Re: Request for non-member

[<Cfbernard@aol.com>]

This was written for another purpose but some of its elements may help with 
that student's request for material on brainwashing.

I'm still looking for my review of a book called Manifeste de Camp #1 by a 
French man called Pouget.  It is potent, and I will keep looking.

There were a variety of reasons we lost the war in Vietnam.  The VC's 
abilitiy to motivate themselves and recruit others is just one, but important.

Best,

Carl Bernard


Gerry Atkinson,

As usual, I am trying to do too much, and this first effort on your new work 
is not complete.  However, it seems better to alert you and get this part 
down than delay its improvement.

Thank you for sharing my appreciation of the use of the "speak bitterness" 
meetings and the "auto-critique" sessions used by the Chinese and the 
Vietnamese to train their own as well as to control the POWs they acquired.  
The French analysis and description of this process is fascinating and very 
detailed.  A full colonel at a MATA course at Bragg broke into tears during 
his classmates' application of these processes to him.

I have read your Sensivity one and a half times.  You will get more running 
comments and my overall perspective on it eventually.  Naturally, some of our 
sources are not the same, and the different intellectual baggage we brought 
to our reading them gave us different reinforcements.  Sadly, you may be the 
only American I've met since Fort Bragg who knew anything of Luria!

· Page 1: "… the U.S. military is being corrupted… ."  Maybe.  It is 
evolving in some unattractive ways as it accommodates many unhappy elements 
in today's world.  The changes required to reorient away from the mission of 
stopping the Soviets at the Fulda Gap to the various sorts of "People's War," 
depressed those who once knew their "trade."  I find the impact of this far 
more serious than what is happening at our service academies. Voltaire said: 
"to kill someone, persuade him that what he does is no value."  Do see George 
Wilson's discussion of Don Vandergriff's current situation in the October 
issue of The National Journal for one man's valiant struggle.

· Page 2:  "…mold our future officer corps into young Marxists?"  No.  You 
are jumping too far.  Finding this objective or result from "sensivity" 
training is no more relevant than using a toothbrush makes those who do this 
Marxists because they also brush their teeth, or drink vodka.

· Page 2: "…inspired the 1960's counter-revolution… ."  Think about the 
various accounts of MACV's Five O'Clock Follies for the role of senior 
Americans in creating this "counter-revolution."  I appreciate that their 
behavior had an "unintended consequence," but the lack of character had other 
rationales.  See Vandergriff's The Path to Victory: Achieving Military 
Excellence for America for a grim depiction of this.

· Page 7: "Sensitivity training…"  has many origins and sources.  I'm not 
sure how many of these you must cite.  A retired Marine and colleague, Roger 
Charles, attended the Psy Ops course at Fort Bragg some years after my 
departure from there.  I intend to task his memory of their instruction.  If 
my efforts survived, this explanation of this behavior modification began 
with Luria's effort to produce Lenin's "new Soviet man."  The auto-critique 
was a component of this thing we call "brainwashing."

· Page 8: "…authentic sources… ."  Stouffer and his colleagues' The American 
Soldier, plus what you have acquired of Luria could/should define the 
problem.  

· Page 27:  "…peer pressure…" is the most powerful and immediate tool to 
transform the attitudes, hence behavior of soldiers forced away from their 
usual habitual information sources or influences.  

· Page 28: "…cognitive dissonance…" dismays and distresses target audiences 
on whom it is imposed.

· Page 113:  "The transformation of American culture envisioned by the 
'cultural Marxists'" is pejorative only where Lenin extended it.  Marx's 
humanist orientation, and his effort to revive the distressing impact of 
early capitalism, was generally positive and widely accepted.  Witness its 
continued existence in England, France and Germany today.  Can this be 
China's future?  Do we want it to be?

· Page 114: "destroy American civilization."  No, inertia is too powerful a 
source.  An enduring disruption of our tranquil society, unconcerned with the 
Frankfort lot, is possible giving the unintended impact of such technologies 
as the Internet.  My personal concern is the application of such tools as a 
modernized "peoples war" using varied chemical WMDs delivered by pick-up 
trucks.

· Page 116: "…destructive criticism… ."  Go to the Five O'Clock Follies for 
a disruption of our society unconnected with the Frankfort lot.  Continuing 
this avoidance of accountability is far more likely to disrupt our society's 
tranquility.

I picked up a book titled the deliberate dumbing down of america during a 
visit to its printer.  The author, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, uses many of 
your sources, from Pavlov to Luria to Wundt to Lewin.  Her alert supplements 
yours, despite her lack of focus on the defense establishment.

An Army major, Joe Ulatoski, established the SERE (?) training for Air Force 
pilots at Stead Air Force Base near Reno, Nevada in early 1963 (?).  He and 
another Army major from the Psychological Warfare department of the Special 
Warfare School at Fort Bragg are important witnesses and evaluators whose 
advice you should solicit.  Both are retired BGs now.  I will alert them to 
your efforts.  I want particularly to hear Joe's appreciation of a difference 
in attitudes and behavior of the pilots who went through his orientation at 
Stead AFB, and those of Korea who had no concept of how they might be treated 
as POWs.

I will have much more to say about her effort and yours.