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(FireDogLake) – Joost Meerloo was a Dutch psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who, having fled German-occupied Holland in 1942, and survived torture by the Gestapo in Belgium, made a name for himself in British and U.S. medical establishments. By the early 1950s, he had undertaken an examination of the supposedly new phenomena of “brainwashing.”
Recently, I was reading Meerloo’s out-of-print 1956 classic, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing. (A portion of the work, though not the quote below, can be read online.) I was surprised to find Dr. Meerloo enunciating a critique on an organization that has been heavily implicated in the U.S. military’s torture regime abroad. The Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (or SERE) schools in the different branches of the military have their origin in the Pentagon’s response to the POW confessions of the Korean War.
More recently, the Senate Armed Services Committee documented that psychologists working for SERE, in collusion with military and political higher-ups, helped the CIA and military “reverse-engineer” the torture techniques the school was supposed to use to inoculate U.S. military personnel against foreign coercive interrogation and captivity.
Dr. Meerloo is the author of some 300 articles on psychological, sociological, political and literary subjects in both professional and popular magazines. His books include Conversations and Communications (1942); Total War and the Human Mind (1944); Aftermath of Peace (1946); Delusion and Mass Delusion (1949); Patterns of Panic (1950); The Two Faces of Man (1954); The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Though Control, Menticide and Brainwashing (1956); Dance Craze and the Sacred Dance (1959); That Difficult Peace (1961); Suicide and Mass Suicide (1962).
In the field of parapsychology, Dr. Meerloo’s chief interest is in telepathy, particularly as it operates between psychotherapist and patient.
Fairchild AFB is home to a Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) Program. SERE Programs train soldiers, seaman, airmen, CIA operatives, and others–including foreign nationals–in resistance techniques. However, they also provide military and other government torturers, trainers, foreign nationals, contractors (aka US government mercenaries employed by corporations such as Blackwater, CACI International, Titan Corp, and SAIC) and psychologists, among others, the opportunity to develop, refine, practice and polish their torture techniques.
