Amazing how one thing leads to the other. Were you taken in by Kim Jung Un’s charm offensive – little red outfitted cheer leaders and Ms Kim Yo-Jong his little sister, diplomat to the Olympic games their outsized hotel and other expenses fully financed by N. Korea’s mortal enemy to the south? Having recently read Isaacson’s DaVinci biography I was drawn to Ms. Kim’s enigmatic Mona Lisa smile and expressionless eyes as noted in the press. Come to find out that at the age of 30 Ms. Kim is N. Korea’s Minister of Propaganda and Agitation. Ms. Kim’s bland flat expressionless face reflects her pitilessness. Should any of her fellow citizens dare to step out of line, their whole family may land in prison. They are already in prison. I found Joseph Stalin had his own minister of propaganda and agitation. There is a model here, so many precedents in the just past 20th century, Joseph Goebbels, Dmitri Shepilov , countless others.

What better topic for the neurologist than brainwashing? Exploring brainwashing leads directly to guess where? North Korea or more precisely Pyongyang is the capital of brainwashing. I hadn’t realized myself exactly why I have recently found N. Korea so fascinating. I’d been seeing footage of right facing goose stepping soldiers and universal tears of joy for Dear Leader and family. At first thought those were crocodile tears. Now I don’t think so. Certainly I’m aware if someone fails to express the right thoughts what awaits them. If you don’t think these N. Korean citizens are acting, then you have to postulate the leaders mastered an all-encompassing system of thought control. That relates to other systems of persuasion where the wages of sin is death, such as has been recently seen on TV in The Handmaid’s Tale, irrationally exuberant hero-worship and traditional religious thought.

The Manchurian Candidate is a famous novel twice made into a movie about brainwashing captives of the Korean War. Of Americans captured by the N. Koreans a few were “persuaded “ to stay and others were simply kept, many summarily executed. When it comes to brainwashing the N. Koreans are the masters. Stalin passed his art to Mao who bequeathed it to the Chinese who taught the N. Koreans, Actually the massive opening of the Beijing Olympics that I personally found repulsive, demonstrated best, death of the individual to a collective spectacle, everyone moving in unison. One thoughtful Chinese young man summarized the traditional Chinese way of life as subsuming “I to we.” His life up until this time has been mired in the struggle to find himself amidst the sacrifice of his parents and older generations.

The story is told of Korean Flight 858 mysteriously blown up en route from Bagdad to Seoul in 1987 killing 115 on board. The whole ruse was invented by the N. Koreans to sabotage S. Korean elections and the upcoming Seoul Olympics at the time but it is now a distant memory. A bomb was placed by specially indoctrinated man and woman agents, soon captured. Each took cyanide. The man died but the woman, Kim Hyon-hui survived. This Ms. Kim 25 at the time, had been specially prepared to speak and act Japanese, perhaps to create the impression that the hated Japanese perpetrated the heinous act. But Ms. Kim had been incompletely indoctrinated and according to what she later said, weighing threats to her own family in the North against the morality of lying to the families of the dead victims, she broke down and confessed. Suggestible kids who have yet to form a their own ego identity, are most vulnerable to the effects of brainwashing and indoctrination. Such had been the case with Patty Hearst who was pardoned by president Carter. Ms Kim was originally condemned to die, was also pardoned. State sponsored schools and madrassas are the perfect vessel such brainwashing as we all know. Ms. Kim eventually married in South Korea and had children of her own. With her life in danger even today, she regrets being the instrument of this crime yet considers herself guilty of having been born into the wrong society. While the brainwash capital may be Pyongyang brainwashing – forcibly causing a person to adopt a set of beliefs contrary to their own human impulses, is extensively used practiced today by religious and political fanatics of all stripes.