Tag: brainwashing

The Enemy of My Enemy

One of the most effective thought-terminating clichés is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

It is particularly effective because it works on both people who are, let’s say, not extraordinarily intelligent, and on more intelligent people, people who you wouldn’t expect to fall for such simplistic tricks.

It is especially effective in hyper-polarized sociocultural environments, like the one we’re in currently, where people feel like they need to be on one or the other side of whatever.

If you’re unfamiliar with thought-terminating clichés, the term was popularized by Robert Jay Lifton in his seminal book about “thought reform,” i.e., brainwashing.

“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: a Study of Brainwashing in China

Thought-terminating clichés you might be familiar with include, but are not limited to, “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists,” “trust the science,” “trust the plan,” “it’s not perfect, but it’s better than the alternative,” “it’s just common sense,” “freedom isn’t free,” “that’s just the way it is,” and the list goes on.

Thought-terminating clichés are designed to do exactly what it sounds like they are designed to do…terminate thought, particularly critical thought.

They are typically deployed against you when you are challenging some item of official propaganda, or dogma, or reprehensible action, associated with or perpetrated by whatever “party,” “side,” “team,” or “cult” people think you’re a member of, or are trying to get you to shut the fuck up about.

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A brief, weird history of brainwashing

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.

When a senator asked about Hunter’s work for the OSS, the operative boasted that he was the first to “discover the technique of mind-attack” in mainland China, the first to use the word “brainwashing” in writing in any language, and “the first, except for the Chinese, to use the word in speech in any language.” 

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Our Brainwashed Covid Youth

The necessity to control mass population in order to execute a political agenda is familiar from history.

During the 20th century, for example, both National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union understood that indoctrinating the youths of their nations was the key to regime success.

Today’s youth appear to have been similarly brainwashed into being terrified of Covid-19, despite the fact that the virus has little effect on young people.  Cases in point: I am most often scolded, chased down, or harassed by younger people when I dare to enter a business massless, in defiance of the needless local mandate.

I do get a certain number of adult busybodies threatening to deny me service (even though I qualify as medically exempt), but it’s mostly the younger demographics that seem desperate to conform.

It’s remarkable that forty years ago, it was our nation’s youth that refused to comply with authority.  1960’s America was about defying the Establishment.  How did we get here?

Children under 17 account for 6.3 million positive tests in the U.S., out of 51.2 million in total.  That’s 12 percent of the total cases for a group that represents about 25 percent of the total population.  However, it has proven impossible to determine the number of cases that are symptomatic, and how many children had the Delta variant, which usually presents with fewer symptoms than the original strain.

Just under 700 children have died, nearly all of them as a result of multiple co-morbidities.

That’s the data.  So why are kids so afraid? What we’re witnessing in America is the inevitable result of three trends.

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