Mao struggle session7/28/2023 Well, the CCP had their own “Two Minutes Hate” called dou di-zhou -“struggle against the landlords”-which lasted more than two minutes and involved real “enemies,” whose crime was not that they were necessarily landlords, but that they were better off than the rest. In these sessions, the participants are made to express their hate and fury by screaming and shouting at a film of their ideological enemy. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the citizens of Orwell’s fictional dystopia have to make their way daily to what is known as a “Two Minutes Hate” session. When, in 1927, the CCP began building its own armies and taking territory, the Party decreed that to get the peasants “to join the revolution, there is only one way: use Red terror to prod them into doing things that leave them with no chance to make compromises later with the gentry and bourgeoisie.” When the following year an army led by Zhu De was driven out of the territories it had taken (and razed), “thousands of civilians went with him.” They were “the families of the activists who had done the burning and killing,” and who thus “had nowhere else to go.” The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) implemented this on a grand scale. Those with only a tentative interest in an ideology can still change their minds and leave, but once they are coerced into committing a crime, parting ways no longer becomes an option. Just like a gang initiation-which is exactly what it was-the loyalty of the members of his secret group was sealed by the spilling of blood. In 1869, a radical by the name of Sergey Nechayev incited his group of underground revolutionaries to murder one of their own comrades. Dostoevsky’s novel Demons was inspired by such a wedge. Next, the party drives a wedge between the us and the them. Their new “key” gives them an inflated sense of understanding, makes them think that they are possessed of deep insights into the hidden workings of the world-insights to which the uninitiated masses are blind. An ideology thus acts as a kind of straight-jacket, restraining the thoughts of those who follow it by binding everything to a single cause and a single explanation. Once you accept the initial assumptions, everything else, every single event or process, can be explained through them, interpreted through them. The Nazis explained it as a struggle between races. For example, the communists explain history as a struggle between the working class and the capitalists. What she means by this is that ideology is a series of assumptions that explain the causes and direction of the process of history (and indeed the very assumption that history itself is a process that is going somewhere). An ideology is, in the words of Hannah Arendt, a kind of key to history. Totalitarianism begins the process by dividing the people into us and them, comrades and enemies, allies and foes. Whereas your run-of-the-mill tyrant might want to coerce the people into supporting him-or at least into not actively trying to dethrone him-a totalitarian ruler wants to eliminate free thought altogether and transform the people into an unthinking machine. Totalitarianism wants to break down your will to the point where compliance is no longer necessary, because you no longer have the capacity to resist. But totalitarianism doesn’t want you to comply. It won’t work because this course of action rests on a mistaken assumption that what totalitarianism wants is compliance. It may be tempting to think that you could survive a totalitarian regime by complying with its demands.
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