Brainwashing: The Story of Men who Defied It

2024 Reprint of the 1958 Edition. Facsimile of the original edition and not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Hunter is widely acknowledged as having coined the term brainwashing in a 1950 article for Miami News. In this article and in later works, Hunter claimed that by combining Pavlovian theory with modern technology, Russian and Chinese psychologists had developed powerful techniques for manipulating the mind. As author Dominic Streatfeild recounts, Hunter conceived the term after interviewing former Chinese prisoners who had been subjected to a "re-education" process. He applied it to the interrogation techniques the KGB used during purges to extract confessions from innocent prisoners, and from there, variations were conceived - mind control, mind alteration, behavior modification, and others. In 1958 Hunter published Brainwashing: The Story of men who Defied it. In it he provides dramatic first-hand accounts from Korean War veterans who survived P.O.W. camps and Communist attempts to brainwash them.

Historian Julia Lovell has criticized Hunter's reporting as "outlandish" and sensational. By 1956, US government psychologists largely concluded after examining files of Korean War POWs that brainwashing as described by Hunter did not exist, but the impact of his reporting was significant, and helped shaped public consciousness about the threat of Communism for decades. Lovell argues that Hunter created "an image of all-powerful Chinese 'brainwashing' ... [that] supposed an ideological unified Maoist front stretching from China to Korea and Malaya", but declassified US documents show a much more complicated and contested picture of Chinese influence and international aspirations in Asia.

Nevertheless, the new terminology stuck and found its way into the mainstream in The Manchurian Candidate novel and the movie of the same name in 1962.

Contents: A new word -- Ivan P. Povlav. Man and dog; The popular version; The secret manuscript -- Brainwashing in action. Total means "everybody"; "What a scoop"; Sam Dean; John D. Hayes -- The Negro as P.O.W. The Korean miracle; Simple things; The golden cross club; First man out -- Camp life. Herb Marlatt; Zach Dean; Frank Noel; Robert Wilkins; Battle of wits; Crazy week -- The independent character. Brains; Guts; Agony; Combat -- The British in Korea. Subtlety and horseplay; The coronation -- What brainwashing is. Two processes; many elements; Some of the elements; Threats and violence; Yalu madness; Drugs and hypnotism; Confession -- The clinical analysis. Dr. Leon Freedom; Self-analysis; National neuroses -- How it can be beat. Mental-survival stamina; Faith and convictions; Clarity of mind; Using one's head; Cutting them to size -- A matter of integrity.