Cult brainwashing vs mental conditioning

Somebody Shaw posted below (sorry I can't remember your first name):

'I can deal with strong mental conditioning, but brainwashing seems like a slippery slope.'

My question is, isn't mental conditioning a definition of brainwashing? Some people tend to think that brainwashing means a total wipeout of the mind with a new brain basically wired in -- so that the "brainwashed" person bears no responsiblity for his or her actions when under cult mind control. To me that seems like old reasoning and I'm not sure anyone really believes that, at least not any more. I don't know if that's the definition Shaw had of it, and I'm not saying that, but it does seem to be a popular misconception.

Maybe the term "brainwashing" itself is distracting and not useful to any disucssion on cult mind control. I think there were other intense pressures and "controls" and both kindagentler and Achieck have talked about them and spelled them out. In my view, there definitely WAS an attempt by the cult to "control" us, the members, and that attempt was systematic, intense and ongoing -- and in the case of the retraining camps, it was brutal and sometimes even drove people to the edge of sanity.

Forget the word brainwashing, but I think we'd be pretty hard-pressed to deny that there was a systematic and ruthless program by the cult leaders to form people into a mold and they used every tool at their disposal to gain control over people's minds: intense fear tactics, fear of losing children, fear of displeasing God and being killed by him as a result, intrusive reporting on yourself and other, public shamings, exorcisms, retraining camps, you name it. They found all the screws and applied them mercilessly to every pressure point they could.

To me that is a deliberate attempt to foist mind control on cult members.

However, mind control or not, those who committed crimes (even under intense pressure) still bear responsibility for those crimes. Believing you were under mind control explains a lot of the stuff that went down, but it is no excuse for crimes committed.