"No Rule of Dog-Eat-Dog"

Four days after fighting erupted in what would eventually be known as the Korean War, a strange broadcast appeared over the radio in Seoul.

It featured the voice of an American officer, captured only 48 hours earlier.

It said:

"Dear friends, we, all prisoners, solidly appeal to you as follows: the armed intervention in Korean internal affairs is quite a barbaristic [sic] aggressive action to protect the benefit of the capitalist monopolists of the U.S.A. Let us fight for right against wrong, bravely opposing to be mobilized into such a war against Russia!"

That was the first indication that something strange was going on.

After the war, the U.S. Army Medical Corps discovered something unsettling: American soldiers were returning home as converted communists, praising their captors.

The statistics got worse as the investigation continued. Over three years of war, there were 7,190 American captives - not one escaped. Instead, fully one-third collaborated in some way with the enemy. One out of every three - 2,730 - died in captivity, a rate far worse than any other war.

The Medical Corps found that neither torture nor lack of food or medical care were the cause of the American's difficulties. Instead, they pointed to morale collapse.

"They refused to obey their own officers, cursing and even striking them, buying into their captors propaganda that capitalistic rank no longer existed. On forced marches from one prison camp to another, able-bodied men would refuse to lift the stretchers of the wounded. The strong regularly took food from the weak, and the sick were ignored . . . or worse."

According to J.A.C. Brown, the soldiers complied with their captors for various reasons. About 13% gave in quickly, lacking "the moral stamina to resist even slight pressure," and surrendered "in as short a time as thirty-five minutes of not very intensive questioning."

Some were opportunists, "who yielded for strictly personal and selfish reasons and would inform, make broadcasts, or sign petitions for even slight benefits like freedom to walk outside the camp, cigarettes, or an extra egg."

Approximately 75% chose the path of least resistance, complying outwardly by making relatively harmless broadcasts, signing petitions, and passively cooperating with indoctrination programs without doing anything obviously traitorous. The smallest group consisted of those who truly accepted and adopted Communist beliefs.

About 13% of the Americans resisted any attempts at indoctrination, roughly the same percentage as those who quickly collaborated. Many of these resisters had pre-existing tendencies to resist authority (and often had troubled records within the Army).

However, these outcomes were not universal. Contrast the experience of the Americans with that of Turkish soldiers.

The Turks were the third most numerous group represented in Chinese captivity. Of the 229 captured, half were already wounded - but none died in prison. "Hardly a single one" was guilty of even minor collaboration.

In a camp with 110 Turkish prisoners and 1500-1800 Americans, the Americans lost 400-800 men.

The Turks lost none.

By all accounts, the Turkish soldiers had been exemplary at both resisting Chinese indoctrination attempts and at surviving the grueling conditions of the camps.

Why? In contrast to the Americans, the Turks "deliberately kept morale high" - and this seemed to make all the difference.

They did so with intense discipline, in-group feeling, and an unbroken chain of command. The Chinese very deliberately sought to undermine American group cohesion, removing leaders from their groups or turning officers and enlisted men against each other; the Turks resisted these attempts.

One Turkish officer recounted:

"I told the Chinese commander of the camp that I was in charge of my group. If he wanted anything done, he was to come to me, and I would see that it was done. If he removed me, the responsibility would fall not on him but on the man next below me, and after that on the man below him. And so on, down thru the ranks, until there were only two privates left. Then the senior private would be in charge. They could kill us, I told him, but they couldn't make us do what we didn't want to do. Discipline was our salvation, and we all knew it. If a Turk had questioned an order from his superior to share his food or lift a [stretcher], the way I understand some of [the Americans] did, he would literally have had his teeth knocked in. Not by his superior, either, but by the Turk nearest to him."

The Chinese certainly made attempts to indoctrinate the Turks, but the Turks simply made fun of them. When the Chinese brought in the English leader of the National Assembly of Women as an interpreter she "was presented with an insulting document telling her (in effect) to go elsewhere with her left-wing doctrines."

These (seemingly) small acts of deviance leveraged humor as a form of resistance. As Robert Lifton details in Thought Reform and The Psychology of Totalism:

"Since a prisoner could never fully avoid participation, the next best form of resistance was to adopt a neutralizing attitude, one which deflated rather than contested, and which thereby took the sting out of the assaults...A show of humor had the effect of breaking the general tension and dissipating the anxiety and guilt which hung heavy in the environment...Humor was a way to express a tone contrary to thought reform's self-righteousness, an implication that the intense doings of the moment could be made fun of because they were merely a speck on the great human canvas."

Perhaps most importantly, the Turks cared for one another, prioritizing the group over the individual:

"When a Turk got sick, the rest nursed him to health. If he was ordered to the hospital, two well Turks went along to minister to him hand and foot and to carry him back to the compound when he was discharged. At mealtime two Turks were dispatched to carry the food back, and it was divided equally down to the last morsel. There was no hogging, no rule of dog eat dog, not ever."

The Turks kept morale up in other ways. For example, they engaged in lively wrestling matches, a form of competition which kept them strong (and, we must imagine, mentally stimulated). These lengthy conflicts actually had the effect of making the Chinese fear them. Compare this to Ernest Shackleton’s insistence that his men, trapped in the arctic without hope of rescue, maintain “normalcy” by putting on plays, talent shows, and other attempts at entertainment. As Robert Greene has written, “when Shackleton found himself responsible for the lives of so many men in such desperate circumstances, he understood what would spell the difference between life or death: the men’s attitude.”

In the end, what mattered most in resisting indoctrination was not some secret tactic, or otherworldly levels of toughness or personal grit. Instead, it was the strength found within the group.

Americans have a long cultural history of prioritizing individual strength and ability. We lionize, with good reason, those able to make their own way. In situations of extreme hardship, however, the capabilities of any individual are overwhelmed. The dedicated efforts of those who wish to overthrow our sense of self are incredibly difficult to resist alone. When we gain strength from our sense of belonging, when we’re able to “reality check” our mental state against those of our peers, when we support and lift one another up, we find ourselves capable of more than we imagined.

Even the strongest individuals can be coerced. But, as Brown quotes one American officer, "there is no way of compelling a group, through methods of mass psychological pressure, to do something it says firmly it won't do. Mass resistance in that case always wins."

Yours,

-d

P.S. I did a piss-poor job of citing my quotes in this essay, but they all come from these sources:

THE WRESTLING TURKS AND AMERICAN MILITARY MORALE IN THE KOREAN WAR

Remembering the Korean War and the bonds between U.S. and Turkish soldiers

Thought Reform and The Psychology of Totalism. Robert Jay Lifton

The Manipulated Mind. Denise Winn

Techniques of Persuasion. J.A.C. Brown

Brainwashing. Kathleen Taylor

Something I'm Reading:

Studying Yourself.

"To study ourselves, we must be constantly trying to populate an ever-evolving 2x2 matrix with information: