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A Manchurian Candidate in Our Midst?
As the remake of the 1962 thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, opens nationally, experts speculate that what was once purely fictional may, in fact, be a reality.
In the movie, soldiers in the Gulf War are kidnapped and brainwashed for sinister purposes. Army Major Bennett Marco (Denzel Washington), a career soldier, grows suspicious about his experience in Desert Storm after Squad Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) becomes a candidate for vice president.
The 1962 version was set in the Korean war. In both, a brainwashed war hero is programmed as a sleeper/mole agent to assassinate a presidential candidate.
While the pretense is still largely fictional, it may be possible, says psychoanalyst Susan C. Vaughan, MD, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. "If you have a person in a position where they are psychologically dominated and keep them isolated from everything else, [a Manchurian candidiate] could be possible," she says.
In this scenario, "you are told what to think and not given the opportunity to express your opinion or hear any other opinions, and gradually the message comes to you and you begin to believe it," she explains. "It helps when the message is delivered by someone who has or who represents themselves as having a lot of power over you."
Examples Abound
Take the Stockholm syndrome, in which kidnap victims, over time, become sympathetic to their captors.
"The Stockholm syndrome and brainwashing are variations on a theme," she says. "The kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart is a good example in which you take one individual out of a normal context and put them in a bizarre context with new rules, and after being in this different reality for a little while and under pressure, they will break down and go along with party line," she says.
Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped from her Utah home on June 5, 2002, and found on a suburban street in the Salt Lake Valley on March 12, 2003.
While the Manchurian candidate is still "pretty much science fiction, there are definite examples of people being able to have that kind of power, and the more repressive a society is, the easier and more likely it becomes."
The syndrome of abused women resembles brainwashing in its classical sense, she says. In these cases, a woman is psychologically abused over time and eventually comes to think she deserves such abuse and apologizes profusely for her "crimes" or "misconduct."
Manchurian Candidate in the Midst?
"I am not sure whether [a Manchurian candidate] is technically possibly or not, and nothing has been attempted to my knowledge," says Robert J. Maddox, PhD, a professor emeritus of modern American history at Penn State University in University Park, Pa., and a World War II and Cold War specialist. Maddox served during the Korean War.
During the Korean war, he says, "through beatings and deprivation, North Koreans would try to get people to say they were ashamed [of their party], but there was nothing along the lines of coming back at a predetermined date to kill the president," as in the movie.
"They just had [prisoners of war] make public confessions," says Maddox, also the author of six books including Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision Fifty Years Later and The United States and World War II.
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