PLAGUE 1: PSYCHOLOGY AS RELIGION

OR BELIEVING THAT

'THE TRUTH IS WHAT WE WANT IT TO BE'

"They don't realize that we are bringing them the plague." Said by Sigmund Freud to Carl Jung as their ship was arriving in New York. Some say that this is a myth. That’s interesting, since the original meaning of the word myth was that it is a fiction that tells a truth.

A WARNING FROM HISTORY: ‘RE-EDUCATING THE PRISONERS’

For prisoners of the Communist Chinese in the Korean War (1950-1953), the technique of ‘re-education’ embraced every phase of daily life in the camps for captured prisoners. Everything was designed to influence the thoughts of the prisoners and make them more receptive to the Communist way of thinking. The ‘progressive’ view—the Com­munist view—was the only one allowed. Every activity of the prisoners, whether it was a sing-song, or a private languages class, was designed to support this. The basic means of indoctrination was originally the compulsory lecture and discussion. The lectures were almost invariably followed on the same and subsequent days by periods of discussion during which prisoners were confined to their rooms and had to talk about questions based on the lectures. The squad leader or the squad monitor was given the task of keeping order and of recording in writing the opinions of members of his squad, either as a collective answer or as an individual answer signed by the authors. These signed statements were, of course, preferred, for they gave the Chinese 'a better opportunity of assessing "progressive" or " reactionary" tendencies and potentialities.

Study groups appeared to have been set up spontaneously by ‘progressive' prisoners, though in view of the stringent control exercised by the Communists over every aspect of camp life, it is more than likely that there was prompting and assistance by the camp authorities. Attendance did not necessarily imply sympathy with the Communist view. One British soldier, for instance, attended a group in order, as he put it, 'to get in with the Chinese'. In this way he was able to obtain medical equipment for fellow prisoners.

In such an atmosphere it was inevitable that many prisoners began to say what their Chinese tutors wanted them to say simply to avoid being classed as 'reactionaries'. Most of them never worked actively for the Chinese, but merely put their names to so-called 'peace' petitions and broadcasts, inserted the right Communist jargon into their letters to relatives and friends at home, and did not resist the process of 're-education'.