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How China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique

atroche.org

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Re: How China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique

#141

Post by philwelch »

lostlogin wrote: post #136
philwelch wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the countries that occupied Iraq agreed on how to rebuild the country. That wasn't the case in Korea. No one in South Korea wants to reunite Korea badly enough to live under a hereditary Stalinist dictatorship, nor does said dictatorship want to give up power, so the situation is at a stalemate.

umm.. a few of Americas lackeys came along for the ride as it was politically expedient. Despite this governments fell. Iraq was America's mess and a few unfortunates followed them on down. I'm not sure there was any agreement on rebuilding, it was, and still is a catastrophic mess. Nothing other than embarrassment should be felt over the humanitarian disaster this adventure was.

I agree with all of that. The fact that the invasion was mostly unilateral is exactly why Iraq wasn't divided after the war, which was my entire point.

Re: How China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique

#142

Post by philwelch »

xerophtye wrote: post #130
Sandman wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you teach your children critical thinking and to base their opinions on something provable.

Then you're still doing brainwashing/indoctrination. Let's not forget, it's "irrespective of the opinion's merit". Besides, just as you hold your "must be provable" views dear, similarly the religious parent holds his or her religious views dear.

I think there's a useful distinction between teaching a set of opinions that must be held regardless of evidence and teaching the practice of forming one's own opinions based upon evidence, but it's a tricky point to make.

Re: How China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique

#143

Post by lotsofcows »

w1ntermute wrote: post #32
anologwintermut wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America was in almost no way the aggressor. North Korea Invades South Korea on June 25th 1950. The UN, for probably the first,last, and only time, takes military action (at American behest and because the Russian's were boycotting the UN) led by a US General and primarily American troops. This force and the South Korean Army repel the North Koreans and drive into North Korea (which was suppose to hold open elections…

Nobody has explained to me why Korea was even divided up into the North and South in the first place. It should have been left to its own devices after the Japanese empire collapsed at the end of WW2. That is, the US/UN shouldn't have been occupying the South and the USSR/China shouldn't have been occupying the North. Seems to me that the fault should be assigned to all of those countries/organizations.

Nobody's explained it to you? OMG! How you can you have been tortured so?

Did you consider spending 10 seconds on wikipedia? No. But you still felt it necessary, even after recognising your ignorance, to vomit forth your opinion.

...all that is wrong with the world...

Re: How China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique

#144

Post by philwelch »

forgottenpaswrd wrote: post #138

It is not that hard when soldiers could discover that they had been lied by their own people and sent to die in order for others(that will never risk a finger) to profit. All wars are full of lies, Roosevelt lied to the American people, "for their own good" of course, as the American public did not want to enter a world war. The Lusitania was full of weapons as divers discover in 2008, the first American sub to be si…

One of the most effective ways to persuade people is to mix lies with truth to give the mixture the flavor of truth. For instance, starting with some comfortable truisms (all wars are full of lies) combined with questionable implications (Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were inside jobs) supported by misleading details (the carriers weren't present at Pearl Harbor, but battleships were universally considered the more valuable strategic asset until the battles of Coral Sea and Midway; the 9/11 hijackers were mostly Saudi because they were dissidents against the US-supported Saudi government whose senior leadership moved to Afghanistan to avoid the Saudi authorities). Consider also the general theme of such arguments: always to attack and denigrate the United States' involvement without ever giving consideration to the wider context. Indeed it's easy for the US to come off as the "bad guy" for entering a war against the actual Nazis so far as you keep the focus squarely on what the US did wrong rather than considering a wider context.

Re: How China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique

#145

Post by philwelch »

daenz wrote: post #22
andyl wrote: post #13

Brainwashed? If that is brainwashing, then it seems like there's brainwashing everywhere you look. For example: - http://www.foxnews.com/ - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBbBfrKsVqY

It sounds more like de-brainwashing to me. If those soldiers go in with this perfect idea of America, how we can do no wrong, and how everything we do is justified, then turning that on its head seems more like...rational thinking.

The reasonable perspective is that America isn't perfect, America can do wrong, and not everything America does is justified. The brainwashing occurs when you go past this reasonable perspective straight to: Communist China is perfect, America can only do wrong, and nothing America does is justified while everything the Communist Chinese do is.

And when you're comparing the US of 1950 to the Communist China of 1950, frankly, if the pro-US viewpoint is naive, the pro-Mao viewpoint is utterly deluded.

You still run into the kind of people who try to draw moral equivalence between the Japanese internment and Dachau to this day. I'm not saying this to deflect criticism, because I hold the US to a much higher standard than the rest of the world and the way to do that is to be critical. But coming to the conclusion that the US used chemical weapons in Korea (we didn't) or that Mao was a positive force for China in the 1950's (he wasn't) just because America falls short is a very long way on the opposite side of reasonable.

Re: How China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique

#146

Post by philwelch »

md224 wrote: post #76
stephengillie wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this what "deprogramming" a brainwashed person is? Moving them from the position of their captors' propaganda to a position within the propaganda believed by an entire society? Patriotism being one example of this type of propaganda -- the idea that some of us are better than others because we were born on one side of a line in the dirt.

This is why I find the concept of brainwashing/deprogramming fascinating from an epistemic perspective; you're essentially substituting one set of axioms for another. And it's often hard to determine who occupies the epistemic higher ground, since all camps will claim to do so. For example, liberals think Fox News is brainwashing people, and conservatives think academics at liberal schools are brainwashing people. So…

Humans don't work the way you think they work. We don't hold sets of axioms and reason from them to build a logically consistent set of opinions in such a way that changing someone's axioms carries the whole weight of their belief system along with it, like making a code change in a shared dependency changes the behavior of an entire computer system. Humans are a lot messier than that.

Re: How China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique

#147

Post by LeeHunter »

xerophtye wrote: post #135
DominikR wrote: post #112

I wouldn't categorize this as brainwashing. Or to be more specific: I wouldn't categorize the description in the blog post as brainwashing or torture. To me, this looks more like some kind of group therapy since the POWs were not forced and the example statement they were asked to make ("The United States is not perfect.") is obviously a fact because nothing is perfect. What I find interesting is to compare this to w…

What I find interesting is that most terrorists are a product of brainwashing too. And i mean DELIBERATE brainwashing, not the kind of stuff you learn from society as you grow up. So why not fight fire with fire and deprogram them? Heck the violence actually reinforces their brainwashing that the captors are Evil people.

Saudi Arabia has apparently had considerable success deprogramming militants by engaging them in religious discussions.

Re: How China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique

#148

Post by DanielBMarkham »

gruseom wrote: post #79
asveikau wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record The Manchurian Candidate was a book before it was a movie. I read the book once long ago but don't remember much about it. In contrast the imagery of the movie is very hard to forget.

I never read the book but apparently it was a favorite of JFK's and he was instrumental in getting the movie made. That explains how something so politically edgy could have come out of Hollywood in 1962—it had the President vouching for it. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/movies/film-a-co-productio... <-- Contains Spoilers

Just a nit, but there was nothing special about Hollywood in 1962. Hollywood has always been a "cool kids" club, and JFK was right in the middle of it.

What we see over time is that various people are considered cool kids or not, and the cool kids all like one thing or another, but Hollywood in the 50s and 60s wasn't some kind of propaganda machine, although folks today make it out to be. It was just that's what all the cool kids were doing back then.

There was some really edgy stuff made in the 50s and 60s.

Re: How China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique

#149

Post by realo »

LeeHunter wrote: post #147
xerophtye wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find interesting is that most terrorists are a product of brainwashing too. And i mean DELIBERATE brainwashing, not the kind of stuff you learn from society as you grow up. So why not fight fire with fire and deprogram them? Heck the violence actually reinforces their brainwashing that the captors are Evil people.

Saudi Arabia has apparently had considerable success deprogramming militants by engaging them in religious discussions.

Oh? I thought that militants in that region of the planet were programmed by religious discussions in the first place.

Maybe we do not share the same definition of what a "militant" is, in Saudi Arabia?

Re: How China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique

#150

Post by atroche »

VanillaBooks wrote: post #110

I disagree with the _utility_ of the article's conclusion - "keep the facts in mind when you are asked to do things". Basically it says - be in control of what you do. Or, we are always a step or two behind (we only realize later what happened in a certain situation). So what you do when somebody applies a technique on you, which you don't know yet, in a situation in which you are caught, which you don't yet realize…

Good points.

Can you elaborate on what steps you might take to guard against unknown techniques?

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