One of the upshots of treating prisoners well and doing exchanges frequently is that all those prisoners you had are gonna tell their friends, and next time you’re in an attrition battle it’s more likely that they’ll just surrender when it even remotely starts looking bad for them.
Wilfred Burchett was a journalist who covered major conflicts during the Japanese nukings and the Cold War. During the Korean and Vietnam Wars, he reported that American POWs were treated very humanely and many of them weren’t even shackled, just allowed to roam around outside in the prison yard. He received a bunch of hate and slander for this, but even his detractors stepped in to defend him saying the reports were accurate because the returning POWs confirmed it. Although the US would later accuse a lot of them of being traitors and brainwashed.
The term “brainwashing” was invented to dismiss the accounts of actual POWs in favor of phantom POWs that didn’t/don’t exist who are definitely still being kept prisoner there at 90 years old.
“Stockholm syndrome” was later invented to serve the same purpose.
One of the upshots of treating prisoners well and doing exchanges frequently is that all those prisoners you had are gonna tell their friends, and next time you’re in an attrition battle it’s more likely that they’ll just surrender when it even remotely starts looking bad for them.
Wilfred Burchett was a journalist who covered major conflicts during the Japanese nukings and the Cold War. During the Korean and Vietnam Wars, he reported that American POWs were treated very humanely and many of them weren’t even shackled, just allowed to roam around outside in the prison yard. He received a bunch of hate and slander for this, but even his detractors stepped in to defend him saying the reports were accurate because the returning POWs confirmed it. Although the US would later accuse a lot of them of being traitors and brainwashed.
The term “brainwashing” was invented to dismiss the accounts of actual POWs in favor of phantom POWs that didn’t/don’t exist who are definitely still being kept prisoner there at 90 years old.
“Stockholm syndrome” was later invented to serve the same purpose.