I’ve literally said for years but the idea of mind control being real is more valuable as propaganda than actual mind control
“Brainwashing” as a concept was invented by Edward Hunter, a CIA-funded writer, to explain away why US troops captured by communist forces during the Korean War were so amenable to their Evil Totalitarian Captors. It definitely wasn’t that they were treated well (far better than the US treated its captives); with POWs allowed to cook their own food, organise sports competitions, and one black soldier even allowed to travel to Beijing to attend university - a privilege he wouldn’t have had back home - nor could it have been that any of these people saw any truth in communist theory. No, the real explanation must be that the communists had developed some nefarious means of controlling peoples’ minds, the same technology which they must have used on their own people to make them all support communism so wholeheartedly!
…
My great grandfather was a Russian POW during WWII. He was sent to the gulag.
He was one of the “lucky” ones.
He got back.
The amount of FUCKERY his subsequent behaviour caused my grandmother, and therefore my father and yes, therefore ME cannot be overstated. Like. Encanto gives a teeeny tiny idea of what generational trauma is.
The reality is fucking worse.
He was tortured. He was broken. He behaved so atrociously that my great grandmother, a woman in a country with no divorce, had to leave him with 4 children, 3 of whom young to very young.
I won’t go into the details. But the trauma of that lived in his daughter behaviour toward her son, and in his grandson my father.
DON’T. Come to me. And. Praise the URSS treatment of POW.
Fucking don’t.
Signed: somebody who had to live among the ruins
damn that’s crazy. what did your grandfather do to end up in a soviet pow camp during wwii
this is legitimately the perfect copypasta
This deserves to be in the post itself
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these two should hang out.
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Grueling labor camps for political dissidents in 20th century communist (Marxist-Leninist and subsidiaries) countries very much were things though, as someone whose grandparents actually lived through one, I can attest to the fact that you had to be very very careful about what you said in a public space lest you get sent to labor in horrible conditions with a chance that you won’t ever return.
While they didn’t have any problems because they never messed with politics… they were very aware of the cases where things went differently.
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