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In September 1950, roughly three months after the start of the Korean War, the Miami News published an article by Edward Hunter titled " 'Brain-Washing' Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party." Hunter, a CIA-supported journalist and eventual editor of the psychological warfare journal Tactics, would go on to publish two books on the subject: Brain-Washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men's Minds (1951) and Brainwashing: The Story of Men Who Defied It (1956).' Hunter initially conceived of brainwashing to account for the mass "reeducation" of civilians in Maoist China. Largely on the basis of interviews with Chi Sze-chen, a recent graduate of North China People's Revolutionary University, Hunter claimed to have unearthed a complex system of ideological indoctrination. The system was notable not so much for its scathing anti-American ethos as for its coercive methodology, which combined mind-numbing repetition with rewards and punishments to force a wholesale shift in worldview. This approach, Hunter explains, was "psychological warfare on a scale incalculably more immense than any militarist of the past has ever envisaged." Still, at this early juncture in its history, brainwashing had not yet come to seem the nightmare of total mental control into which it would soon be transformed. It was rather a mix of familiar techniques for coercion, on the one hand, and pedagogy, on the other-a tool "for political indoctrination" in which the "medium for this learning is propaganda, and propaganda is applied to everyone. . . . Even the word ['learning'], used this way, is a propaganda term."2 If this system was innovative, what made it so was the scale of the operation and the ruthlessness of its proponents, who aimed for nothing less than the mental transformation of an entire continent.
Five years later, however, brainwashing had grown into something far more bizarre and terrifying. By the time of his 1956 account (this one published not by Vanguard but by the large New York house Farrar, Straus and Cudahy), Hunter would describe it as the stuff of science fiction, "some form of mass hypnosis" capable of fostering "unthinking discipline and robotlike enslavement." A mysterious mix of oriental mystery and Soviet rationality, the technique now seemed "like witchcraft, with its incantations, trances, poisons, and potions, with...