May 4-May 12, 1973
A trip to New York City, to see what light may be thrown by recent returnees from Vietnam upon a kind of psychological warfare peculiar to the 20th century.
The spring sun illuminates the grass in Central Park and the frail green of the city's trees—but it can hardly be said that the world political situation receives enough clarification. In conversation with a British editor (who has made special studies of Southeast Asia, and who through the 60's paid visits to Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore) we come to agree that democracies in general are more vulnerable than one might have thought to indirect propaganda; and that in America itself, credulity has not declined, but seems rather on the increase. We note that in the germ-warfare campaign of the early 50's in Korea, the North Koreans brought in Communist observers to hear the confessions of tortured and brainwashed American and British soldiers. These confessions were then broadcast to the world at large. None of the returned men, once freed, supported the germ-warfare accusation. It had all been for external (non-American) consumption.
Ten years later the Communists seem to be playing for heavier stakes. The North Vietnamese bring in non-Communist United States observers to listen to rehearsed statements extracted from U.S. prisoners, aiming for publicity inside the United States. They succeed in making fools of numerous Americans, and indirectly, via the media, hundreds of others. Ramsey Clark can describe the “Zoo” without knowing what it is. A Navy flyer complains that while journalists are being duped, he himself is being tortured. And so on.
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As the bus crawls down Fifth Avenue this May morning, I am trying to get through a sheaf of reports of news conferences with returned POW's. It is a muffled experience, like deserting the real world with its live noises—the grinding of the bus, the voices from the nearby seats, the sirens—for some subterranean country where prisoners are kept in darkened isolated cells, in caves, chained up in bunkers, once or twice buried up to their necks in the ground.
The preliminary action has had a familiar American ring. With the help of 2,000 doctors, nurses, and administrative personnel, with big Medevac planes, with blue Air Force ambulances, with “comfort” kits and long-distance telephone calls, the returnees are evacuated and turned over to public-relations representatives appointed by the Pentagon (themselves carefully briefed in all possible sensitivity and tact). The prisoners, smiling and silent at first, begin to speak—returning in memory to their imprisonment, but with a curious modesty often characteristic of physically strong and active men. Their stories vary according to the location of their capture and imprisonment—North or South; according to their attitude to North Vietnamese demands; according to their rank. But it is clear at last how bad their treatment was. For in spite of heavily propagandized interviews—arranged in Hanoi, and attended by a number of idealistic Americans, during which interviews the beleaguered pilots give statements to the effect that they are quite happy and well-treated, that they support the North Vietnamese people's democracy, that they only want the war to end—the truth, only slowly apparent, is that a large number of them, perhaps 80 per cent, were tortured until they “broke.” Some observers at press conferences—for instance Telford Taylor at the International Club in Hanoi on January 10 of this year—see tense bewildered men who stand blinking in the glare of floodlights, who give names and ranks and turn away. Taylor expresses to the North Vietnamese his disapproval of this “exhibition,” and later in another area he talks to a prisoner who explains that he (Taylor) is now in the “Zoo,” that is, a section where a group of men is held permanently so that they can be available to foreign observers.
Behind the Zoo's façade lies a horror story of coercion. The torture of the “ropes” is described frequently—trussing the body so tightly that the arms and legs begin to turn numb and black, and then administering beatings in this position. As one POW, Colonel Guttersen, attests: “I think when we demonstrate it you will realize that . . . a simple piece of rope like this will do the job adequately.” Added variants are iron ankle clamps drawn tighter and tighter until they cut into the nerves; drawing the body into a ball so that the toes are almost in the mouth, as well as hanging and swinging in this position; punctured lungs, broken limbs and ribs; not to mention interrogation after periods without water, without sleep, or with drugs. There is, of course, a point beyond which a normal man cannot resist, and gives in to all demands.
“I've been broken,” Navy Captain James Mulligan admits, “I think everyone here has been broken. We went through agony again and again.” Commander Richard Stratton shows scars on his legs and tells of being forced at gunpoint to appear at a news conference on January 5, 1967. Marine Lieutenant Colonel John Howard Dunn ponders that he thought himself a “superman.” “However, I found out they were clever, using a high level of pain over a long period.” Air Force Captain Joseph Milligan, chained in a ball and left for days on an earth floor, saw his wounds fester and was grateful to have them eaten by maggots. Michael Benge, former employee of the Agency for International Development, tells of dysentery and beriberi, of falling hair and teeth, of an operation with a rusty razor blade, of two missionaries who were his friends, dying for lack of medical care. The power of resistance alone is stressed in all these stories. “The only weapons we had,” claims Colonel Lewis Shattuck, “were our bodies and our pain.”
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The parallel between the treatment of captured POW's in Vietnam and those captured in North Korea is inescapable. During the Korean conflict, 1,600,000 Americans served with the UN troops, and prisoners taken are spread among a score of camps, camps often reached by desperate marches through knee-deep snow, the wounded jolting along in rough carts. Survivors give their prisons names like “Pak's Palace” (supervised by a character called “Dirty-Pictures Wong”) and “Death Valley”—labels as famous then as today's “Zoo” and “Hanoi Hilton.” In Korea the UN holds thousands of prisoners in its compounds (130,000 Koreans and 20,000 Chinese on Koje Island alone) and these, by refusing to be expatriated, complicate the truce attempts in the summer of 1951. In Camp Number 2, 12,440 of the 16,978 Chinese prisoners sign petitions in blood saying they will kill themselves rather than return to China. While the Russians are using American POW's as hostages, and while the Indian government is trying to arrange compromises—with apparent agreement with Peking and Pyongyang (this is arbitrarily rejected by Vyshinsky)—the POW camps are the scene of bitter anti-Communist struggles. At least 3,000 tattoo themselves with the slogan “oppose communism—resist Russia.”
Probably as a result of embarrassment at such a loss of face, the Soviet press and radio spring into a compensatory propaganda campaign, and try to convince the world that the U.S. army has been waging war with bacteria. Pak Heung Yung (later executed) makes the disclosure in February 1952. Yuri Rastvorov, who later defects from the Soviet mission in Tokyo, recalls Moscow's order that the mission collect from the Japanese Communist party all possible evidence that the U.S. is planning to start a germ-war offensive:
I could not help laughing; even my chiefs found various items hard to swallow. One charge was that the U.S. Army had been purchasing Japanese corpses which were to be shipped to an American hospital in the center of Tokyo for experiments in extracting bacteria.
While the campaign gets going in the Far East, others in Europe—Ilya Ehrenburg, Pierre Joliot-Curie, Dennis Pritt—call meetings against the “bestial Americans.” Pravda follows up with daily bulletins. And while the Russians are rejecting the “neutral investigation” demanded by the UN, confessions of guilt from imprisoned Americans begin to be made public—for instance those of Colonel Frank H. Schwable and Corporal Batchelor.
After about a year it is revealed that thousands of U.S. prisoners have been put through an intensive screening process disguised as normal interrogation. The small number of those who show character defects or weaknesses have been subjected to various intense pressures, i.e., torture. The basic idea of confession and the techniques worked out for extracting it were developed in Russia, but while much of the interrogation in Korea is carried out by Soviet specialists, there are also Chinese interrogators trained in Soviet-operated schools in Peking. It seems that a certain repetitive technique (which may originally have been associated with a custom traditional to China of reciting texts and principles), perfected by Mao's ssu hsiang kai tsao—that is, “transformation-of-thoughts” program—has also been in use. Some of the Korean returnees can only make their declarations with the precision of phonograph records, and if interrupted have to go back and begin at the beginning. The word “brainwash” is heard for the first time in the West.
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In an apartment that is the top half of one of those well-kept brownstones not far from the river on East 66th Street I meet a man in khaki uniform, tall, dignified-looking, calm-featured, silver-haired. This is Brigadier General Ernest Reid, Jr., who as a young marine made the Inchon landing on September 15, 1950. “It was my first actual combat, not so very different from maneuvers, except when it got to eyeball-to-eyeball fighting. . . .” He grimaces. “I was captured on a convoy action after the Chinese entered the war. It was, I think, November 28 when we were driving north and trying to push the Chinese back. The word was to forge ahead at all costs. Anyway, the convoy got cut in half while we were still short of the objective. We fought in fact until we had no ammunition left. Then we agreed to surrender the able-bodied of this mixed group if the wounded could be returned.”
I ask how he felt when surrender became inevitable. “How did I feel? I'd been prepared to be killed or wounded, but not to be captured.” He projects a classic military determination. “It was a shock; for a Marine that kind of defeat is unheard of. The Chinese respected us, we were never beaten, for instance, we had the same food they did—but we had to walk in sub-zero weather, many of us with wounds and sore feet. When we got to the camp the interrogation started. There would be questions as to origin, is your father a millionaire, et cetera. This always led to discussions of American corruption.” Because he was not a pilot, and at that time only a junior officer, he was not tortured or put under too much pressure. “The pilots and senior officers were put through the whole routine,” he adds. “They were stripped and put nude in the snow, then brought in to be revived and questioned—then put in the snow again. We called it the ‘hot and cold routine.’ For the most part the Koreans were more brutal than the Chinese.” (Harrison Salisbury, writing in 1972, notes that North Korea is still more isolated from the Western world than all other countries, not excepting Albania, that here Kim Il-Sung stares down from every point, that the media regularly accuse Americans of the most horrendous atrocities, that during his stay he could not even get the chairman of a factory committee to say how many people lived in her district!)
General Reid describes the cold of that 1950-51 winter, the miserable saltless sorghum with an occasional piece of seaweed. “Most of us got rickets and beriberi. Then there were long boring propaganda lectures . . . we soon got to know the various Western collaborators.” The name of Wilfred Burchett comes up, the Australian journalist who is supposed to have acted as an interrogator in Korea. “We were given the New York Daily Worker and the Peking papers. And of course there were books written by Wilfred Burchett, and Felix Greene and Anna Louise Strong . . . yes, I met men who'd been questioned by Burchett. He'd say, ‘You're the aggressor,’ and so on. Of course he wouldn't do the torturing, he'd leave it to others. After that came the germ-warfare campaign. Next to the camp they set up an exhibition, of pictures of dead animals supposedly dropped from airplanes with germs in them, foxes, rats, et cetera.”
I ask how it appeared to them. “It seemed laughable to us, it was so far out it didn't make sense. There were pieces of metal, for instance, supposedly from the containers they found; these might have been got anywhere. Among ourselves we thought they'd done it to make the villagers go on a rat hunt and clean up their huts, in this way killing two birds with one stone. . . . One senior officer, now Lieutenant General Thrash, was kept in solitary for a year while they tried to get a confession from him. They kept him half-frozen without exercise and gave him hour after hour of interrogation. Yes, later I met a man who'd begin to cry after he'd had a few drinks, and describe how he confessed. They sent him to Panmunjom. had him photographed, just like they did with the ‘broken’ POW's in Vietnam. He'd repeat over and over in an agonized way how they'd made him do it.” (The charge of germ warfare isn't to die with the end of the Korean war. In June 1964 the New York Times reports Fidel Castro claiming something similar, but “the rain has prevented the gathering of samples.” And in Australia a phony story of “nerve gas” used in the Vietnam war is circulated in 1968 by a professor of microbiology at the University of Melbourne.)
The apartment has yellow curtains and the sun streams in onto graceful furniture and a piano with sheet music—Ravel and Chopin. “This is a friend's apartment,” the general says as if in apology, “I'm only here for the weekend.” It all seems a long way from the banks of the Yalu, from those crude huts serving as brainwashing clinics, where indoctrinators worked in relays over exhausted prisoners. “If I learned anything in Korea it was not to condemn prisoners who ‘confess.’ But there's something more important. Its that however ridiculous this indefatigable Communist effort seems to us, we Americans tend to underestimate it. . . . We may be the most advanced nation technologically, but we are also the most politically naive.”
Although the general is in uniform, it is hard in this white and gold Manhattan apartment to consider the reality of American defense; especially defense in some future time when the slow but sure falling behind the Soviet Union—not to mention racial trouble in the army and navy, acts of sabotage, anti-war sentiment, the tenfold rise in absenteeism, desertion—should have had its effect. I ask about all this. “Yes, we have suffered a decline in loyalty and faith,” the general says with a slight drop in his voice. “In case of war, Americans I believe will rally, but will it be too late? People, many of them, don't want to wear uniforms any longer . . . to walk onto some U.S. campuses with a uniform on, is as much as your life is worth.”
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As there is an ideological link between the treatment of Korean war POW's and that of Vietnam POW's, so there is a historical link between this treatment and the setup of the Stalinist trials in the 30's in Russia (and the East European trials in the 50's). The trials of the 30's have a specific internal purpose; all dissent is to be stifled and party power is to be consolidated by a brutal repression which can immobilize the opposition. At the same time large propaganda needs are to be served; Trotsky is to be discredited, and the capitalist West is to be seen as attempting to corrupt his followers and recruit them for espionage. In Korea the propaganda demonstrations are planned to center around the germ-warfare campaign; and in Vietnam around filmed and televised news conferences and the War Crimes Tribunal in Sweden. In both cases the “bestiality” of Americans is to be publicized and beamed around the world, especially to Third World countries. To accomplish this end, extensive torture (of the kind which typified the Stalin era) is used.
One of the ironies to emerge from history is that while a Marxist would disclaim “physical and mental torture” as part of the old, sick capitalist world, and while torture was officially outlawed in Russia in 1801 under Alexander I, it later was revived under Stalin. This was in 1937 (officially confirmed in 1939 by a special coded authorization sent out from the Central Committee). Nor can the architects of the Revolution, Marx included, completely dissociate themselves from this revival. As Edmund Wilson points out in To the Finland Station, Marxism is future-oriented; to arrive at that “future” the Communist “must be cruel and repressive just as the capitalist has been; he, too, must do violence to that common humanity—it is a serious misrepresentation of Marx to minimize the sadistic element in his writing.” Lenin is ready to support “axes,” “bombs,” “boiling water,” “shooting on the spot,” and “wholesale arrest.” His ready acceptance of injustices is a reminder that in essence the great confession trials are only an extension of that “trial by the street” which he believes has the spirit of life itself. Trotsky is less relentless, but he too accepts the necessity of “barbarous methods to combat barbarism.” It is upon the declared powers of Lenin and Trotsky that Stalin is to build a fortress-like state in which all human wavering and uncertainty is to be banished. “What mercy should be shown,” Bertram Wolfe asks in Marxism—100 Years in the Life of A Doctrine, “to men who stood in the way of History and opposed her will. . .?” By 1937 it is no longer even considered necessary to keep up pretenses for the sake of the non-Communist world, whose innocence party propagandists can now count on.
“Never mind,” Stalin comments when it is suggested during the great show trials that Western public opinion may be alienated, “they'll swallow it.”
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I have an early morning appointment at the Roosevelt Hotel with a POW returned from Vietnam. Inside the lobby is the well-known U.S. hotel atmosphere—space, impersonality, neutral furniture. Up in the elevator to a small sitting room dwarfed by a huge TV set where I am joined by a stocky man in sport shirt and slacks with blue, rather penetrating eyes and hair that is almost white. This is Colonel (formerly Captain) Kenneth North. He comments that he is ambivalent—i.e., anxious to talk about his experiences, but also anxious to get away from them; in fact he wants to leave for Cape Cod.
He says that he was shot down by anti-aircraft fire on August 1, 1966; and while the muffled city noises come in through the heavy curtains he begins to describe that day. “It was a very quiet afternoon and I was looking down on the delta, onto acres of rice paddies. When the plane was hit I thought ‘this is it’ but headed north into the mountains, deciding to stay with the plane, hoping I'd get away from the populated areas. But I landed in the jungle and although I was in radio contact for two hours the North Vietnamese caught up with me, probably saw my ‘chute and followed that. They were armed village militia. One had a machete and he came straight for me, but another one intervened. In fact, there was a fight.” He grins—“You can guess who I was rooting for”—then goes on. “They tied my arms and walked me two hours or so to the village—a pretty primitive village, no power, no water—and took me to the chief. I was treated very well, they seemed more curious than hostile, gave me food and a bath, and let me sleep under a mosquito net. There was no rock-throwing or beating with sticks . . . in fact with a little luck I felt I might have won them over, and we might all have struck south together.” He laughs. “In the morning things got worse. They took me to a militia camp on the outskirts of Yen Bai where I was interrogated by an English-speaking man looking like a college English professor, you know, civilian clothes, thick glasses, certainly no laborer. He wanted me to tell where I came from, what the target was, et cetera, et cetera. They tied me up with wire.” Had he been frightened? “Not so much frightened as despairing. In those initial days we lost a lot of men, though we know any number got to the ground alive.” He pauses. “Most likely some were tortured to death.
“The interrogator left after a while, abandoning me to the others. This was the pattern, like he'd say ‘You force me to punish you.’ They didn't like the word torture. First they'd say, ‘You are a criminal and must obey orders,’ and they'd ask for information and you'd refuse and they'd start in.”
Colonel North has clear eyes, is perhaps younger than he now looks after seven years of imprisonment. “The wire was shutting off the blood to my feet, I could look at them slowly turning purple . . . again it's psychological. They put wire around my neck and tied me to a post against an anthill. They were those small ants that bite like fire . . . they left me there for two hours. If they hadn't moved me, I think the ants would have taken over . . . it was bad.” Was it the worst? “No, nothing was as bad as Hanoi. Here at Yen Bai there was a sort of mechanical brutality, later in Hanoi a real hatred was built up . . . we just got further and further apart.”
He talks of “Heartbreak Hotel”; of days in dark solitary cells meant for Orientals of small size, cells built—ironically—by the French. “There were manacles on the wall but my ankles wouldn't fit in them . . . for seven days they took me out to interrogate me. It was easy to avoid their questions as far as military matters were concerned, because the interrogators were both naive and cocky, and they'd start telling you the answers and they had little understanding of aircraft. I'd agree and say ‘Yes, you're right.’ They'd torture you to find out what you didn't know, for instance, future targets. I had a rather low-key interrogator, but he lost patience and the real torture started.” The only sign of nervousness on Colonel North's face comes from a slight twitch of his lips from time to time. “They put me in the ropes. . . . One of the worst times was when I was screaming and they pushed a wet plastic sponge and a chamois in my mouth and under my nose. I thought I was going to drown, it was like drowning in a cup of water. I struggled and managed to push the sponge back a bit and get air through my nose. They use nylon parachute risers on your arms and your arms roll out of their sockets. They dislocated both my arms and I passed out . . . when I woke up I was still trussed. . . . I was damaged by these torture sessions; for seven weeks there was no feeling in my arms.”
As if to reassure himself, he adds: “I was strengthened by the experience. Many Americans have led a pretty sheltered life. Going through something so brutal, you don't exactly panic, but at first you wonder if you can take it . . . in the end you realize you can still live. What helps? Some kind of faith and loyalty . . . then something it's not nice to say . . . hatred. Hatred of what Communism means. Did I break? Yes . . . at the end of the seventh day I couldn't hold out. They'd been showing me statements. There was one that was fairly innocuous-sounding. I copied it. There comes a moment when you think it's that or death. Yes, almost everyone gave up in the end . . . at least as far as I know. . . .”
He goes on to describe the refusal of medical help by his captors until he contributed a short biography, and the effectiveness of an alternation of kindness and brutality (so that the isolated prisoner automatically adapts himself to reality and chooses life with adaptation over death by resistance). “There were heavy propaganda sessions, working with young English-speaking cadres, and some of them struck me as disillusioned. They'd make a point and I'd refute it. In the end I think I had them listening more than talking.”
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A question arising from accounts like Colonel North's is how the West understands indirect warfare of the kind waged so effectively by Communist regimes. The propaganda aim itself is superficial compared with the more important side maneuvers that accompany it. In the Vietnamese situation, if the first aim may seem to be to brand the Americans as “imperialist monsters,” and get them out of Southeast Asia, the wider aim has been to gain the help of new “authenticators,” publicists, and sympathizers, to train new cadres among American dissenters, to frighten Americans themselves. This comes home to me during a day and a night spent at Pleasantville, once a small village in the Hudson River Valley, now merging—as do so many other communities—into the urban conglomerate surrounding New York City.
Against a tranquil background the POW question intrudes again. A young son of a friend (only eighteen) announces defiantly that he “doesn't believe it.” He is rather short and dark, with the currently fashionable beard, and offbeat clothing topped by a floppy purple felt hat. “What doesn't he believe?” someone asks. The huge dark eyes, seeming even more vulnerable under the unbecoming hat, blink a little as he hastens to profess ignorance. “I know nothing about it . . . I only read the Times on Sunday, and then only if I'm not busy.” He seems proud of this anti-involvement, prouder even than of the psychedelic pictures he has been painting up in his attic room. “As for my parents,” he goes on, “I don't know what they think, I've only heard them talking about amnesty. . . But I know that I don't agree with the POW's.” With what doesn't he agree? Doesn't he think they were tortured? “I know one thing I would say.” He pauses as if to collect his thoughts. “. . . If they weren't messed up in Vietnam, then they got messed up by American doctors.”
I intervene to ask how they got messed up by American doctors.
“Doctors would be given orders to do this, do that,” he states solemnly.
“You actually think that American doctors tortured the POW's, and not the North Vietnamese?”
He sounds less secure, but speaking from a half-understood medley of double-think, fantasy, propaganda handed out by the influential among his generation, he goes on firmly, “Yes, American doctors would torture and brainwash them, just to convince them that the Vietcong torture. . . .”
Three young Americans in Central Park don't give themselves over to fantasy as completely as the eighteen-year-old from Pleasantville, but (as is common in the counter-culture) share a glorification of what is foreign, and a scorn of what is American.
A snub-nosed boy with bare feet says that he “doesn't believe it” (referring to the POW's) and adds: “I think our men committed war crimes and they deserved to be held in captivity.”
A girl adds in a disgusted voice: “I think they were trying to make themselves into heroes.”
Does the boy with the bare feet really think that all those prisoners manufactured their stories, and that this whole thing, even the torturing, was the fault of the U.S.? Getting more and more worked up, he answers that he is convinced that it is a put-up job and that the older generation in the U.S. are robots who believe anything. Another young man breaks in to say that he himself believes that the prisoners were tortured. “They were victims,” he says, “misguided victims.”
I put a direct question to the snub-nosed boy with the bare feet: “But you don't believe they were tortured?”
He backtracks a little. “I don't say categorically that they weren't tortured. I just don't think it's important.” He rubs a beautiful silver buckle on his belt with a piece of Kleenex. “If they were tortured it was a matter of policy . . . I can't fault the North Vietnamese if they did torture.”
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A conversation on the phone with a psychiatrist friend, in which he suggests that the need for community acts as a catalyst in more than one human situation. “It's easy to understand how in lieu of a community, alienated Westerners might turn toward a cohesive and defined leftist creed. . . . Similarly the young in this conscious or unconscious support of the Left find themselves part of a community of their own generation. In a different way the great desire to feed the U.S. POW's into the Communist propaganda mill is also part of an attempt—opportunistic of course—to absorb them into the community of Communism. . . .”
This conversation makes me remember a story of the Hungarian prisons, of a Communist called Endre Havas, so shaken by the arrest of Rajk, whom he adores, that he develops a fantasy that these are not Communist police who are torturing him but rightists—and begins to shout, “Help, help, long live Stalin . . . help, help!” So the boyars, being put to death by the Oprichina, mingled eulogies of Ivan the Terrible with their cries of pain, and old Bolsheviks went to their deaths with “Long live Stalin!” on their lips. In the Korean and Vietnam wars, prisoners have attested that “they take you to the edge of death and then draw you back, and you are grateful to them.” Does this sense of gratitude then help to carry a prisoner into a state of voluntary acceptance, while the weakest, confused by a combined assault of propaganda and pain, learn to identify with the source of both?
I read, far into the night, material about the Slansky trials in Communist Czechoslovakia. These trials are thought of as the last of the great Stalinist show trials. But Stalin, having learned his lesson with Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria (who retracted his confession in open court and maintained his stand throughout), sees to it that Westerners are not admitted, and that the broadcast comes from tapes. Fourteen Czechs are accused of Trotskyism, Titoism, espionage for the West, and Zionism. Eleven of the defendants are executed and three imprisoned. Of these three, two later publish books. One of them, Eugen Loebl, now a professor at Vassar, explains in his Stalinism in Prague that although it is Beria's men who proceed to decimate the Czech opposition by a mock trial, the interrogation itself is executed by a Russian-oriented group of Czechs and Russians. The other survivor, Artur London (at the time of arrest Under Secretary of Foreign Affairs), is tortured until he denounces his co-defendants and “confesses.” His account, which describes better than most the slow hammering at the prisoner's resistances, and the way in which forced lies and a sense of guilt gradually merge into something close to a psychosis, illuminates the difference between this and the similar trials in Russia; its capacity to haunt the reader is greater—if possible—than that vast literature of tragedy from Stalin's Siberia. Gone is that dramatic Stalinesque scene in Moscow's Hall of Columns, complete with red banners, loudspeakers, floodlights, interjections from the audience and speakers giving orations that last for six hours at a stretch. In these later proceedings there is something completely denatured; the chill which emanates from these books is a sense of human powerlessness, brought on by refinements of the state's instruments of corecion. Loebl and London both describe constant admonitions to “listen to our teachers,” and to be “sincere.” They are to proceed with their evidence “sincerely,” they are to pronounce their last statement in a tone of “sincere repentance” and so on. (Similarly Korean prisoners are urged to be “sincere.” Commander Lloyd Bucher of the U.S.S. Pueblo—on the occasion of his confrontation with a dreadfully tortured but still living man hanging on a wall—is told, “You see why you must be sincere?” After another session he is ordered back to his cell to think “sincerely” about how Oswald was engaged by “running-dog CIA” to kill President Kennedy—“We will shoot all your men, sonabeechy, especially all insincere liars.”) But these admonitions are merged with alternately harsh and kind treatment, constant reproaches, and appeals to natural human guilt. A conditioning situation has been set up which approaches the symbiotic. During the Slansky trials, in case there should be recantations, the interrogators never left the side of their assigned prisoners.
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I have lunch with Jerzy Wojciechowski, a Polish refugee who lectures in philosophy at the University of Ottawa, and is now en route to a philosophical conference in one of the Southerns states. Jerzy agrees that the treatment of the American POW's in North Vietnam is important as a demonstration of ideological tyranny of the most determined kind. (He has come by his political knowledge honestly, since his father had once been a co-founder of the Polish Socialist Democratic party of the Ukraine—the party founded by Rosa Luxemburg; and as a boy he himself had served in the underground.) I ask to what extent, in this matter of total control, Communist Russia learned from Communist China, and vice versa. “Of course China carried the ruthless Stalinist course a step further. Whereas Stalin wanted ‘immediate obedience’ and used terror, elements in Chinese society tended toward unification, and toward slower, more thorough methods. At least with ‘non-enemies,’ Mao actually made an attempt to change the thinking of whole classes and professions . . . a stupendous unremitting effort at thought reform, which began in the early 20's when experiments were carried out on captured Kuomintang soldiers.
“All this was rather different from the Cheka in Russia which was set up by a Pole, that was Dzershinsky . . . my father knew him well. He came with ‘clean hands’ as they say, but became a fanatic. He died very suddenly, by the way, after two hours of screaming at the opposition—just fell dead in the lobby of the Central Committee Building!” As we walk along the street after lunch, Jerzy says that Mao had suggested the key skill which lies behind the conversion treatment. “He said something like, ‘You must first give the patient a shock and shout at him “You are ill!” so that he is frightened into a sweat—and then tell him gently that he needs treatment.’ You can imagine that Mao was aware of the need to break the old loyalties of the intellectuals to the West—especially to America which had been their promised land.”
We discuss the Russian scientist Roy Medvedev's book on the political use of psychiatry (A Question of Madness) and how Medvedev points out that the commitment of his brother Zhores to a psychiatric hospital heralded an escalation of the trials for “ideological sabotage.” I wonder at the formalities taken. “Well, you see,” Jerzy says, “it was always easier to avoid something, avoid a trial for instance. Why not? Trials lead to moral victories and to new material for samizdat. . . . Now even psychiatrists become jailers. It's just a further refinement. Instead of publicity there are consultations, then treatments with drugs, restraint, et cetera. Already the ‘struggle’ that they speak of so seriously in China seems old-fashioned . . . as for ‘putting them through the ropes’ as in North Vietnam, by comparison this is crude and brutal. I tell you something, the more you know about man the easier it is to influence him.”
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P., a rather idealistic friend with grayish hair and a harmonious neat-featured face, is not overly enthusiastic about my concentration on the returned POWs. “You see,” he says, “I have the feeling that they have been exploited by the President and the defense department, and made into a show. . . . Besides, anyone who goes on bombing missions must be soulless and oblivious to the damage he causes.” P. doubts that propaganda influences him. “Maybe I get information from people like Susan Sontag, who represents the sort of people I feel comfortable with . . . but surely the North Vietnamese aren't as cruel as we want to think.”
The conversation seems to have a life of its own. P. remarks almost dreamily that Bertrand Russell was a philosopher. Yet the War Crimes Tribunal was so biased that it embarrassed even the Swedish government; Sartre and Dave Dellinger found it necessary, for instance, to tax Saburo Kugai, a Japanese professor testifying at the trial, for stating that the maps captured from U.S. pilots had hospitals marked in red as bombing targets. When asked how he knew that this wasn't done so they could avoid the hospitals, the professor had to admit that he had no proof either way.
“Think,” cries P., “of the emotional atmosphere of the period when Jane Fonda went to Vietnam . . . shattered bodies of children and so on . . . in a war we were imposing on an innocent people. . . .” He doesn't mention that a returned POW, Commander David Hoffman, said from his bed in a San Diego Hospital that he'd been forced to appear before Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark by being roped by his broken arm which was in a cast, put on a table, and having the table kicked out from under him. His actual words were, “If Miss Fonda thinks for a minute that the people she saw were able to speak freely . . . or that any deviation from the ordered script wouldn't bring instant punishment . . . then she's got another think coming.”
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A dinner party with a group of astute journalists in one of those Park Avenue apartments where big windows look out onto the New York City blocklike buildings brilliant with light. The writer-hostess, small and smart in a long clinging scarlet dress, explains that she and her husband are going to mainland China; and a discussion follows about inevitable problems of freedom of movement, journalistic coverage, the language barrier, etc.
Some of those present agree that the thought of China is rousing euphoria rather than objective or critical study. One says that journalists are on the whole tougher than other travelers, since their profession automatically educates them to certain harsh realities—that is, if they are able to get a glimpse of those realities. For a moment the discussion turns to that “dream world” which Americans so often have found abroad. “After all,” a tall TV director remarks, “it's been so ever since first Hawthorne and then James wrote about the ‘vacuum on a foreign shore.’” “And made a very good thing of it!” jokes the hostess. The director ponders that with regard to mainland China, as with other little-known territories, the skeptics will eventually come into their own. “Look how it was in the late 20's and early 30's. In Hollywood they were collecting money to buy tractors for Russia; in the meantime old Gene Lyons was storing up critical thoughts. . . . Now it's the East that's arousing people's fantasies.”
The smallish, curly-haired host, who has been busy with cocktails, is exhilarated that he is finally getting to Peking; and is confident that he will be able to find some of the information he needs. “Listen, I'm used to finding my way around after all. There's always a way, and if there's not you have to find one.”
“Any way you look at it, it'll be hard sledding,” prophesies a sports writer.
Someone else produces laughter by drawling, “You can always try the American Embassy!”
The whole American bogging-down in the great imponderables of Asia creates a confusion which projects the adventure of “going to China” as only one small episode in a vast groping attempt to “include the East.” Some of the journalists present tend to believe that because events in China, Russia, North Korea, North Vietnam, etc. have shades of difference—and because there is conflict between China and Russia—the complexities of the Marxist tie which binds can be forgotten.
There seems little regard for the prisoner-pawns being moved around on a chessboard infinitely vaster than that of Vietnam. Mary McCarthy, once so astute about Russian repression, reflects something like this in her book on Hanoi. Shepherded by her carefully selected contacts, she philosophizes as to the opinions expressed by someone at the War Crimes Commission—that the pilots were brought to “repent,” not by being fed lies, “or in my judgment, mysterious drugs, but by a simpler method . . . they were taken to see bomb sites.” She is somehow genuinely able to believe that the North Vietnamese were “carefully distinguishing the person of the criminal from his crime, treating the fractures of the shot-down pilots with their advanced surgical skills.” Actually, in an absolute parallel with the lessons of the Korean war, these shot-down pilots, except for a few “special” cases and those thought to be unproductive, had medical care (as with food, sleep, and absence of torture) doled out to them when they were willing to “cooperate.” Later in her book, talking of the discovery of the bodies of friends of hers—Mr. and Mrs. Krainich of the University Medical School—in the mass graves of those executed by the Vietcong in Hué Miss McCarthy says, “There is no way of knowing what really happened and I feel somewhat suspicious of American stories of mass graves.” She adds with unashamed bias, “I should prefer to think it was the Americans, indiscriminately bombing.”
This would be unimportant, were it not that blindness to the obvious recrudescence of Stalinism has become a Western pattern. While echoes of the great show trials sound from Leningrad and Vilna, from Conakry (with cries of “Judgment of the People” and pre-hanging poems by Touré), from Prague and from Moscow again (where Pyotir Yakir and Victor Krasin—after being in custody for many long months—“confess” in the accepted manner), new and better methods are being thought up to subdue; and the “lesson of the confession” (as Eugen Loebl titled a recent article) is that man under inhuman pressure will apologize for his humanity.
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In the meantime the younger (as well as the older) generation in the West remains only “too human.” The barefoot boy in the park can't bring himself to countenance, let alone believe, what disturbs him; the boy in the purple felt hat projects his disturbance upon American doctors; and on the day that I leave New York, a young would-be Maoist, apparently overcome by euphoria at the rising power in the East, and somewhat drunk at a party, tosses her long blond hair and cries, “I think China is the greatest . . . just the greatest !”
