Chapter 1: Who is Rebecca Lemov and what is her connection to brainwashing?
It took a while.
She didn't recognize it.
Yeah.
You're back in California.
Yeah.
How often do you come?
Pretty often, partly my husband's family lives here.
Did you guys meet in college?
We met afterwards, but in Oakland. I was struggling to write my dissertation and he was working at the cafe where I was struggling. Me cute. It really was. There was a mixtape involved.
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Chapter 2: How does Rebecca Lemov's personal history connect to her research?
And nobody knew what happened to him, but he was taken by the secret police of Hungary. And then he came back and he looked like a shadow of himself, like a gray puppet. And he was paraded before the newsreel cameras. And he confessed to these outrageous crimes that he couldn't even have possibly committed. Like he had stolen religious artifacts and he said he had taken money from the church.
And even though he'd left a note, he said, if I'm arrested, don't believe anything I say when I come back. Yet this still happened to him. And it was almost like he was a trophy for these new communist governments, like an announcement that we can do this. And he did return to himself within a couple of years. And he said, without knowing what had happened to me, I had become another person.
And you say, yeah, becoming someone else was alarming enough, but the nightmarish part was that you had no ability to recognize that this had happened. So even scarier than becoming different is you wouldn't have even noticed it.
Yeah, that first part without knowing. So within 28 days, fairly fast. And then he also revealed what had happened to him, although I didn't have full memory of it.
And if you think of your stereotype of someone susceptible to this type of thing, it's not a leader in the church who's got charisma and all these people skills and a great education and all these other tropes we think would inoculate you from this.
a hero to his people and he knew what was coming. He knew that there was a possible threat to himself. So he could have been prepared or he probably did try to prepare himself. But one interesting thing about it, he said he thinks he was drugged and he was pushed around. He was not a young man and he was sleep deprived.
But one of the things that struck me was that he recalled that he was stripped of his clerical robes and he was made to wear a clown costume and he kind of had to crawl. And so there were these status-based humiliations.
Also a quite literal stripping of someone's identity. Exactly. Yeah.
Well, it's often the case that removal even of someone's name is very effective. Like in the Stanford prison experiments, one of the first things they do is the guards only refer to the prisoners as numbers. It's very effective.
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