The True Story of Brainwashing and How It Shaped America

The “true story of brainwashing?” You’re so screwed!

It’s hard to talk about the greatest crises of our world when you cannot convince a know-it-all american their modern living is built upon a lie incomprehensible to ordinary minds.

We just went through these last “fake news conspiracy” years with the outcome of convincing yourselves that all conspiracies are crazy talk and the conventional narratives capture truth.

There is a conspiracy against your natural destinies, and thought control is more than brain washing.

Screwing with your mind has modernized, these ideas of “brainwashing” are antiquated and miss all practical tells.

As one of the people "who lost China", Linebarger had some pointed post-mortems in the 1954 Edition of his Psychological Warfare.

His reaction to "how could anyone go communist?" was not to say "brainwashing" (an area in which he presumably had professional expertise), but to say "because our counter-offer needs to be better":

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pa...

> Sir Henry Gurney['s] approach to the problem of confronting Communism was hopelessly sane. The Communists were offering young Chinese the intoxication of craziness, of a mad and heroic righteousness to justify the misspending of their lives. Sir Henry's answer was decency, goodness, security, prosperity, authority, liberty under law. He offered everything except glamor, terror, inspiration, and romance—

> Everything except the chance to join the British side.

> What kind of British side?

> A British side which, like the Communist side, would welcome the makers of the future, the builders of the next civilization, the arbiters of history.

> The Communists have presented a high bid against the U.S. and Britain as well as the other Western powers. We have not yet overbid them. The high bid is the opportunity to join, to belong, really to be equal, not just legally equal, and, above everything, to share, to struggle, and to work under conditions of heroism for a common goal.

For context, in 1954 the US Military had just started to get serious about desegregation, via implementing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9981 (while US society, OTOH...)

[Edit: upon reflection, in modern terms, Linebarger's characterisation of the Brit offer would be: We Brits shall embody power, you Malayasians will crave it.

Maybe there are better dynamics available than that of the Sith?

A musical lagniappe:

http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0510/jfk/01_-_Sing_Along_With_J...

http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0510/jfk/05_-_Sing_Along_With_J... ]