Evening star., 1953-10-28
The Evil We Face

HC 6VH w VIC
Dr. Charles w. Mayo, the renowned Min
nesota surgeon who is serving as United States
delegate to the United Nations, has used words
as a scapel-grimly factual words-to lay bare
the malignancy and malevolence of the mon
strous Kremlin- directed effort to make the
world believe that our country has waged germ
warfare against Red China and North Korea.
This effort, as shown by DR.. Mayo in his
powerful report to the General Assemblys Po-
litical Committee went to the extreme of fore
ing confessions" from captive American flyers
by >subjecting them to mixture OF physical
brutality and psychological diaboliSm almost
too vile and terrible for the civilized Western
mind to comprehend. Endless day-and-night
questioning, solitary confinement in literal hell
holes, exposure to the worst kinds OF tempera-
lures, sickening medical mistreatment, starva-
ton rations death threats, and numerous other
narrowing forms of refined and unreflned
bodily mental and spiritual torment-these
were the weapons used against our airmen to
ternorize and condition" them into confess
ing" to germ warfare.
Let DR.. Mayo tell the story, for his own
words can hardly be improved upon: "The total
picture presented is one Of human beings
reduced to status lower than that of animals;
filthy full of lice festered wounds full of mag
short of death; unshaven, without haircuts or
baths for as much as year faced with
squads of trained interrogators, bullied inces-
sanity deprived of sleep and browbeaten into
mental anguish All this testimony" (Sup-
ported by the victims affidavits) suggests
frightening pattern. 1t suggests that the Com
munists were deliberately perverting to their
ends essentially the same technique which the
famous Soviet biologist Pavlov used in his
experiments on dogs and rats This technique
is called the conditioned reflex When
rat goes through the wrong door he gets an
electric shock. When he goes through the right
door he gets bit of cheese. Before long
the rat has been conditioned to enter the door
you want him to enter"-and man, by just
such means, can have his mind disintegrated
and be made not merely to confess" but also
to become "a seemingly willing accomplice to
the complete destruction of his integrity and
the production of an elaborate fiction"
This brief excerpt does not do justice to
the full force-force with a shocking impact
of DR.. Mayo's report But it is enough to pro-
vide good measure of the british and devlnSh
nature of the attempt by the Communists to
document" their colossal lie about American
germ warfare. The report shows, moreover
that the attempt, in some cases, was carried on
long after the signing of the Korean truce
until almost the very moment of the victims
repatriation. Further than that-and here is
one of the most important facts of all-the
testimony sworn to by the airmen involved
leaves no room for doubt that Soviet personnel,
trained plug-ugles sent from Russia, partlcl-
pated directly in the torturing process, super
viSing the lesS-eXpert efforts OF the Nortn no
rean and Chinese Reds.
The Kremlin denies all this, of course, but
~ i4@ In
ping and Pyongyang, has blocked every move
by the overwhelming majority of the U. N. to
stage an impartial inquiry into our alleged
germ warfare. The Mayo report shows why.
It also shows that we are faced, in relation to
Red totatarianism, with monstrosity so great
and so revolving that the civilized mind is
forced to wonder how mankind can even hope
to attain a decent and enduring peace as long
as such evil continues to exist.