If an opinion is being slowly but inexorably pushed on you from all sides by your captor over a long period of time, as part of an explicitly designed program of of propagandizing, it's brainwashing, regardless of the opinion's merit!

The religious education that my parents gave me through childhood counts as brainwashing.

Correct, it just gets call "indoctrination" as that sounds nicer and it is often (though far from always) more subtle as it is more of a "long game" thing.

It is one of those "one person's X is another person's Y" comparisons: indoctrination/brain-washing, religion/cult, freedom-fighter/terrorist, cute cat / insane evil sharp edged ball of allergens, ...

No, the nicer sounding word is "explanation".

I don't agree there. Explanation would be more "I do/think/believe X because" where indoctrination is more "you should do/think/believe X because".

A more passive form of indoctrination would be repeated explanation (with or without query/prompt) so explanation can become indoctrination depending on context, but I'll stand by my choice of words above.

Your examples answer the wrong question.

"Where do rainbows come from" can be answered with the explanation "As a way to show God's promise to Noah never to flood the Earth again" or with the explanation "because sunlight refracts through water into all the different colors we can see" or with the explanation "invisible unicorns fly through the sky sometimes and leave rainbows where they've gone".

Many people would call one or more of these indoctrinations, despite the complete lack of "should" in any of the responses. Egocentrism does not a benignity make.

I don't know if you are being facetious or not, but I think all religious teachings for children count as brainwashing.

Alao if the religious beliefs are agnosticism? Basically, by this definition, all parenting is brainwashing.

no, no, no, if you teach your children beliefs I approve of, that's different...

Not if you teach your children critical thinking and to base their opinions on something provable.

Then you're still doing brainwashing/indoctrination. Let's not forget, it's "irrespective of the opinion's merit".

Besides, just as you hold your "must be provable" views dear, similarly the religious parent holds his or her religious views dear.

I think there's a useful distinction between teaching a set of opinions that must be held regardless of evidence and teaching the practice of forming one's own opinions based upon evidence, but it's a tricky point to make.

I would say that the oposite is true. Brainwashing takes the same mecha isms that we use as humans to be able to learn our how to behave in the society, and how to learn to be a person. I have small kids and they are like empty disks looking for something to copy. They copy behaviours that sourround them and make them part of their personality.

Adults just slow down the writting but we always try to fit in the social group that we are living. And that includes political opinions, faith, etc...

We do this all the time, for example to immigrants. We call this integration in europe, you might also call this learning/internalizing the right values or assimilation.

And if I had to choose between that kind of Chinese brainwashing and Guantanamo/CIA black sites, I'll pick the Chinese option.

I'd take a good brain washing over torture too.

It could still move the person's mental state toward improved rationality.

Is this what "deprogramming" a brainwashed person is? Moving them from the position of their captors' propaganda to a position within the propaganda believed by an entire society?

Patriotism being one example of this type of propaganda -- the idea that some of us are better than others because we were born on one side of a line in the dirt.

This is why I find the concept of brainwashing/deprogramming fascinating from an epistemic perspective; you're essentially substituting one set of axioms for another. And it's often hard to determine who occupies the epistemic higher ground, since all camps will claim to do so. For example, liberals think Fox News is brainwashing people, and conservatives think academics at liberal schools are brainwashing people. Sometimes the only thing you can use to figure out what's true is secondhand knowledge (via a network of cognitive authorities that you've chosen to trust) plus your own judgment, which itself has inevitably been influenced by some set of chosen axioms.

And often each system of beliefs has epistemic protection against debunking... for example, religious believers may view debunkers as agents of evil/Satan, while conspiracy theorists may view debunkers as agents working on behalf of the conspirators. In both cases, one has a "rational" reason to be skeptical of (or even outright disregard) any arguments that attempt to undermine one's axiomatic system.

Humans seem to gravitate toward certainty and consistency the way moths fly toward light. It's an emotional craving, and in order to be rational we have to be exceedingly comfortable not knowing things (and realizing we often don't know what we don't know).

The more a person seeks the opiatic, emotional feeling of fake knowing, the more receptive he is to religion, political brainwashing, conspiracy theories, prejudices, social authority structures, etc.

Humans don't work the way you think they work. We don't hold sets of axioms and reason from them to build a logically consistent set of opinions in such a way that changing someone's axioms carries the whole weight of their belief system along with it, like making a code change in a shared dependency changes the behavior of an entire computer system. Humans are a lot messier than that.

So the beauty of brainwashing/deprogramming is how you actually manage to substitute those axioms, even though they may actually lead them to disregard everything you say. That's like inception from the outside!

If you have a mistaken belief, then the inverse of that belief is not necessarily correct. I find it hard to believe those soldiers were in a position - in a prison camp - to reliably determine whether America had used germ warfare, or to assess whether Communism had 'done a fine job in China.'

The reasonable perspective is that America isn't perfect, America can do wrong, and not everything America does is justified. The brainwashing occurs when you go past this reasonable perspective straight to: Communist China is perfect, America can only do wrong, and nothing America does is justified while everything the Communist Chinese do is.

And when you're comparing the US of 1950 to the Communist China of 1950, frankly, if the pro-US viewpoint is naive, the pro-Mao viewpoint is utterly deluded.

You still run into the kind of people who try to draw moral equivalence between the Japanese internment and Dachau to this day. I'm not saying this to deflect criticism, because I hold the US to a much higher standard than the rest of the world and the way to do that is to be critical. But coming to the conclusion that the US used chemical weapons in Korea (we didn't) or that Mao was a positive force for China in the 1950's (he wasn't) just because America falls short is a very long way on the opposite side of reasonable.