that i always enjoy a reading also which takes me as far away from those realities as possible it is an escape and i try to do it as often as they can. . .

stories that i found circulating in american culture in the war on terror after 9/11 we captured an american john walker lens and he had all of these front cover news stories and kept getting referred to as brainwashed, serious experts and newspapers were writing about him as having been brainwashed. my first reaction was can people be using this science fiction term to be talking about a real person. and then i kept wondering about what sort of work that story was doing or that kind of metaphor of brainwashing and describing the decision to be against

america in this moment as unthinkable, as literally something a thinking person could unfathomably do. the manchurian candidate got made and the vision of the body snatchers got made, galactica, the homeland show that having a strong resemblance to the john walker lindh stories. so, in my book what i am trying to do is think about that story and why we want to tell it as a literary historian i am trained to think about why we need certain stories at certain moments and why they are popular in certain areas of history so what i decided to do is start

from this war on terror brainwashing moment and think about what sort of story that was and what it does for us and what kind of ideas it activates for us, so that took me back to world war ii after the term brainwashing gets invented and then through the kind of spread of the idea and the spread of the idea that the human mind might be programmable or influence will and the kind of ways we talked about influence, coercive persuasion brainwashing and propaganda and so forth. >> have you found the storylines to be accurate or inaccurate? >> they are inaccurate. it's a kind of fantasy story and it's also a way of telling a story about something that's really happened. at some point, john walker changed his mind about what he

valued and what he wanted to do. at some point, abby hirst changed her mind. but we tell stories about the process of kind of valuing the things other ordinary americans value and then valuing something that seems just radically different. the liberation army, the taliban, a fundamentalist cult. we wind up telling the story in a certain form and there's this kind of magical moment in the story and that is the brainwashing moment. we often imagine it's this thing we imagine technology is responsible for, so the spread of decades we've been telling the story we described it in different technologies sometimes it is a computer chip implanted into the brain is a remake of the manchurian candidate.

it's hypnosis like drugs when the original candidates in the 1960s, so it's this imagining the technology might be about to erase something that we call freedom and this idea of freedom is one of the big ideas that the brainwashing stories are asking about. we can't see it in this abstract sense cause of the stories act out what the difference might be between american democratic freedom and totalitarian or fundamentalist freedom. >> explain a little bit how the term brainwashing came to be. >> it's happened just after when ed hunter goes over to china

under the payroll of the cia but is also a journalist and he goes and investigates how he's running his state and its convincing large numberhisconvif people to join the communist party and run the government in china. these were the allie allies in d war ii and suddenly they are enemies. so he starts to investigate this and writes a book and comes up with this term brainwashing. he is attributed to the chinese but apparently documents [inaudible] with that kind of flips around a little bit and then at the end of the korean war, two years later after the first book in 1953, operation big switch and little switch, 7,000 comeback

and "the new york times" reported that almost a third of the 7,000 had been convinced to cooperate with the enemy in some form or fashion so it is a pr disaster and nightmare. in fact, there were 22 american soldiers who got released and decided not to even come home, so they had been in a prison camp with the communists and cod supposedly indoctrinated and then decided to stay in korea instead of coming home so the term brainwashing just explodes. that's the way to explain what the communists were doing to these american pows and then its way to explain what the communists want to do a.

and to rob americans of their freedom. from there, the term explodes and gets used on the political left and political right to describe how victims of indoctrination become less than human. they no longer have free choice. they are sort of human robots and story winds up kind of continuing and we keep getting fictional stories about brainwashing and having news media and other public culture to talk about. >> where does the psychiatric community fault when it comes to the term brainwashing? >> it's a very controversial one

obviously. i think coercive persuasion is kind of the official way to talk about brainwashing seriously. and they're absolutely art techniques that people use successfully to coercively persuade people. in the kind of 1970s scare where you had at the end of the 1970s the jonestown massacre. but throughout the 70s, young people running away from home to join these new religious movements as religious scholars call them that there were groups that were sleep depriving their new converts. they were having them do lots of chance. they were kind of cutting them off from their home communities.

so the techniques exist and some psychologists and psychiatrists to study them and hope to make people who are doing these coercive persuasive techniques be held accountable for trying to undermine people's economy. >> and atomic tom is a precursor to a robot actually. it's a kind of statue that is made to move. in the 17 and 18 hundreds and the courts in europe they were making ones that could write and draw things. if you've seen the movie hugo, they use an actual historical one. and then in the 1920s, we import the word from the czechs

play. but i use the term because of an american immigrant psychologist who in talking about totalitarianism and what it does to your mental state he says people get turned into human. people get turned into sort of living robot. so the phrase helps me to describe a kind of longer cinematic and literary and technological history of this idea of a kind of pre- moving thing that might be a person or might just be a statue.

in the 17 and 18 hundreds, there were plenty of stories about those mistaken for real people. the sandman is about a woman to command the falls in love with a woman that is in atomic tom but it stretches back to that sort of questions of free will and freedom. for centuries, millennia. but then in this pos this postwr american scenario, the question about what freedom is usually gets tied up with a question about what american freedom is and what it means to be an american and a democracy where to be a democracy you have to have citizens who wer are able o choose something freely so we imagine ourselves as free thinking and rational and then

when we start thinking about what is totalitarianism and someone comes along and says they are turning people into human, we imagine that freedom is kind of taken away in this very abstract and strange sense. >> you start talking about why stories are written in a certain era. what is it about the postwar period, was it because of the korean war that this all occurred? >> i think the korean war, the cold war, the struggle against totalitarianism are the major motivators and there is also a kind of propaganda problem during world war ii and after and especially during the cold war where we have an enemy

that's not a certain kind of person that looks a certain kind of way in a certain country. we have an enemy that is a kind of nebulous thing, an enemy that is an ideology of communism or fascism. the kind of merge the two in the idea of totalitarianism and the way to describe who the bad guys are and what the consequences are of leading america fall to communism during the cold war is that we are going to be robbed of our freedom in this way that is conveniently represented by the cheap special effects of having someone walk around looking like a robot. robot. >> you've identified as a literary historian. what do you teach at the university of arizona? >> american literature mainly.

and also a big lecture course on people and machines through literary and philosophical history. so we go back to the greek myth of a man falls in love with a statue, and to play those where people are puppets trapped in caves looking at puppets and kind of going through these things, so we are looking from the greek antiquity to words science fiction and thinking about the stories of people and machines. so my research is all on the ladder and i've got. i teach a big class and other things about science and technology and culture. >> are you surprised that george orwell 1984 has become a bestseller and?

>> not at all. it is a book i talk about in my book as well and it's really kind of an amazing catalogue of ways of thinking about propaganda and misinformation and persuasion in a way that makes it such a useful book nowadays and thinking about that sort of big problem of fake news. that was winston smith's job in 1984. he was the guy that went through the newspapers and changed things when they no longer fit with the party orthodoxy and that has a certain kind of an effect on him and the hate and all these other news speed and other ways of trying to change peoples minds. people's minds. so, orwell was absolutely prescient in thinking about trying to understand the variety

of ways people might be persuaded coercively. >> professor of english at the university of arizona and author of this book human programming, brainwashing and american unfreedom. this is booktv on c-span2. >> booktv on twitter and facebook. we want to hear from you. twitter.com/mac booktv or post a comment on our facebook page, facebook.com/booktv. >> a journalist in germany since 1994 including more than a decade as a correspondent at business week magazine. he joined "the new york times" in january, 2010 as a business and economics writer based in frankfurt. during