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I wanted to say that what you say seems to confirm your claim regarding your past. But the last thing you stated makes me wonder. It's not that I'm calling you a liar; it's just that you seem to gloss over one of the most important aspects of totalitarian systems. The things is, nobody who's actually lived through such an incredibly repressive system for any length of time would say "you can imagine" (speaking to someone who is presumed to never have experienced it themselves), because it is inherently something very very difficult to imagine, as an outsider; and it's not a matter of intelligence, because so much of it amounts to the manipulation of raw instinct and human nature. If it were any other way, then Maoist "Struggle Sessions" could be completed in hours or days, rather than taking weeks and months--and including stages of change that have to be completed before moving on (and, conversely, the manufactured fear of inadvertent regression in a moment of "temporary insanity" being a significant driver of the process) . The process ("struggle," meaning a process that is explicitly laborious at each step) of "reeducation"
(brainwashing) is a topic that entire books have been written about. One such book, by Robert Lifton, contains interviews with American soldiers captured in NK and Chinese dissidents who were subjected to brainwashing by the Mao Zedong regime, called "Thought Reform and the Psychology of a Totalism" (the claim that merely addressing this subject at all is "sinophobic" is actually one of the integral steps in the administration of a struggle session; calling someone"racist" or "sexist" in similar circumstances, likewise). I'll end this comment by reiterating its central tenet: there is a reason they were called struggle sessions, not "moments of insight." It's a process, rather than a realization. If you read 1984, then the description of the events in room 101 give you a l crude understanding of the process, but written by someone who might be deemed a B-/C+ scholar of the subject: having internalized the process in its entirety and having a general understanding of the process (so they could be a facilitator of it, perhaps), but without the full appreciation of the psychological significance of each stage (I.e. insufficient to be an "architect," or someone capable of optimizing a process they themselves do not fully understand). To his credit, Orwell does a not too bad job of explaining the mechanism of brainwashing to a layman audience; but--and especially if you've read the book yourself--there are aspects in it that remain intellectually obtuse, or counterintuitive. PS: I concede, it is perhaps possible to have lived in a totalitarian system, without ever experiencing a struggle session in person. It's after all a fairly intensive process and therefore mostly reserved for political prisoners. For example, the NKVD in Soviet Russia didn't mass arrest people to subject them to struggle sessions (something written about in detail by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Gulag Archipelago)--it mass arrested people and shipped them off to Siberia. PPS: I forgot to add, one example of a modern implementation of Struggle Sessions is the so-called "Cancel Culture." Conversely, watch the stages the person being publicly "cancelled" undergo, beginning with refusal and rejection (correct), but then transitioning to admission (incorrect, because they are more often than not not guilty of what they're accused of, they merely want the pain to end and for things to return to normal, which is a normal and sane human desire; where they go wrong is in assuming that once they cave, things will go back to normal; if, by "normal," they mean release, then read what happens after Winston Smith is released) and finally concluding with profound, heartfelt apology, and subsequent loss in their previous standing/authority, since they just admitted to the (mostly fabricated) crimes they were accused of (incorrect, because they were dragged through the mud and admitted to manufactured crimes). Come to think of it, Cancel Culture is actually a pretty optimal form of Struggle Sessions. Mao would be proud, especially after learning where this was taking place. |