5 ms·

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every

• toxik 5y ago
  Whenever you think that you’re on the outside looking in, seeing the world for what it is while others seem blind, you should reconsider your perspective. The Chinese people is not some herd of sheep without mental faculties. I wince when I see quotes like these spoken about a people of literal billions.
  • roastytoasty 5y ago
    You do not know how easy it is to control mass populations. Open a history book
    • jaywalk 5y ago
      You don't even need to open a history book. Just open a newspaper.
      • slig 5y ago
        Just open the window and look outside.
  • wizzwizz4 5y ago
    > The Chinese people is not some herd of sheep without mental faculties. Have you read 1984? Neither are the Party members. (And also, the quote doesn't mention the people.)
  • nasmorn 5y ago
    The Chinese people will surely not write about the Americans like this. 1984 is banned there.
    • bildung 5y ago
      That's apparently wrong, and your comment thus a wonderful example of what toxik meant.
      • nasmorn 5y ago
        Apparently nowadays you can buy a physical book but not talk about it online. Guess my conclusion still stands.
      • notRobot 5y ago
        In-depth view into Chinese censorship: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/why-1984-and-animal-farm-arent-banned-china/580156/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/why-1984-a...
      • oolonthegreat 5y ago
        maybe not the book itself, but if you read the article you'll see that even weirder stuff are banned: The government disallows the publication of any work by Liu Xiaobo, the determined critic of the Communist Party who in 2017 became the first Nobel Peace Prize winner since Nazi times to die in prison. Again, for a time last year Chinese citizens could not type 19, 80, and four in sequence—but they could, and still can, buy a copy of 1984, the most famous novel on authoritarianism ever written. Prefer Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World? They can buy that text, too, just as easily, although its title also joined the taboo list last winter.
  • bostonsre 5y ago
    Do you know of any examples of descent against the government that ended well for those that spoke up? I highly doubt the people are sheep and I'm pretty positive I would act in the same exact way and keep my mouth shut in order to live my life if I was living in a country with an oppressive government.
    • flohofwoe 5y ago
      The collapse of the Eastern European socialist countries 30 years ago is an excellent example. But it only works when the general public had suffered enough and isn't willing to support the regime anymore. And the economic situation needs to get worse for one or two generations, it won't happen overnight and in a working economy. A few dissidents "speaking up" to incite change is a romantic idea, but it's not enough.
      • hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
        It's a kind of miracle it happened in most these countries without bloodshed. You need to mobilize large parts of society and have a favorable political situation to perform a coup like this without a civil war.
      • bostonsre 5y ago
        Yea, I meant in China but those examples you provided definitely illustrate how unlikely it will be to happen in China. It's pretty sad and I can't imagine having such a bleak future, especially for those that are more oppressed than others over there.
  • dpratt 5y ago
    So, should the outside observers who noticed the mass hysteria, death and destruction in Russia, Germany, Cambodia, Myanmar, Romania, Turkey and myriad other examples during the 20th century just have realized that they needed to "reconsider their perspective"? It's entirely possible, and in fact, highly probable, that entire mass groups of people can be manipulated into collective insanity quite easily. That doesn't make them sheep, it makes them Human, and it's up to us to be aware of this aspect of our collective psychology and point it out where visible.
  • bboygravity 5y ago
    Except the quote isn't criticizing people. It's criticizing the political party which is defined by 1 person. Not billions. The (Chinese) people are the victims in this.
  • bobthechef 5y ago
    I don't see anything in that quote that's specific to the Chinese in general. Most people make an at least intuitive distinction between individuals of an ethnic or national group and the ethnic or national group as an organized political entity. When we say "the Russians exterminated thousands of Polish officers in Katyn", obviously we don't mean every Russian exterminated Polish soldiers. When we say "the Germans exterminated millions of Poles", we don't mean every German was murdering Poles. We mean that the the Russians or Germans as organized political entities, led by certain people, perpetuated those crimes. Some individual Russians and Germans themselves payed for opposing such actions. Similarly with "the Chinese". That's why when there is animosity between two groups, the cautious presumption might be that someone of the other side is an enemy, but personal contact can reveal what their individual stances are and that they may differ from the political stance. FWIW, Americans themselves often suffer from a great deal of myopia and Americentrism, regardless of political leaning, and lots of people who lived under the boot of the Soviet Union who've moved to the US are sensitized to the subtler forms of psychological warfare the American public has been subjected to for decades.
  • inglor_cz 5y ago
    "The Chinese people is not some herd of sheep without mental faculties" Neither were inhabitants of all the other nations where totalitarian regimes seized power, but it did not help them. Totalitarian systems are really adept at controlling people. It is a matter of survival for them.
  • gmadsen 5y ago
    I'm beginning to think this is an intentional tactic made in bad faith. Criticisms of the CCP are not criticisms of Chinese people. This was used two years ago regarding the cover up by the CCP of the Wuhan Lab. Direct parallels can be seen in US discourse regarding the actions of the Israeli government being equated to antisemitism.
  • doodlebugging 5y ago
    >about a people of literal billions. I think that so far there, billion is singular since the population of China is only about 1.5 billion. The population growth rate is also in decline and has been for a while. One and a half billion is still a big number though.
  • dqpb 5y ago
    > The Chinese people is not some herd of sheep without mental faculties. Can Chinese people freely communicate with each other? The ability to do so is critical for unimpaired mental faculties of the collective.
  • CWuestefeld 5y ago
    Whenever you think that you’re on the outside looking in, seeing the world for what it is while others seem blind, you should reconsider your perspective. My wife's an immigrant, having grown up in Shanghai during the cultural revolution. She's got countless stories of how she was systematically lied to the entire time. For example, when she was little she was taught that children in America were largely starving too death, which the children of China were lucky that the leadership of Chairman Mao had brought them such bounty. My wife's family was systematically persecuted, in part because of their cosmopolitan exposure (her uncle was already in America, and her father was a sea captain traveling the world). Every member of her extended family, other than her grandmother, spent time in prison or work camps. I've read the forced "confession" documents from some of her family. All through this time, we know that China has been consistently suppressing information about the Tienanmen Square massacre, for example. While under Deng's regime the pendulum started to swing back toward freedom a bit, it's completely reversed again over the past several years under Xi. On a number of occasions my wife's own communications to her family in China have been filtered (e.g., postings on WeChat being removed after the fact, or email attachments being stripped out of messages). Your point that we need to be cautious about assuming that others are blinded while we have a unique ability to see the truth is well taken. But I think in this case it's really warranted.
    • killjoywashere 5y ago
      I wonder how much business Western cyber companies have with China? If I recall, the Great Firewall was actually started by a US company built out of either an IARPA or DARPA project. It wasn’t until many years later that DoD started using similar products, only then after they jailed (Shawn Carpenter).
  • javajosh 5y ago
    >The Chinese people [are] not some herd of sheep without mental faculties. Meta: sure doesn't take much bad faith to sour a good debate! "One bad apple spoils the bunch," they say. One of the two core ideas in 1984 is a) the extreme plasticity of the human mind, and b) that power finds its ultimate expression using that plasticity to cause suffering. The ruling society of 1984, the "inner circle", as represented by O'Brien, is highly self-aware (also, insane). The people, like Smith, are not sheep although he, like everyone else around him, must act like one on command, by threat of force. To characterize the victims of 1984 as sheep is miss the stunning evil of the antagonists, which is that they first found ways to make people act that way on a gross level, and who are now methodically finding ways to make them act that way on a subtle, universal level. Perhaps you, and rugged individualists like you, believe you wouldn't have anything to worry about under such a regime, and by extension if you accuse a population of actually suffering under such a regime, then it is an attack on them. I encourage you to consider the possibility that your hypothesis is wrong. Namely that you would not, by hypothesis, have survived the events of 1984. And that doesn't make you, or anyone, sheep.
    • justicezyx 5y ago
      The point in 1984 is that *everyone* can fall victim to mental manipulation, and an observer can discover the manipulation easily. Like American sees the hypocrisy of Chinese democracy, and, equally, Chinese seeing the hypocrisy of American one. They are virtually identical in the observation, and both sides can easily convince themselves of their own conviction. God, I only wish this time the leaders from the both sides are responsible ones, people like Trump on both sides can easily make wars in a wink of eyes with both sides seeing each other this way. The sideline point is that one is the worst judge of themselves...