Dirty Laundry & Brainless Washing

Slate, Jan 2002: "Believing in brainwashing allows us to consider our own (Christian) religious beliefs normal, even rational, while allowing us to dismiss Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and Scientologists as zombies. We can feel sorry for them and still go to church on Sunday... If anyone has been brainwashed, it’s the millions of Americans who still view new, radical, or unusual religions as “cults” and their leaders as masters of mind control." -- Dahlia Lithwick


The claim of "Brain Washing" is not new in legal history and has been THOROUGHLY DISCREDITED by both academia and in the courts. Except for extreme circumstances of physical confinement during war and only for the duration of imprisonment, the "penguin made me to do it" plea is no longer considered even funny, leave alone a credible escape route for criminals.
Dirty Laundry cannot ascribe to “brainwashing” her oh-so-unbelievable yarn as to why she continued promoting the Gurukul MONTHS after she left the ashram and why she waited more than a YEAR - till the exact month when official investigation started into her criminal acts of sexual abuse and attempted murder - to come out with her made up stories of beatings of Gurukul Kids. Cognitive dissonance - the big-word she uses in her video - just means insane. Except when you cannot claim the insanity defense you try to blame it on someone else - aka brain(less) washing.
Dahlia Lithwick in the article below explains why this theory of voluntarily getting brainwashed is absurd pseudo science and hardly a legal defense in the modern times.
In U.S. v. Fishman, a California federal criminal action in which a defendant put forth an insanity defense in a mail fraud case, alleging that he’d been brainwashed by the Scientologists. The judge tossed the brainwashing testimony, holding that the views did not represent the consensual view of the scientific community.
More and more, the idea of brainwashing is dismissed by courts as either Cold War hysteria or the anti-cult mania of the ‘70s and ‘80s. With their new affection and tolerance for “new religious movements” and a dearth of empirical evidence that evil geniuses can force innocents to do what they would not normally do.
It requires a long, airy leap of logic to believe that a subject released from physical restraint will continue to obey the commands of her captors for protracted periods of time.

Believing in brainwashing allows us to consider our own religious beliefs normal, even rational, while allowing us to dismiss Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and Scientologists as zombies. We can feel sorry for them and still go to church on Sunday
In the terror trials of 2002, defense attorneys will be hard pressed to find a judge who will still recognize a second-generation brainwashing specialist as an expert or a brainwashing expert who would even testify that Bin Laden can remotely control the minds of thousands of innocent young men. We must try these terror cases free from the patronizing assumption that strange, even crazy beliefs are necessarily products of illness or undue influence
If anyone has been brainwashed, it’s the millions of Americans who still view new, radicalized, or unusual religions as “cults” and their leaders as masters of mind control.

Cult leader Sarah's revelation


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