Excerpt from Brainwashing the Story of Men Who Defied It The new word brainwashing entered our minds and diction aries in a phenomenally short time. This sinister political expression had never been seen in print anywhere until a few years ago. About the only times it was ever heard in conversation was inside a tight, intimate circle of trusted relatives or reliable friends in Red China during the short honeymoon period of communism. The few exceptions were when a Red indoctrinator would lose his temper and shout out, You need a brainwashing. The reason the word was picked up so quickly was that it was not just a clever synonym for something already known, but described a strategy that had yet no name. A vacuum in language existed: no word tied together the various tactics that make up the process by which the communists expected to create their new Soviet man. The word came out of the sufferings of the Chinese people. Put under a terrifying combination of subtle and crude men tal and physical pressures and tortures, they detected a pat tern and called it brainwashing. The Reds wanted people to believe that it could be amply described by some familiar expression such as education, public relations, persuasion or by some misleading term like mind reform and re-educa tion. None of these could define it because it was much, much more than any one of them alone. The Chinese knew they hadn't just been educated or persuaded; something much more dire than that had been perpetrated on them, similar in many peculiar ways to a medical treatment. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

First published in 1956, this book by U.S. journalist and intelligence agent Edward Hunter comprises dramatic first-hand accounts from Korean War veterans who survived P.O.W. camps and Communist attempts to brainwash them. “The new word brainwashing entered our minds and dictionaries in a phenomenally short time. [...] The reason the word was picked up so quickly was that it was not just a clever synonym for something already known, but described a strategy that had yet no name. [...] The word came out of the sufferings of the Chinese people. Put under a terrifying combination of subtle and crude mental and physical pressures and tortures, they detected a pattern and called it brainwashing. [...] What they had undergone was more like witchcraft, with its incantations, trances, poisons, and potions, with a strange flair of science about it all, like a devil dancer in a tuxedo, carrying his magic brew in a test tube.” A true and terrible story of the men who endured and defied the most diabolical red torture—the war book you will never forget. “A fascinating document.”—Chicago Tribune

Plots, Designs, and Schemes is the first study that investigates the long history of American conspiracy theories from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. Since research in these fields has so far almost exclusively focused on the contemporary period, the book concentrates on the time before 1960. Four detailed case studies offer close readings of the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692, fears of Catholic invasion during the 1830s to 1850s, antebellum conspiracy theories about slavery, and anxieties about Communist subversion during the 1950s. The study primarily engages with factual texts, such as sermons, pamphlets, political speeches, and confessional narratives, but it also analyzes how fears of conspiracy were dramatized and negotiated in fictional texts, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown (1835) or Hermann Melville's Benito Cereno (1855). The book offers three central insights: 1. The American predilection for conspiracy theorizing can be traced back to the co-presence and persistence of a specific epistemological paradigm that relates all effects to intentional human action, the ideology of republicanism, and the Puritan heritage. 2. Until far into the twentieth century, conspiracy theories were considered a perfectly legitimate form of knowledge. As such, they shaped how many Americans, elites as well as “common” people, understood and reacted to historical events. The Revolutionary War and the Civil War would not have occurred without widespread conspiracy theories. 3. Although most extant research claims the opposite, conspiracy theories have never been as marginal and unimportant as in the past decades. Their disqualification as stigmatized knowledge only occurred around 1960, and coincided with a shift from theories that detect conspiracies directed against the government to conspiracies by the government.

Bringing the worlds of neuroscience and social psychology together, this book examines the ethical problems involved in carrying out the required experiments on humans, the limitations of animal models, and the frightening implications of such research. It also explores the history of thought-control and shows how it exists around us.