- Thread starter
- #41
10. The thought-police will never allow any to survive who do not bend to their will. You must claim to agree with every fallacy about gender, about racism, about police that they deem correct….even when they do a 180° turn the next day.
This is totalitarianism.
And it has all been done before.
"The Party’s all-around intrusion into people’s lives was the very point of the process known as “thought reform.” Mao wanted not only external discipline, but the total subjection of all thoughts, large or small. Every week a meeting for “thought examination” was held for those “in the revolution.” Everyone had both to criticize themselves for incorrect thoughts and be subjected to the criticism of others.
The meetings tended to be dominated by self-righteous and petty-minded people, who used them to vent their envy and frustration; people of peasant origin used them to attack those from “bourgeois” backgrounds. The idea was that people should be reformed to be more like peasants, because the Communist revolution was in essence a peasant revolution. This process appealed to the guilt feelings of the educated; they had been living better than the peasants, and self- criticism tapped into this. Meetings were an important means of Communist control.
Every time she went home she found herself being criticized. She was accused of being “too attached to her family,” which was condemned as a “bourgeois habit,” and had to see less and less of her own mother.
The Communists had embarked on a radical reorganization not just of institutions, but of people’s lives, especially the lives of those who had “joined the revolution.” The idea was that everything personal was political; in fact, henceforth nothing was supposed to be regarded as “personal” or private. Pettiness was validated by being labeled “political,” and meetings became the forum by which the Communists channeled all sorts of personal animosities. My father had to make a verbal self-criticism, and my mother a written one."
Chang, "Wild Swans"
This is totalitarianism.
And it has all been done before.
"The Party’s all-around intrusion into people’s lives was the very point of the process known as “thought reform.” Mao wanted not only external discipline, but the total subjection of all thoughts, large or small. Every week a meeting for “thought examination” was held for those “in the revolution.” Everyone had both to criticize themselves for incorrect thoughts and be subjected to the criticism of others.
The meetings tended to be dominated by self-righteous and petty-minded people, who used them to vent their envy and frustration; people of peasant origin used them to attack those from “bourgeois” backgrounds. The idea was that people should be reformed to be more like peasants, because the Communist revolution was in essence a peasant revolution. This process appealed to the guilt feelings of the educated; they had been living better than the peasants, and self- criticism tapped into this. Meetings were an important means of Communist control.
Every time she went home she found herself being criticized. She was accused of being “too attached to her family,” which was condemned as a “bourgeois habit,” and had to see less and less of her own mother.
The Communists had embarked on a radical reorganization not just of institutions, but of people’s lives, especially the lives of those who had “joined the revolution.” The idea was that everything personal was political; in fact, henceforth nothing was supposed to be regarded as “personal” or private. Pettiness was validated by being labeled “political,” and meetings became the forum by which the Communists channeled all sorts of personal animosities. My father had to make a verbal self-criticism, and my mother a written one."
Chang, "Wild Swans"
