Re: Korea - 50 years ago this week, Dec. 13-19

[<Cfbernard@aol.com>]

You all,

The experience of French POWs in Indochina is worth considering.  I will try to find a review of Le Manifeste de Camp # 1 that I wrote several years ago and send it on to you.  The same techniques of self criticism that the VC used to organize the south against us were used on French POWs and I presume ours.  Recall these had their beginnings when Lenin charged Luria with perfecting "The New Soviet Man."  This technique caused old Bolshevics (spelling) to confess they were spies (!) for the British secret service and to be executed in the 30s.  This was also the tool used help convert CKS's troops to attack us in Korea not long after Mao had taken over their country.

ALERT:  The paper below is not the one I want to sent you.  My labels are betraying me!  However, this has some relevance.  The other review will get to you when I find it.

Best regards,

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 accomodates 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.