Brainwashing — a Political WeaponHow much further has man gone?
In 1927 or 1928 he developed a political weapon called “brainwashing.” A Russian by the name of Pavlov, who had been experimenting with the reactions and conditioning of dogs, was brought to the Kremlin by Stalin. He was put in a separate room and was asked to write everything he knew concerning the conditioning and actions of animals as it might apply to the human being. He wrote a 400-page manuscript which since that day has never left the Kremlin.
Immediately after that in 1928 we saw the astonishing factor of cabinet ministers and Russian officials confessing to the most outrageous crimes. These men walked up before the bar of justice and at their own trials condemned themselves glibly.
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Brainwashing is child’s play. One shouldn’t be very worried about brainwashing. Some twenty per cent of the soldiers who are captured in battle will crack up in prison camps and brainwashing does not violate this percentage. The man who invented it and the people who have used it are not sufficiently acquainted with the mind in order to make it very effective. An inspection of brainwashing cases demonstrates that it worked only occasionally.
What Brainwashing Is
Brainwashing is a very simple mechanism. One gets a person to agree that something might be a certain way and then drives him by introverting him and through self-criticism to the possibility that it is that way. Only then does a man believe that the erroneous fact is a truth. By a gradient scale of hammering, pounding and torture, brainwashers are able to make people believe that these people saw and did things which they never did do. But its effectiveness is minor as Russia does not know enough about the human mind.
Nevertheless, Pavlov himself directing the use of his original manuscript was certainly effective on the top Russian officials in those treason trials that shocked the world in 1928. These men never did anything that they admitted to having done. They simply had been conditioned into believing they had.
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Brainwashing is not an effective weapon, but it could be worked on, developed and with the information about the mind denied to the rest of the human race and kept secret, brainwashing could be made to be effective.
If that happened society could be made into slaves.
Knowledge about the Mind Must Not Be Kept Secret
Anything which is known about the mind and has benefited human beings, must be permitted to exist in public view. It must be possible for anyone to lay his hands on how to undo such things as brainwashing. Therefore there must never be a restriction of technologies concerning the human mind. These must never be buried. There must never be a hierarchy in some universities that dictates the only technique that may be used or invalidates the abilities of people who can work in the field of the mind.
It would be a very dangerous thing to the human race if such a group existed. Why? Because we have this thing called brainwashing and because it became a war weapon.
How to Undo Brainwashing
How does one undo brainwashing? One simply brings the person up to present time. He is stuck in time — the time he was “brainwashed.” He is thrust into the past. He is completely introverted and all one has to do is to extrovert him, let him see where he is, how he is and what he is doing and brainwashing desensitizes. It is not even a problem to the Scientologist. We have undone many cases who have been brainwashed with success, but it is a problem to the governments of the world. Governments fear that if we go into the next war and the enemy captures many of our troops, throws them into prison camps and brainwashes them, they will then so derange and disarrange and change these soldiers’ loyalties that these men will return to their own country as saboteurs and provocateurs. It worries governments as this is a dreadful thing, for they depend on loyalty and the fact that it might be possible to change the loyalties of individuals worries governments.
Any Scientologist with an E-Meter could tell if somebody’s loyalty has been changed.5 That is not even a problem, but it is a problem of the governments and they are working in their own way trying to solve that problem. However, they don’t seem to be making much progress.
The government itself is threatened by the weapon called brainwashing.
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Here is a weapon which is no good. It has not proven very useful. It is simply dangerous and it worries people.But it is a modern scientific weapon and its future history can only be dismal because the only thing it can do is to shake the foundations of the governments which employ it. Russia must have various organizations posting guards every night around its leaders to make sure that nobody slips in and brainwashes them. How can one guarantee their loyalty to Russia?
If one suspects that one of one’s associates has been brainwashed, the best thing to do is to get hold of a Scientologist for he can handle the matter with ease. But the real trouble is that few people have the skill to detect the fact and then fewer still have the ability or technology to undo it. Because of this it becomes a terrible weapon.
It takes a very unsettled, unstable neurotic personality to succumb to brainwashing. He has to be mad already because Pavlov never did find out how to drive a really sane man insane. He merely found out how to utilize incipient madness.[Hubbard, L. R. (1957). All About Radiation by A Nuclear Physicist and a Medical Doctor. Los Angeles: Bridge Publications.]