A.M Merloo, Rape of the mind kertoo aiheesta:
"It is more than twenty years (in 1956) since psychologists first began to suspect that
the human mind can easily fall prey to dictatorial powers. In 1933, the German
Reichstag building was burned to the ground. The Nazis arrested a Dutchman,
Marinus Van der Lubbe, and accused him of the crime. Van der Lubbe was known
by Dutch psychiatrists to be mentally unstable. He had been a patient in a mental
institution in Holland. And his weakness and lack of mental balance became
apparent to the world when he appeared before the court. Wherever news of the trial
reached, men wondered: "Can that foolish little fellow be a heroic revolutionary, a
man who is willing to sacrifice his life to an ideal?"
During the court sessions Van der Lubbe was evasive, dull, and apathetic. Yet the
reports of the Dutch psychiatrists described him as a gay, alert, unstable character, a
man whose moods changed rapidly, who liked to vagabond around, and who had all
kinds of fantasies about changing the world.
On the forty second day of the trial, Van der Lubbe's behaviour changed
dramatically. His apathy disappeared. It became apparent that he had been quite
aware of everything that had gone on during the previous sessions. He criticized the
slow course of the procedure. He demanded punishment either by imprisonment or
death. He spoke about his "inner voices." He insisted that he had his moods in
check. Then he fell back into apathy. We now recognize these symptoms as a
combination of behaviour forms which we can call a confession syndrome. In 1933
this type of behaviour was unknown to psychiatrists. Unfortunately, it is very familiar
today and is frequently met in cases of extreme mental coercion."
"A man will often try to hold out beyond the limits of his endurance because he
continues to believe that his tormentors have some basic morality, that they will
finally realize the enormity of their crimes and will leave him alone. This is a delusion.
The only way to strengthen one's defences against an organized attack on the mind
and will is to understand better what the enemy is trying to do and to outwit him. Of
course, one can vow to hold out until death, but even the relief of death is in the
hands of the inquisitor. People can be brought to the threshold of death and then be
stimulated into life again so that the torments can be renewed. Attempts at suicide
are foreseen and can be forestalled.
In my opinion hardly anyone can resist such treatment. It all depends on the ego
strength of the person and the exhaustive technique of the inquisitor. Each man has
his own limit of endurance, but that this limit can nearly always be reached and even
surpassed is supported by clinical evidence. Nobody can predict for himself how he
will handle a situation when he is called to the test. The official United States report
on brainwashing (See the "New York Times", August 18, 1955) admits that "virtually
all American P.O.W.s collaborated at one time or another in one degree or another,
lost their identity as Americans...thousands lost their will to live," and so forth. The
British report (See the "New York Times", February 27, 1955) gives a statistical
survey about the abuse of the P.O.W.s. According to this report one third of the
soldiers absorbed enough indoctrination to be classified as Communist
sympathizers."