The Strange Story of the BRAINWASHING Manual of 1955
BRAINWASHING
A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics.
PSYCHOPOLITICS—the art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaus, and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of enemy nations through "mental healing."
The Church of Scientology today is happy to quote scholars who criticize anti-cult brainwashing theories.
Yet in 1955 L. Ron Hubbard published a booklet called BRAINWASHING, implying that brainwashing was practiced with some success in several countries.
Did Hubbard believe in brainwashing? In order to answer this question, we need first to study Hubbard's attitude towards Communism.
The booklet was published as a public service by The Church of Scientology.
In The Cossack (1935) the Czarist Duchess of Novgrod is a murderer who ends up as a prostitute (falsely) accused to be a Communist and lynched by a mob in nationalist China, where «the beard-curling cry of "Communist!" was enough to send these peoples into swirling mobs of fiendish activity».
In The Price of a Hat (1936), an American agent says: «Although we hardly approved of Nicholas II as a ruler, we needed a head for the state we thought we could form, and the best marionette we could find would be Nicholas».
In Red Death Over China (1937) pilot John Hampton flies «the only plane Mao possessed».
While initially he works only for money, Hampton experiences a religious conversion of sort - in a temple - and willingly sacrifices his life for the Maoist cause.
Hubbard wrote: «It was not power which Mao and his men craved, but freedom. In their domain the peasants could own their own land a fact which was not equaled in all of China».
«Consider the U.S. support of China’s totalitarian regime headed by Chiang Kai-shek. While we weakly spoke of freeing the Chinese from the yoke of imperialism, we poured huge sums of money and war material into the hands of a government which practiced the very principles we spoke against! When this government finally fell there was no one ready to teach the Chinese the human way of life. [...] Somebody was there with a propaganda aimed directly into the desires of the people who want just a tiny taste of freedom. Russian agents were there» (DianeticAuditor’s Bulletin, July 1951)
In 1949, the book Country of the Blind by U.S. anti-Communist academics George Sylvester Counts and Nucia Perlmutter Lodge accused the Soviet regime of widespread «mind control».
Also in 1949, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four described a similar concept:
«We make the brain perfect before we blow it up [...]. No one whom we bring to his place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean [...]. By the time we had finished with them, [...] there was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they have done and love of Big Brother».
In 1950 Edward Hunter, an OSS and later CIA agent whose cover job was that of reporter, coined the word «brainwashing» in an article for the Miami Daily News.
In 1951, he published BRAINWASHING in Red China.
Hunter claimed to have found the word in Chinese sources (hsi nao) but in fact he created it based on Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In Science of Survival (1951), Hubbard wrote about a form of hypnotism he claimed was practiced by the Soviets:
«There is another form of hypnotism which falls between the surgical operation and straight hypnotism without physical pain. It is a vicious war weapon and may be of considerably more use in conquering a society than the atom bomb. This is no exaggeration. It required dianetic processing to uncover pain-drug-hypnosis. Otherwise, pain-drug-hypnosis was out of sight, unsuspected, and unknown».
In a 1956 lecture, Hubbard called Hunter's text on brainwashing «a fascinating book».
Consistent with his idea that the Chinese Revolution started from legitimate claims and was later infiltrated by the Soviets, Hubbard insisted that Hunter's book confirmed that brainwashing techniques were imported into China by Russian Communists.
Page 10 shows a portrait of Ivan Pavlov and a diagram explaining classical conditioning.
Hubbard praised Hunter for showing «how all of Pavlov's experiments on dogs could be applied to human beings in order to produce a certain given result».
At the Games Congress of 1956, Hubbard also claimed that the secret of brainwashing was revealed in a mysterious «book written by [Ivan] Pavlov for Stalin and which hitherto has never been outside the doors of the Kremlin».
«That book never left the Kremlin. But now I have that book», Hubbard announced.
Page 11 shows a photo of Cal Tech scientist Jack Parsons holding a device.
One of the most controversial portions of Hubbard's biography is his association in 1945-1946 with the Agapé Lodge of the occult organization Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) led by Jack Parsons. ]
Parsons' father-in-law, Burton Ashley Northrup, who worked for U.S. intelligence, investigated Parsons and discovered that he had joined a secret Communist cell in the 1930s.
Hubbard fell in love with Sara Northrup, and the two broke with Parsons and were married on August 10, 1946.
The marriage quickly deteriorated, and Sara found a lover in one of Dianetics' early associates, Miles F. Hollister. After a bitter divorce, Hubbard attributed both his marital difficulties and problems within Dianetics to Communist infiltration and mind control techniques.
Hubbard reported to the FBI that his wife Sara had been subject to Communist mind control techniques and that a Communist cell had tried to infiltrate and destroy Dianetics.
In a March 1951 letter to the FBI, Hubbard listed suspected communists in his organization, including:
On September 4, 1955, Hubbard sent a manuscript to his publisher to be printed on a «hurry-emergency basis».
He wrote: "I need only 2,000 copies for the first run... A paper cover, very cheap. The general appearance should be like an Army training manual."
He added: "This ms. is pretty violent stuff. A copy of it has been sent to the F.B.I. of course and there's no risk in printing it."
BRAINWASHING: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics was released shortly thereafter.
In January 1956, Hubbard withdrew the booklet from circulation, asking for all copies to be returned to Scientology, claiming it was based on «the friendly opinion of the government».
On August 15, 1956, Hubbard told his publisher he was writing a new book on Russian brainwashing since he had «Pavlov's secret ms. that was never before out of the Kremlin», but it was never published.
The Manual claims to be a synthesis of books originating from Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, the chief of Russia's secret police (NKVD).
The booklet opens with a speech Beria allegedly gave to «American students at the Lenin University».
A quote from the Manual:
«It is in the interest of Psychopolitics that a population be told that a hypnotized person will not do anything against his actual will... While this may be true of light, parlor hypnotism, it certainly is not true of commands implanted with the use of electric shock, drugs, or heavy punishment».
The Manual, published as Scientology was starting its campaign against psychiatry, explains that Soviet agents have infiltrated the West, where brainwashing is disseminated through psychiatrists.
In the US, Soviet agents work against American individualism and single out certain religions, including «that terrible monster, the Roman Catholic Church», Christian Science, and Scientology.
Kenneth Goff (1909-1972), a former Communist turned right-wing Christian activist, claimed to have compiled the Manual based on Communist internal documents.
Both a left-wing opponent and a friend of Goff claimed that Goff, rather than Hubbard, wrote the Manual.
Goff's earlier versions of the Manual were undated, and there is no evidence they pre-date the 1955 Scientology publication.
For anti-cultists, it is quite obvious that the Manual is simply a figment of Hubbard's imagination.
Anti-cultist Bent Corydon claimed in 1987 that Hubbard's son Ron DeWolf stated that «Dad wrote every word of it».
DeWolf claimed that after an assistant suggested discrediting psychiatry by connecting it to Communism, «you could hear him [Hubbard] dictating the book».
Hubbard's story, from Operational Bulletin no. 9, 1955:
«Fortuitously, in Phoenix there came into our hands two manuscripts [...] they were left there at the front desk with the request that they be mailed back to their owner (allegedly «Charles Stickley», «supposed to be a professor at Columbia University in New York City»), and we are not sure exactly from whom these came».
No professor Charles Stickley has been traced, in New York or elsewhere.
Hubbard later claimed the mystery was solved when a book called Psychopolitics was found in the Library of Congress. He stated, "It is in German. It was written by a man named Paul Fadkeller [sic]... this book [the Manual] is probably the Russian translation".
However, German philosopher Paul Feldkeller's book shares with the BRAINWASHING Manual only the word «psycho-politik» in the title - and the meaning is not even the same.
Scientology critics such as Stephen Kent claim that the BRAINWASHING booklet is important because it was later used as a manual in order to practice brainwashing within the Church of Scientology.
They claim that Hubbard admitted this in a Technical Bulletin dated 22 July 1956, where he wrote that «we can brainwash faster than the Russian (20 secs to total amnesia against three years to slightly confused loyalty)».
In fact, Hubbard's works denounce brainwashing as something that epitomizes everything that Scientology finds reprehensible in modern psychiatry and should not be practiced.
According to Hubbard, Scientologists know more about psychiatry than psychiatrists and «can» replicate their evil techniques, including brainwashing, but should not do it, otherwise their «moral sense» would be as low as the psychiatrists'.
A second reason for Scientology not to practice brainwashing: it doesn't work.
Hubbard at the Games Lectures, Washington D.C., 1956:
«Brainwashing is not effective. It does not do a job. It's a hoax. The communist can't brainwash anybody. It's one of these propaganda weapons... there is practically not a person in this room that would be permanently harmed by brainwashing except as it related to being starved and kept under conditions of duress.»
Both Hubbard and Goff stated that they wrote or dictated the text, but they claimed to work on the basis of Communist sources available to them.
Arguments against Hubbard's authorship: the style is somewhat different from his known writings, and his insistence on the easily disprovable Feldkeller book as a source is strange.
Arguments for Goff's authorship: his friends insisted he compiled it, and he was describing Soviet «conditioning» in similar terms before 1955.
An alternative scenario is that a governmental agency (other than the FBI, possibly the CIA) prepared one or more manuscripts derived from a number of sources: Soviet and American Communist tracts, textbooks on psychopolitics, and Hunter's writings.
The agency then forwarded the manual, more or less anonymously, to the Church of Scientology, and possibly to Goff's group and others.
Whoever originated it, the Manual campaign was successful. The booklet was reprinted in dozens of editions by right-wing organizations and kept in print to this very day.
After the Cold War, right-wing extremists claimed that the U.S. Government, rather than the Soviets, was now brainwashing its citizens to enforce a New World Order.
This was claimed by Operation Vampire Killer 2000, a booklet by Jack McLamb which reprinted portions of the Manual and inspired the terrorist of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, Timothy McVeigh.