating to say that we have been “brainwashed” than to recognize our own inadequacy in coping with our problems.
Secret Plan Revealed: CIA Told to “Destroy” Those Supporting Communist Germ Warfare “Myth” (archived)
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 