The US Army searched for a brainwashed prisoner and never found one
Brainwashing entered English in a Miami newspaper in October 1950 and soon dominated Cold War headlines. Yet a 1956 US Army report concluded that exhaustive research by several agencies had not turned up a single conclusively documented case among American prisoners held in Korea, and called the idea a popular misconception.
The word began as a Chinese phrase, xinao, literally wash brain. Early twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals used it to mean modernising one's outlook, punning on a Taoist habit of cleansing the heart before rituals. Under Mao it came to describe coercive efforts to remake so-called reactionaries. Journalist Edward Hunter, a fierce anticommunist reputedly working undercover for the CIA, carried the term into English to explain why some captured American soldiers cooperated with their Chinese guards and a few even defected.
American officials found the idea useful for discrediting prisoners' confessions, including claims of germ warfare. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who from 1953 interviewed former prisoners as well as Chinese citizens who had undergone university indoctrination, found something less dramatic: once home, the returning prisoners' thinking soon went back to normal. His 1961 book on thought reform became a classic.
The concept resurfaced in courtrooms. Heiress Patty Hearst, kidnapped at 19 by a militant group in 1974, joined its activities and was later arrested for bank robbery; her lawyer F. Lee Bailey argued her captors had brainwashed her like Korean War prisoners, but she was convicted. In a 1990 fraud case involving a former Scientologist, a court barred brainwashing testimony because the theory lacked general scientific acceptance, and American courts have rejected such evidence ever since.
In the 1970s and 1980s anti-cult campaigners applied the idea to new religious movements. Sociologist Eileen Barker spent nearly seven years studying the Unification Church and rejected the theory, since it could not explain why most people who attended recruitment meetings never joined or why so many members walked away voluntarily. James Richardson added that groups armed with genuine mind control should grow fast, yet most struggled to recruit or keep followers.
Source: Brainwashing
