Be Careful What You Concede
Part two...
The above also describes exactly the kinds of statements our supposed "Commander in Chief" made, first against our allies, during that fraudulent trip of his abroad, and then later, against our country, at Helsinki.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWj1wC2YW0A&app=desktop
What is actually behind these obviously insidious sell-outs?
The following, by Robert Cialdini, on pages 53, 54 of his bestselling "Influence: The Psychology of Influence" sheds some interesting light...
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"The question of what makes a commitment effective has a number of answers. A variety of factors affect the ability of a commitment to constrain our future behavior.
One large-scale program designed to produce compliance illustrates nicely how several of the factors work. The remarkable thing about this program is that it was systematically employing these factors decades ago, well before scientific research had identified them.
During the Korean War, many captured American soldiers found themselves in prisoner-of-war (POW) camps run by the Chinese Communists. It became clear early in the conflict that the Chinese treated captives quite differently than did their allies, the North Koreans, who favored savagery and harsh punishment to gain compliance.
Specifically avoiding the appearance of brutality, the Red Chinese engaged in what they termed their “lenient policy,” which was in reality a concerted and sophisticated psychological assault on their captives.
After the war, American psychologists questioned the returning prisoners intensively to determine what had occurred.
The intensive psychological investigation took place, in part, because of the unsettling success of some aspects of the Chinese program.
For example, the Chinese were very effective in getting Americans to inform on one another, in striking contrast to the behavior of American POWs in World War II.
For this reason, among others, escape plans were quickly uncovered and the escape attempts themselves almost always unsuccessful.
“When an escape did occur,” wrote Dr. Edgar Schein, a principal American investigator of the Chinese indoctrination program in Korea, “the Chinese usually recovered the man easily by offering a bag of rice to anyone turning him in.”
In fact, nearly all American prisoners in the Chinese camps are said to have collaborated with the enemy in one form or another.
An examination of the Chinese prison-camp program shows that its personnel relied heavily on commitment and consistency pressures to gain the desired compliance from prisoners.
Of course, the first problem facing the Chinese was how to get any collaboration at all from the Americans. These were men who were trained to provide nothing but name, rank, and serial number.
Short of physical brutalization, how could the captors hope to get such men to give military information, turn in fellow prisoners, or publicly denounce their country?
The Chinese answer was elementary: Start small and build.
For instance, prisoners were frequently asked to make statements so mildly anti-American or pro-Communist as to seem inconsequential (“The United States is not perfect.” “In a Communist country, unemployment is not a problem.”).
But once these minor requests were complied with, the men found themselves pushed to submit to related yet more substantive requests.
A man who had just agreed with his Chinese interrogator that the United States is not perfect might then be asked to indicate some of the ways in which he thought this was the case.
Once he had so explained himself, he might be asked to make a list of these “problems with America” and to sign his name to it.
Later he might be asked to read his list in a discussion group with other prisoners.
“After all, it’s what you really believe, isn’t it?”
Still later he might be asked to write an essay expanding on his list and discussing these problems in greater detail.
The Chinese might then use his name and his essay in an anti-American radio broadcast beamed not only to the entire camp, but to other POW camps in North Korea, as well as to American forces in South Korea.
Suddenly he would find himself a “collaborator,” having given aid to the enemy.
Aware that he had written the essay without any strong threats or coercion, many times a man would change his image of himself to be consistent with the deed and with the new “collaborator” label, often resulting in even more extensive acts of collaboration.
Thus, while “only a few men were able to avoid collaboration altogether,” according to Dr. Schein, “the majority collaborated at one time or another by doing things which seemed to them trivial but which the Chinese were able to turn to their own advantage….
This was particularly effective in eliciting confessions, self-criticism, and information during interrogation.
- pages 53, 54 Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
