East, have enormous international political influence while otherwise being
obvious candidate members. The economically highly productive but politi-
cally backward countries of the Pacific rim, notably South Korea and Taiwan,
similarly defy categorization. Some would introduce a further category, the
Fourth World, for those underdeveloped countries which also lack any
significant exploitable natural resources. The label Third World is probably
too deeply entrenched to be avoided, but in fact very few statements using it
can be made with any reliability (as, increasingly, with the other two worlds),
and any degree of precision requires so many qualifications as to render the
tripartite categorization largely useless.
Thought Reform
Thought reform is the idea that a person’s political and social attitudes and
views can be radically altered to fit in with a particular ideology with which
they lack sympathy. Indeed, so thorough is the idea of thought reform that not
only evaluations, but supposedly factual beliefs, are seen as alterable. The exact
history of the concept is hard to trace, and its use in political discourse is
confused by its extensive discussion in fictional literature, and especially in
science fiction. Probably the first systematic non-fictional usage arose from
treatment by the Chinese of American and British prisoners during the
Korean War. It seems that some of these prisoners were subjected to intensive
conditioning, partly by torture but mainly by psychological means, to persuade
them of the entire truth of the Chinese Marxist interpretation of the war and of
the relative merits of the East rather than the West in international conflict. It is
entirely unclear how successful, and if successful how long-lasting, these
conversions were. Similar attempts to condition French and later US prisoners
during the wars in Indochina seem to have been failures. Certainly the Chinese
later, during thecultural revolution, adopted intensive processes of political
re-education to persuade those whom the Red Guard saw as ‘deviationists’ to
adopt the more radical views and to confess and seek absolution from their sins
and failings. By talking of thought ‘reform’, rather than of ‘change’, one is of
course accepting a premise buried deep in the process itself, that deviating
views are actually not only wrong but a species almost of mental illness, which
can be cured, the victim being brought to see reality properly rather than in a
distorted way. In the same way the Soviet Union used psychiatric medicine and
mental health clinics on leading dissidents, to alter their beliefs and attitudes
towards what was regarded as a correct ideologically, and therefore ‘normal’,
political position. Certainly a comparison can be made with the Roman
Catholic Inquisition, where the leading inquisitors were genuinely concerned
to re-convert heretics, even if by brutal means, and not simply to kill them to
stop the spread of a heresy.
Thought Reform