Thread by @ConceptualJames

In reading about Mao's reign in China in the 1950s, I was particularly taken by a concept and phrase I hadn't heard yet, one that the Communists used to absolutely devastate China and overthrow all resistance. They held meetings that were designed to "Speak Bitterness."

What would happen is that the Communists would come into a region or village and immediately place cadres and set up a nightly meeting everyone had to attend on various pains if they refused. They used them at first essentially as data mining operations with the people.

They would gather extensive biographical information on virtually everyone they could, sometimes quite detailed and including various misdeeds, cheats, and intrigues. They'd also start to use this biographical data to classify people into one of a few class categories.

Over the course of several weeks, the Communists would start the "Speak Bitterness" campaigns in the nightly meetings, encouraging everyone who held any grievances against their neighbors to speak out and air it all. The idea was explained as a way to get division out and open.

Villagers generally resisted the Speak Bitterness programming, and it would take the Communists several weeks to get people speaking bitterness against each other, or the nationalists, or whoever, but once they did, it was like breaking a dam. Everyone would start in.

Encouraged by the Communists, virtually everyone would start airing grievances against each other, if not proactively and voluntarily, in retribution for the grievances aired against them and the shame and humiliation that followed. Soon, everyone was trashing everyone.

The Communists frequently couldn't keep control over populations subjected to Speak Bitterness campaigns, which devolved into mass hatred, enmity, and often violence, if not murder, but they could direct the bitterness up the class hierarchy ladder consistently enough.

That is, the Communists could make the poor peasants hate the middle peasants, and the poor and middle peasants hate the rich peasants, even though the rich peasants might not have almost anything more than them (a second wok, a windowpane in their house, a little extra space).

As long as hate flowed up the artificial hierarchy, which didn't apply to most of the people it was applied to, the Communists were generally happy, although the violence and murder often broke out so badly that even the cadres were extorted to allow it to continue.

The result of "Speak Bitterness" was the utter destruction of entire communities, some that had worked peacefully together for centuries only to be torn apart in weeks by these nightly resentment campaigns of the Communists, all in the name of airing and settling all grievances.

Obviously, in the modern situation we find ourselves in, DEI training and the likes (especially "unconscious bias" training) is essentially "Speak Bitterness" campaigning in the guise of some kind of HR department instead of an openly Communist cadre forcing participation.

It's very difficult to comprehend the core purpose of DEI training and policies outside of the "Speak Bitterness" model once you are aware that it was a major programmatic campaign of the Maoist Communists in China in the 1950s. It has other purposes, sure, but this one's big.

This understanding is extremely frustrating because it immediately demonstrates that we never should have been doing it at all, but here we are. If we had learned about Maoist "Speak Bitterness" campaigns in history, we might have avoided most of the DEI damage.