“Brainwashing”

My mother, an anti-vaccine conservative, once suggested that my liberal views are the result of brainwashing in the schools. Well, the joke’s on her because the term brainwashing has ties to the Chinese communist party. It entered the English language in the 1950s through the journalist Edward Hunter, an intelligence agent, who adapted the Chinese term, xǐnǎo (“wash brain”), to describe the Chinese Communist government’s methods for political indoctrination. Though the original Chinese terminology was often used to mean “modernizing one’s thinking”, Hunter sensationalized the word to imply a forced reprogramming. Know your history.