Twenty-one-year-old Roshonara Choudhry was the top student on her English course at King’s College London when she suddenly quit in 2010 before stabbing her MP, Stephen Timms, “to get revenge for the people of Iraq”. Choudhry told police she had viewed his pro-war voting record on the website TheyWorkForYou, as well as more than 100 hours of extremist lectures on YouTube. Timms survived the attack, but, as one newspaper reported, the court at her trial was “forced to the conclusion that Islamist hate sermons on the internet really do have the power to persuade a hitherto harmless young woman into being a killer”.
To say someone has been “brainwashed” can be both an accusation and an apology, the psychoanalyst and cultural historian Daniel Pick points out in this absorbing study of “thought control”, a concept roomy enough in his understanding to span the infamous “dodgy dossier” as well as terrorist radicalisation. The subject is timely: he tells us that he was preparing the book for print just when the journalist Marina Ovsyannikova interrupted a Russian news broadcast with a poster telling viewers “you are being lied to”. Yet Pick (the author of books on Garibaldi, Nazi Germany and the fictional hypnotist Svengali) knows that questions of what it means to think for ourselves are evergreen; any consideration of brainwashing, away from the subject’s lurid core – psy-ops, death cults – soon leads us into an epistemic labyrinth where information and indoctrination blur.
Pick opens his tour of this murky terrain during the cold war, with the reporting on US prisoners of war in Korea (where “brainwashing”, from the Mandarin xi nao, literally to wash the brain, first caught the English-speaking imagination); he ends by examining the role of the QAnon conspiracy theory in last year’s Capitol attacks (still eye-poppingly bizarre no matter how much you’ve read about it already). Each of the six chapters begins by considering a central text before spiralling outward: works under scrutiny include Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind (1953), about mechanisms of surveillance in postwar Poland, and Vance Packard’s 1957 bestseller, The Hidden Persuaders, about the ad industry’s use of psychological experiments demonstrating our tendency to follow the herd for good or ill.
