Watch this phenomenal presentation by James Lindsey @ConceptualJames on the The politics of Compliance: The target is You!
— Edward Dowd (@DowdEdward) February 28, 2024
Presented at ICS at CPAC pic.twitter.com/g5n1p2YFrO
00:25. A quote from a lesser known dictator and that's Mao Zedong. In 1957, he not so famously said, "Not to have correct political opinions is like not having a soul." And I think that that is kind of a banner for the lives that we've been living for the last few years and that's very unfortunate but it's also very telling. My talk is titled, "The Target Is You." What I want to talk about is actually "The Politics of Compliance" is the name I've given this and it's actually derived from a strategy that Mao Zedong used, but to make the politics of compliance work the target is actually you. And I don't just mean you with the wrong political opinions who don't have souls. I mean everybody. There are generally three categories of people when it comes to the politics of compliance: 1) there are the people who are complying; 2) there are the people who are refusing, and 3) there are the people who aren't sure. And all three are targeted by the politics of compliance roughly the same way with the same Dynamic the goal is of course to get the compliant to feel better than everybody else but also frustrated with everybody else it is to convince those who are not sure to join the programming to begin to comply and it is to use the people who refuse to comply as the wedge around which the entire thing turns. In fact, it's to dehumanize them and motivate the other two groups to try to destroy them. So Mao Zedong simply took over China with a very small number of conceptual concepts that I'm lumping together in what I'm calling the politics of compliance. He separated the population into two broad categories I just mentioned. I just mentioned three, well he cut it into two. It was an oversimplification, and those two categories are the people, and the enemies of the people. Not to put too fine a point on it, that's what he called them: the people and the enemies of the people. And what he said is who are the people? Well, he gives this kind of historical record in 1957 as to who counted as the people, and when. And there's a consistent running theme through his 8 or 9 different examples of different historical periods of the Chinese story, whether it's the Japanese or the Sino-Japanese War, the second one, whether it's the period of building socialism after he took power in 1949, whether it's during his 1st, 2nd, or 3rd-Year Plan, and the examples all have the single theme of THE people are the people who agree with Mao, and THE ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE are the people who don't agree with Mao. And it turns out to be really that simple the people at the period of building socialism are those who support the building of socialism and the enemies of the people are those who resist the building of socialism. He says it explicitly that clearly.
3:20. And this sets up a dynamic I think the best name for it is Hatecraft, and here is how it works. The goal of this split is to say that there is a correct perspective on all things, a sacred science (see #5), as Robert [Jay] Lifton described it, and that's called The People's perspective, or at least it was in China. We could call it whatever, "the critical race perspective on Race"; we could call it "the queer perspective on sexual politics"; we could all imagine a bunch of examples under COVID, "the public health perspective," I guess would be the right name for it. I see Red Hats in the crowd, you're not allowed to have those. That's the deplorable side of a different perspective. But this is the general idea. There are people who do the right thing. There are people who do the wrong thing, and the goal is to bring people into the people's perspective, which is also called agreeing with the tyranny.
4:10. And what you do in order to achieve this idea is that you separate the population into two broad categories, The People and The Enemies of the People. And then you say,
What we want is unity. We want Unity but there are certain elements in the population who are preventing us from unity and moving into the future that we can be having, and it's their fault. The people want to move forward, and the enemy of the people is stopping them. The people want to open their businesses and go back about their lives, but the people who won't wear masks or take a shot or socially distance or close down their lives or whatever else in the COVID department, are stopping them. We want to open the country back up, but we can't because there are anti-vaxxers. They are the problem.
That is hatecraft.
