Soviet Cancellation

The American Mind ^ | 04/26/21 | Katya Sedgwick

[PoliticallyShort]

Like the KGB, the woke know that everyone has a breaking point. They are trained to push their victims until they snap. In the Soviet Union, we learned to silently endure official meetings, eyes glued to the floor, heavy sighs suppressed, hoping for some fresh air and a smoke when it was all over. The state seemed indestructible. But when it became possible to speak the truth again in the mid-’80s, the whole rotten apparatus quickly collapsed.

The woke have no winning arguments: contra their assertions, white skin does not confer guilt, America was founded in 1776, and there are two sexes, male and female. Woke writers, like Ibram X. Kendi, are notoriously ineloquent and unpersuasive. The power of the woke comes not from better ideas, but the institutions which they occupy, plus the number of faithful they can summon for a verbal mobbing. They can only win when they isolate a victim, and shout at him from a position of power. Americans have more leeway than Soviets, and should speak out when possible. But for those of us who seek to rehabilitate the cancelled, it’s important to recognize how demoralizing struggle sessions can be for normal folks. That’s the point of them: they hit you where you live...

[Gene Eric]

Nobody watches the Oscars, then suddenly Woke gets widely condemned?

[dfwgator]

I don’t think it was about wokeness as much as there were so few movies made last year, and nobody was familiar with most of the movies that were nominated.

[IYAS9YAS]

I’m currently watching Chernobyl on a Hulu two-week free HBO subscription. So far, the first two episodes really do show just how poorly the socialist system apparatchiks were at anything but exerting power based on rank.

[AZJeep]

Cancelation was invented by Khrushchev/Brezhnev.
Mao perfected the art of cancelation - the enemies of the people were forced to sit/stand on busy corners with signs around their necks explaining their sins. Every passerby was supposed to spit on them and call them names. Most of them got crazy and expired quickly. Terror!

[glorgau]

"Struggle sessions" - oppression by another name. They think they're doing an intervention on you.

For tips on how to counter them, there is the classic How to Ace an Intervention | Modern Drunkard Magazine

[sauropod]

.

[sonofagun]

Sorry Katya, but the US woke generation is not familiar with the Soviet Union. As such, knowledge of their tactics is meaningless.

As for the rest of us, we’re very aware of the similarities.

Thank you for the reminder from someone who has lived it.

[Secret Agent Man]

to quote a once popular movie,

“Its a trap!”

[x]

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
--- Theodore Dalrymple

[kiryandil]

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity

This is why that little punk georgie steponallofus tried to force Rand Paul to say the election was clean.