Grossman's books describe the physiological effects of stress and combat. Some of the responses are also caused by folks not understanding just what has happened to them, and why is their body acting like this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival,_Evasion,_Resistance_a...
High speed driving tends to drive adrenaline levels way up. Police brutality complaints are much higher in the aftermath of high speed pursuits. Yet the tunnel vision and other responses of that kind of driving also affects non-police drivers. We had an incident here in Denver where an ambulance driver t-boned a light rail train. How the heck could someone not see something that's 15 feet tall and 200 feet long? Adrenaline poisoning will do it to you. And I contend that could have been anyone who did that, as well. It takes "innoculation" to learn how your body behaves in these situations, and to do the "right" thing despite what your body wants to do (which in my case is usually puke and soil myself).
While you may feel this to be irrelevant, I can assure you that you aren't quite able to grasp the nuances and evolved thinking behind this type of "performance under stress" training unless you have experienced it firsthand. Being an observer isn't good enough.
It's "brainwashing" only in as much as all other forms of teaching are brainwashing. Which is to say that it is not.
I actually think it is quite relevant. If I'm right then you have been to some extent brainwashed into the thinking that the training is reasonable. Your response makes sense if you had been brainwashed or if you hadn't. Of course this doesn't prove anything either way.
The point is that the proper identification of brainwashing is always going to come from an external observer. To me the process I have heard described of 'breaking someone down and then building them up again' is the definition of brainwashing.
I think where we differ is in our definition of what constitutes "brainwashing".
Read "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society." The author, Dave Grossman, is an Army Ranger and a Psychology professor at West Point. He lays down an argument that most people have a strong, instinctual resistance to killing. In WWI, only about 20% on the front lines even fired their weapons. That rose during WWII and Korea until during Vietnam, it was closer to 95%. He attributes the change to modern training methods which are basically operant conditioning.
(He also has fascinating interviews with veterans about their experiences. But the book sometimes feels like someone's dissertation, and at the end, he tries to make the same claim with violent media, which I don't think holds. Watching something is very different from doing something.)
Citation?
Many people couldn't couldn't surgically cut someone open, too squemish, but after watching it done they could at least think it.
But I think there is a difference to being desensitized to media violence and being desensitized to real violence that happens in front of your face.
I realize this is an uncomfortable theory for many of us who believe we are masters of our environment, but it holds water.
You are right though, there is a difference between media and reality. The problem is that it doesn't manifest until after both situations have occurred. Ergo PTSD.
Post media saturation but pre-real life drama is a very unstable time for individuals, as the likelihood that they will confuse the media outcomes for the real ones is the highest. I think this is essentially Grossman's point, and I don't find it that far fetched.
Your environment affects you, whether you choose to believe it does or not. (Note that this is not to suggest that the same environment affects people in the same way).
That's operant conditioning. If you remove a physical gun and replace it with a virtual gun, perhaps some operant conditioning can take place, but I doubt it will be enough to overcome our disinclination to kill another person. (I know the military actually use FPSes for training in some circumstances - but I think it's used more for communication practice than anything else, and it's used in combination with modern training methods.) The reason I stress virtual versus physical is that you want training to be as close to reality to get the desired behavior.
If you remove participant action completely, such as passively watching a movie, then I think you've lost operant conditioning entirely. Grossman spends much of the book arguing that humans' instinct not to kill other people is so large that we need operant conditioning to overcome it. He submits that the untrained combatant will sometimes literally die instead of firing their weapon. He ignores this argument at the end of the book.
Clearly it isn't, in most cases. But then again, soldiers don't go around arbitrarily killing people either. The fact that the conditioning exists has little to do with whether or not it is exercised.
I think for certain individuals, simply watching the actions of others is enough to alter behaviour. As such, watching continuous murders may indeed be enough to alter behaviour for a select group of outliers in dramatic ways.
The conditioning norm remains subconscious until summoned, which would mean that for most of us, it would never be used. Extremely stressful situations would of course trigger the reaction - and this would fit with the crazed gunman incidents that seem so prevalent these days (historically, gunmen tended to have military experience, interesting side note).
untrained combatant will sometimes literally die instead of firing their weapon
I think he was using historical information to make this observation. It seems obvious to me however that most modern North Americans are not longer subject to this "limitation". Fighting back pirates is certainly a good supporter of this, and seems to lend some support to his point.