When American POWs came home from Korea — some having collaborated, a few having confessed to germ warfare, twenty-one having refused to return at all — a chorus of voices rose to explain what had gone wrong. And their explanation was not "the Communists tortured them." It was: our soldiers were weak. American culture had gone soft. Momma's boys, raised on comfort and liberalism, lacked the character to resist.1
Dimsdale calls these voices the "Job's comforters" — after the friends in the Book of Job who, seeing Job's suffering, insisted he must have brought it on himself. The Job's comforters of Korea looked at coerced, tortured, broken men and concluded the men were to blame. This page is about that blame narrative as a technique — because blaming the victim of coercion is not just cruelty, it's a specific rhetorical maneuver that serves specific purposes, and it recurs through the whole book, from Korea to the questions asked of Stockholm and Hearst survivors.
Three figures led the chorus, and their variations are worth distinguishing.
Edward Hunter, the "brainwashing" coiner, set the template at HUAC: American soldiers cooperated because they were soft, and the real disease was American liberalism and moral decay.2
Major William Mayer, an army psychiatrist, gave the blame a clinical veneer. Reviewing the POW files, he diagnosed the problem as "momism" — overprotective, smothering mothers who'd sapped their sons' maturity and independence. He toured the country describing why prisoners died in the camps: "They died because of some failures and lack of character… 'Giveupitis,' a disease of the passive, the dependent, the rather inadequate, the kid who was awfully insecure… who cried himself to sleep at night… who talked about his mother a lot. Who brooded."3
Journalist Eugene Kinkead, writing in the New Yorker, delivered the cruelest version. He asserted that American POWs didn't try to escape, that their discipline and loyalty were poor, that they had "the temerity to die in the camps." And he attributed the 38 percent death rate not to the Communists' brutal treatment but to "the ignorance or the callousness of the prisoners themselves."4
Read Kinkead's move carefully, because it's the blame narrative at its purest: the prisoners' death rate — the strongest possible evidence of how brutal their treatment was — is reframed as evidence of the prisoners' own weakness. The very fact that proves the Communists' cruelty is inverted into proof of American softness. That inversion is the technique's signature: whatever the victims suffered becomes evidence of their deficiency, not their tormentors' brutality.
Blaming the coerced isn't just gratuitous cruelty — it does specific work, and naming the work explains why the technique is so durable.
First, it protects the comforting illusion. If the soldiers broke because they were weak — soft, momma's boys, morally decayed — then I, who am strong, would not have broken. The blame narrative preserves the listener's belief in their own invulnerability. This is the deepest function, and it's why the narrative is so seductive: admitting that ordinary men broke under conditions that would break almost anyone (the DDD truth) means admitting you would break too, which is unbearable. Blaming the victims lets you keep believing you're exempt.
Second, it advances a political agenda. Hunter's and Kinkead's "American softness" diagnosis wasn't really about the POWs; it was a weapon in the culture war — an argument that liberalism, permissive child-rearing, and modern comfort had rotted the national character and needed to be purged. The broken soldiers were raw material for an indictment of American liberalism. The blame narrative converts a foreign atrocity into a domestic political brief.
Third, it deflects institutional responsibility. If the soldiers were weak, then the military (which trained them poorly, equipped them badly, and planned the war deficiently) is off the hook. Blaming individual character absolves the institution.
And the blame narrative is refuted by the simplest facts, which the comforters ignored. Mayer blamed "momism" and softness, but most POWs were about twenty in 1950 — raised during the Depression and World War II, hardly a "soft" upbringing, many having enlisted precisely to escape poverty. Kinkead claimed no Americans tried to escape, ignoring that the nearest neutral nation was Burma, two thousand miles away, and that Americans couldn't blend in with Koreans (even among 436,000 German POWs held in the United States during WWII, only twenty-eight escaped without recapture).5 The comforters' factual claims collapse on contact with the actual circumstances — but facts were never the point, because the blame narrative serves psychological and political functions that don't depend on being true.
You're confronted with people who were coerced, broke, and did shameful things under duress — and you want to blame them rather than face what the coercion reveals. Here's the Job's-comforter technique.
You reframe their suffering as their deficiency. Whatever they endured — collaboration, confession, even death — becomes evidence not of their tormentors' brutality but of their own weakness. The death rate that proves the camps were lethal? Proof the prisoners were callous and ignorant. Invert every sign of what was done to them into a sign of what was wrong with them.
You give the weakness a name and a cause that flatters your existing agenda. "Momism," "softness," "moral decay," "liberalism" — pick the cause that indicts the domestic targets you already wanted to attack, so that explaining the enemy's coercion becomes an argument for your politics.
You ignore the exculpating facts — the actual conditions, the real obstacles, the impossibility of escape — because facts were never the point.
What tells you the technique is doing its real work is the relief it provides your audience: the comforting conclusion that they would not have broken, because they're not soft, not momma's boys, not weak. You've protected everyone's illusion of invulnerability by locating the failure in the victims' character — which is exactly why the blame narrative is so seductive and so durable, and why it will be asked of every coercion survivor after: the Stockholm hostages, Patricia Hearst, the cult members. "Why didn't you resist? What's wrong with you?" is the Job's comforter's eternal question, and its function is always to reassure the questioner that they're exempt.
The evidence is the documented public statements of Hunter, Mayer, and Kinkead (the "momism," "Giveupitis," and callousness claims), the New Yorker essay and its expansion into a book, and the countervailing facts (the POWs' Depression-era upbringing, the impossibility of escape, the comparison German-POW escape rate). The blame chorus and its factual refutation are both on the record.
The tension the book preserves: the blame narrative was mostly wrong (the military's own careful analysis found the collaboration was produced by conditions, not character), but was it entirely wrong? Some soldiers did behave worse than others; individual variation in resistance is real (the lifelong-rebels data). The unresolved question: is there any legitimate role for individual accountability in coercion cases, or does invoking it always collapse into victim-blaming? The book's answer, developed through the military's own gradient-of-collaboration analysis, is that the honest position holds two things at once — conditions overwhelmingly determine outcomes (so most blame is misplaced), and individuals retain some agency at the margins (so not all responses are equivalent). The Job's comforters erred not by acknowledging agency but by making it the whole story, ignoring the coercive conditions entirely — which is what turns legitimate questions about responsibility into cruelty.
The Job's comforters are the blame-narrative counterpart to The Military's Empirical Counternarrative — the same Korean POWs, read two opposite ways. Where the comforters blamed character, the military's careful analysis found conditions, gradients, and DDD. The two pages are the era's argument in miniature: sensationalist blame versus careful evidence, and (as with Hunter versus the scholars) the blame narrative won the public.
It directly extends Hunter's "American softness" politics, and it's the same victim-blaming impulse the book will document being turned on the Stockholm survivors and Patricia Hearst — "why didn't you resist?" as the eternal comforter's question.
To psychology — The Ordinary Person Thesis. The Job's comforters are the ordinary-person thesis's direct antagonist — they insist breaking is about character (weak individuals), while the thesis insists it's about conditions (anyone breaks under enough DDD). The insight the pairing produces: the blame narrative isn't just factually wrong, it's motivated wrong — it exists precisely to defend against the ordinary-person thesis's unbearable implication. If ordinary people break under sufficient coercion, then I would break too, and blaming the victims' character is the psychological maneuver that lets me deny this. The comforter needs the soldiers to be weak, because the alternative (they were ordinary men in extraordinary conditions, and so am I) destroys his sense of personal invulnerability. This reveals victim-blaming as a defense mechanism at the level of a whole culture: the intensity of the Job's comforters' insistence on American "softness" is proportional to the threat the ordinary-person thesis poses to everyone's need to believe they're exempt. We blame the broken not because the evidence supports it but because we cannot bear the truth that we are made of the same stuff.
To behavioral-mechanics — scapegoating as a binding mechanism. The Job's comforters' scapegoating of the POWs served a social-cohesion function — uniting the healthy majority against the weak minority, reaffirming shared values (toughness, loyalty) by defining the broken soldiers as the deviant Other. The insight the pairing produces: blaming the coerced isn't only individual defense, it's collective boundary-maintenance — the community affirms "we are strong, loyal Americans" by casting out the ones who broke, converting the POWs into a scapegoat whose exclusion strengthens the group's identity. This connects the blame narrative to the broader mechanism by which groups manufacture cohesion through a designated Other: the twenty-one who wouldn't come home, the collaborators, the "soft" broke — these became the scapegoats against whom Cold War America defined its own toughness. And like all scapegoating, it required ignoring the scapegoat's actual circumstances (the coercion), because the scapegoat's function is symbolic (embodying the deviance the group defines itself against), not evidentiary. The Job's comforters needed villains to bind the community, and broken soldiers were conveniently available.
Sharpest implication: The Job's comforters looked at coerced, tortured, broken men and concluded the men were to blame — inverting every sign of what was done to them (the death rate, the collaboration) into a sign of what was wrong with them (softness, momism, moral decay). This victim-blaming isn't mere cruelty; it's a motivated defense against the ordinary-person thesis's unbearable implication that anyone breaks under enough coercion, including the person doing the blaming. The comforter needs the soldiers to be weak, because the alternative — they were ordinary men in extraordinary conditions, and so am I — destroys his illusion of invulnerability. "Why didn't you resist? What's wrong with you?" is the eternal comforter's question, asked of every coercion survivor after, and its function is always to reassure the questioner that they're exempt.
Generative questions: