Word: manchurian
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...infantry. A Soviet armored division knifes into Manchuria from the west, across the Mongolian border. Fleets of Ilyushin bombers pound Chinese airfields, troop concentrations and industrial centers across the entire northeast. China's outnumbered jets are swept from the skies, and within a week the major Manchurian cities of Shenyang and Harbin have fallen to the Soviet pincers. Linking up, the Russian columns race south toward Peking, then halt 50 miles away...
That is one reason why brainwashing became a subject of morbid fascination in the 1950s, popularly expressed in the movie The Manchurian Candidate. The Communists seemed to have the capacity to break anyone-Cardinal Mindszenty, for instance, or the U.S. journalist William Oatis, who in 1951 confessed to a charge of espionage in Czechoslovakia and spent more than two years in jail. The Korean War confirmed the worst U.S. expectations. The Chinese not only broke down many P.O.W.s, causing them to collaborate; they also persuaded 21 P.O.W.s to settle in China...
...Harvey Oswald in Dallas and Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles, might all be cogs in a single, stupendous murder machine. The killers, Capote suggested on NBC's Tonight show, might all have been intensively trained, brainwashed triggermen of a type envisaged by Novelist Richard Condon in The Manchurian Candidate; their purpose could be to drive the U.S. to its knees by assassinating public persons-a theory, Capote claimed, that was once expounded by 19th century Theosophist Helena Blavatsky. (Sirhan, Capote noted, asked for a copy of Madame Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine soon after his arrest...
...wouldn't be all that difficult. Our ride into headquarters had yet to show up. The air terminal was quiet. Two members of the Royal Laotian Army arrived and were greeted by a couple of U.S. soldiers. An advance scouting party, we joked. Or, perhaps, a remake of The Manchurian Candidate. They were hurried off in a dung-colored government car. So we stood, a few sat, in the middle of the lobby, 18 of us, sleeping bags, suitcases, and McCarthy buttons. No one had told us crusading would be so much...
...baroque. Yet Condon's grotesque farce is often merely the truth as seen in the wobbles of an amusement-park mirror. The book, which drifted past most critics and customers recently without creating much of a stir, is not on a par with the mad master's Manchurian Candidate. But in its own way, it deserves a small place on the shelf that includes Nathanael West...