One victim to whom the author talked had been so subject to Communist brain-changing that he thought himself a real Communist even though he had been reared a Catholic. He was completely convinced of the Communist cause and of his own life and place in that cause after the brain-washing had been completed. Unfortunately for Communism, the man got into serious sexual difficulties, difficulties of a kind which any American psychiatrist would recognize as potentially devastating.
As a result of his sexual frustrations he suffered a mild equivalent of the medically recognized phenomenon of the schizophrenic break—that terrible moment of false enlightenment in which the psychotic personality cuts loose with a truth of his own and shuts off most or all communication with normal people—with the consequence that he was walking along Nanking Road in Shanghai, a normal Communist in one instant of time and (as he put it to the author) in a millionth of a second he suddenly realized he was a Catholic, an anti-Communist, the enemy of every man, woman and child in sight—and at war with his entire environment. As this writer understood it, the poor man, though adjusted to the Communist environment after brain-washing, happened to go crazy—crazy enough to come back to our side.
Who can say which is sane, which insane? When two social and cultural systems are completely at odds with one another it may be impossible to be "normal" in both of them.
Scientifically the Chinese process of personality transformation lacked some of the pharmaceutical features apparent in the Western Communist conversions for purposes of confession. It appears to be a combination of audacious practical experimentation with well-known procedures from textbooks of Pavlovian psychology. It is, of course, an interesting scientific question to ask one's self: could Communist psychological researchers do enough psychological research to understand their own difficulties and to de-Communize themselves in the very act of seeking better psychological weapons for Communism? If the people in charge of Communist psychological techniques were scientists, as American psychologists generally are, there might be a real point of discussion. Unfortunately, most of them appear to be artists, believers, and fanatics. The history of the fanatical religions which have inflamed and ripped so much of mankind across the centuries is not such as to suggest that Communism will de-Communize itself by becoming more Communistic or more scientific.
Logically considered, the United States remains the largest extant revolutionary experiment in the world—the first immense human community which survives without profound dogma or profound hatred and which attempts to make short-range, practical, and warm-hearted (though ideologically superficial) concurrence the foundation for a political and industrial civilization. If the United States wins a few more wars it may be that the rest of mankind will be persuaded that our kind of practicality is not only humanly preferable, but scientifically more defensible than the philosophies of competing civilizations. It seems unlikely that Communist research can outstrip us in the propaganda field so far as the race is run in purely scientific terms; artistically and gadget-wise the Communists are just as inventive as we are and often more enthusiastic.
Private PsyWar and Covert Techniques.
On the other side of the coin, it is very hopeful to note that the many and dangerous techniques developed by OSS for covert propaganda, some of which were applied with considerable success in Europe, have not been introduced into domestic U.S. politics, commercial competition, or other forms of private life. After each war there is often a danger that the coarsening of a culture by the war will lead to the application of wartime skills to peacetime situations. This was emphatically not the case in the Presidential campaigns of 1948 and 1952, even though persons of rich PsyWar experience in World War II were on the staffs of both Stevenson and Eisenhower.
It is often forgotten that some of the deadliest and most effective revolutionary enterprises in the nineteenth century were undertaken without the consent or assistance of the existing governments. Karl Marx was certainly not an invention of Lord Palmerston. Bakunin did not operate out of the French Foreign Office.
In the postwar discussion of USA-Communist rivalry, recommendations were often made on the U.S. side that we should counter Soviet covert operations with our own covert operations against the USSR. What has been forgotten in this context is the fact that such operations have been made illegal and dangerous under United States law. Under Federal law as it exists today no Underground Railway could be developed to assist Soviet escapers in the way that Negro slaves were relayed across the Free States to Canada in the years before Emancipation. One of the chief blocks to U.S. covert operations is the immense growth in all directions of the power, authority, and responsibility of the Federal Government; this growth makes it almost impossible to wage revolutionary or conspiratorial operations from U.S. territory without the prior approval of U.S. authorities—which the authorities, under traditional international law, cannot give and cannot afford to give.
It would seem desirable, if the Cold War situation persists over a long period of time, for Americans to reexamine the restraints which they have placed upon their own citizens and to attempt a revision of the laws which would permit pro-American secret activities to be launched without permitting anti-American activities of the same kind to be carried on. One immediately comes to the conundrum:[63]