Mao enacted a campaign called "Recalling Bitterness" to battle "lukewarm attitudes" about the socialist revolution
The regime forced people into rituals describing how bad life was before they had been "liberated," aim was to reshape memories of the past tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.11…
The communist regime appointed writers and artists to retell stories about class struggle "to suit the needs of different political agendas"
Officials of the state would often manipulate these stories, "there was a gradual blurring of the boundary between history and fiction"
Lin Biao (Minister of Defense) stated that "If the past bitterness is not understood, the present sweetness will be unknown. Some might regard today's sweetness as bitterness." The regime aimed to energize grievances to ensure revolutionary fervor did not die
Mao blamed the Great Famine (30M~ starved to death) and its resulting resentments among the survivors on a lack of revolutionary spirit among the people
Regime officials held meetings encouraging peasants to describe how much better life was now compared to "pre-liberation," hoping to convince them that "successes outnumbered failures."
"Only poor peasants were allowed to speak; former landlords and rich peasants were silenced."
Some communist officials would whisper disagreements about Mao's belief that "hatred and struggle" was a permanent and absolute pattern in class relations, and Mao's methods of relentlessly highlighting, distorting, and politicizing peasants' past suffering
The regime would collect "bitterness" reports from peasants which were carefully approved by high-ranking officials for dissemination. Even then, the recollections of bitterness were pretty mundane. Nothing comparable to starving to death or being tortured in a detention center
Important to remember the bad old days
Officials "reiterated the necessity of educating youths who had not experienced life in the old society. Due to their lack of life experiences in the dark old society...young people were vulnerable to the corruption of bourgeois ideology"
Regime newspaper said peasants were "deprived of the opportunity to learn 'correct' and 'scientific' historical knowledge and were largely misled by folklore fabricated by the exploitative class"
Regime viewed historical knowledge as an arena to wage war against "reactionaries"
The regime fabricated stories and published them as fact, including a bizarre myth about a female tenant-farmer locked in a landlord's "water dungeon"
In these stories, landlords & capitalists "were portrayed as extremely brutal and inhumane, particularly to women and children"
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To exempt themselves from the demands of adulthood, children of the WASP elite claimed to have "neurasthenia," a "neurotic despair" with symptoms like insomnia, irritability, anxiety, fear of responsibility, lethargy, an inability to make decisions amzn.to/3Dm3Fjx
Theodore Roosevelt suffered from neurasthenia as a young boy, "with the makings of a full-fledged neurotic." He ridiculed the softness of the upper class and overcame his fears by lifting heavy weights, boxing, rowing, mountain climbing, cowboying, and leading men into war
Women from rich WASP families were taught at colleges that they had undeserved privilege, and felt a "desperate wish" to atone and "do violence" to themselves to repent. They aimed to blend Christianity with Socialism & "delighted in the vast Russian experiment" in Communism
The upper class is perfectly okay with casting judgment on cigarette smoking and encouraging ppl to stop because it’s unhealthy
But they are unwilling to encourage marriage before having kids, even though single parenthood is also associated with detrimental health outcomes
Interesting that the upper class is okay with condemning cigarette smoking due to health risk but are reluctant to judge obesity. Moral fashions come and go
In the 1960s, 45% of Americans smoked and 10% were obese
"I make sure my mental software programming is always up to date"
Implicit in these comments is the fear of being "out of the loop."
Upper middle class people have apps on their phones that deliver bite-sized news items. They listen to the right podcasts and read the right periodicals, so they always know the talking points of the day
In the season 7 premiere of Mad Men, Freddy Rumsen pitches a TV ad of a young businessman who wears an expensive watch, and suddenly becomes the most interesting person in the room
Freddy says the tagline, “Accutron: It’s not a time piece, it’s a conversation piece.”
I was suspended, didn't do homework, detention, etc. Never had to repeat a grade, but I probably should have given how little effort I put in nypost.com/2020/02/08/how…
"one might expect that adopted children would do well in school...adoptive families tend to be better off financially than other families with children. This is partly due to self-selection and partly to the screening that adoptive parents must go through" ifstudies.org/blog/the-adopt…
“Beginning in the late sixties, Helmut Kentler, one of the most influential sexologists in Germany, placed neglected children in foster homes run by pedophiles. The experiment was authorized and financially supported by the government.” newyorker.com/magazine/2021/…
“Kentler was inspired by the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who had argued that the free flow of sexual energy was essential to building a new kind of society…Kentler came to believe that sexual repression was key to understanding the Fascist consciousness.”
“these foster homes were run by sometimes powerful men who lived alone and who were given this power by academia, research institutions and other pedagogical environments that accepted, supported or even lived out pedophile stances”
“the disintegration of the Soviet Union was one of the most astonishing events in modern history…The largest and most threatening empire in the world, with 5 million soldiers in Soviet garrisons from Budapest to Vladivostok, fell apart in just 6 years” nytimes.com/2002/01/20/boo…