Brainwashed

In 1953, a group of prisoners of war who had fought against the communist invasion of South Korea were released. They chose - apparently freely - to move to Mao`s China. Among those refusing repatriation were twenty-one American GIs. Their decision sparked alarm in the West: why didn`t they want to come home? What was going on? Soon, people were saying that the POWs` had been `brainwashed`. Was this something new or a phenomenon that has been around for centuries? The belief that it is possible to marshal scientific knowledge to govern someone`s mind gained enormous attention. In an era of Cold War paranoia and experimentation on `altered states`, the idea of brainwashing flourished, appearing in everything from critiques of CIA research on LSD to warnings of corporate groupthink, from visions of automaton assassins to conspiracy theories about `global elites`. Today, brainwashing is almost taken for granted - built into our psychological and political language, rooted in the way we think about minds and societies. How did we get to this point - and why? Psychoanalyst and historian Daniel Pick delves into the mysterious world of brainwashing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from The Manchurian Candidate to ISIS, TV advertising to online algorithms. Mixing fascinating case studies with historical and psychological insights, Brainwashed is a stimulating journey into the mysteries of thought control.