Such a swift and merciless crackdown on dissent is yet another example, as Michael Totten said in the passage quoted by Allahpundit on the previous page, why a left-wing totalitarian government finds it “critically important that everyone who hates the government feels like they’re the only people who do so.” Otherwise, what Glenn Reynolds dubbed a “preference cascade” in 2002 risks kicking in and overwhelming the regime:
Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it — but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.
This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers — or even to the citizens themselves. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they’re also often true: Even if one loathes the regime, few people have the force of will to stage one-man revolutions, and when preferences are sufficiently falsified, each dissident may feel that he or she is the only one, or at least part of a minority too small to make any difference.
AdvertisementOne interesting question is whether a lot of the hardline Arab states are like this. Places like Iraq, Syria, or Saudi Arabia spend a lot of time telling their citizens that everyone feels a particular way, and punishing those who dare to differ, which has the effect of encouraging people to falsify their preferences. But who knows? Given the right trigger, those brittle authoritarian regimes might collapse overnight, with most of the population swearing — with all apparent sincerity — that it had never supported them, or their anti-Western policies, at all.
Perhaps we should think about how to make it so.
Of course, it also helps to think about what happens afterwards, otherwise we wind up with what we’ve seen throughout the Middle East with Iraq, Afghanistan and the so-called Arab Spring. But in a way, we can’t: in 1945, we had the societal confidence to reshape postwar Germany and Japan in our image, a confidence we’ve lost as our own left made their long march through our own institutions beginning in the 1960s.
(Thumbnail on PJM homepage by Shutterstock.com.)
The Left has really gotten really crappy at being surreal, and have been for a long time.
I wonder if this analysis applies to the lockstep Black support for Obama? Could that collapse as catastrophically?
Along similar lines, I was wondering how many elections we will have to go through before the conservatives in this country toss out the RINOs once and for all.
And no, Luap Nor is not the answer, either!
The left’s control of education is now so complete that even the core of the RNC, those responsible for appointing and approving candidates, as well as their own numbers, are under their control.
So don’t expect anything but RINOs from being appointed by the GoP as candidates anywhere until 2-3 generations after right thinking people take back control over the educational system and stop the left wing indoctrination of children which now starts at kindergarten and daycare centers.
That looks like a lot of well preserved old Cadillacs. Only the best for Dear Leader.
“It’s critically important that everyone who hates the government feels like they’re the only people who do so.”
That’s also the primary purpose of PC speech codes. Our liberal friends have learned well at the feet of their Stalinist teachers.
“Who’s the intended audience?”
In answer to Allah’s question, I would say that the intended audience is the NoKo political and military leadership. I can only imagine the fear many people have of being the ONE person in the crowd who didn’t cry quite hard enough:
“Oh no, there are the video cameras. I have to wail harder! Otherwise the Secret Police will watch the video and see that I’m not beating my chest and collapsing with grief as much as everyone else! They’ll come for me in the night, and my family will disappear into the gulag. No one will ever see us again!”
I doubt many of the North Koreans care so much about what the outside world thinks of their overall display as they do what their own government thinks about each individual display.
It’s the most pitiful, cultish case of Stockholm syndrome on this scale that we’ll ever see (I hope). so you have not watched grown men throwing kisses at Hugo Chavez?or another one showing his testicles ( yes, like a monkey)to the opposition to Chavez? or women crying because, finally they see hugo chavez person to person?
We have our own “Stockholm syndrome” problem with people here in the US. They’re called Progressives and Democrats.
Watching that funeral video really creeped me out. One really must wonder what purpose the video serves…it really escapes me what the N. Korean government if trying to accomplish. But I’ll say this: the mourners all look very well nourished, which is surprising considering all the reports of starvation. Also, that funeral limo is really very nice. I would have thought that the N. Korean government only had those crappy little cars like the ones from 1960′s East Germany. Also, the soldiers were all so sharply dressed and precise in their marching, which is strange when one considers all the recent reports of declining moral within the miliraty ranks. And the buildings in the background were all so cosmopolitan looking, in a sort of Asian way. You know, maybe things aren’t as bad in N. Korea as the Western media is telling us. I mean, the west is techinically still at war with N. Korea and there is a huge army of Americans right over the border. And Japan is right off the coast. I don’t know…..
“One really must wonder what purpose the video serves…it really escapes me what the N. Korean government if trying to accomplish.”
You answer your own question with the rest of your comment, summed up by this statement: “You know, maybe things aren’t as bad in N. Korea as the Western media is telling us.”
That’s what the NoKo government wants to accomplish by showing “well fed” mourners and “nice” cars (actualy a 1960′s era Lincoln). They want to make outsiders believe that it’s really “not so bad.” More importantly, they want their own people to think things are pretty good. That’s what dictatorships do.
North Korea is hell on Earth. What you see is what they want you to see. What they don’t want you to see is never seen.
I do believe LE was waxing sarcastic there.
None of what happens in North Korea makes sense without an understanding of the culture there. That culture has in recent years been changed to incorporate the Religion of Kim. With its own mythology and dogma, that has become the state religion. The crying is part of the old Korean culture as enhanced by the state religion. Here’s what a North Korean defector in Seoul said:
A twenty-four minute YouTube video from Aljazeera analyzes some of the current goings-on and speculates about the future of the regime under Kim Jong-un and the regional implications.
Another fine example is the awakening in Romania that everybody hated Ceaușescu. That appears to have occurred in the space of two days. Justice was swift (but fair).
Remember the paid mourners of classical times?
This is why the Internet is so valuable, because with it you can find out you are not the only classical liberal living in Hollywood.
“This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared…”
This is precisely why “Faux News” enrages the Left to the point of apoplexy.
Their long march through our institutions (as you put it, Ed) was made to specifically capture our institutions of public thought and discourse: schools and academia, government bureaucracy, entertainent,the arts, and the mainline clergies. When everywhere you turned — school, government, movies, books, televison — spouted the leftest line in lockstep, conservatives were browbeaten into silence and submission. Isolated like a North Korean dissident.
Sure, there were a few Samizdat conservative outlets (magazines like National Reivew, talk radio, web sites), but they could be dimissed by the leftst monolith as “fringe” or “extreme.” Fox News can’t, because it hoists the Left on their own petard.
The Left’s primary propaganda weapon are television images. Vietnam, Watergate hearings, LBJ’s “daisy” ad … their greatest victories came from skillful manipulation of television dating all the way back to the McCarthy hearings. For them, it is their forced-fed opium for the masses, their primary means of control. The monolith that must be protected at all costs.
Fox News affects them more than it actually does conservatives, because, caught in their own web of image propaganda, it’s the one medium that they consider real. “Those conservative rubes in flyover country are going to see this! They’ll realize they’re not alone!”
Even Limbaugh wasn’t considered a real threat until he started doing that silly little late-night syndicate TV show. That’s when the Left started paying real attention to him.
I disagree. The left – excels – at the surreal.
Their actions perfectly reflect their detachment from reality.
The funeral videos come from Pyongyang, where residence is generally limited to those loyal to the Kim Regime. Life there for the elite can be pretty good. This is not to say that mourning is less intense in the provinces, because I don’t know. Still, it seems safe to assume that what we see is generally what the North Korean government wants us to see.
Some people also cry at weddings.
If you are married to the mob, you better shed a tear so as not to appear subversive.
Now, if Seinfeld had made out during the funeral procession, that would be more dangerous than making out during Schindler’s List.
Durng and immediately after periods of extreme tension, people can burst out in emotions of crying…or laughing. Nobody would be executed for crying at this procession. The emotional release is cathartic. Now…back to the extreme tension.
“Who’s the intended audience?”
It must be people like the media, Ted Turner and Jimmy Carter – useful idiots who visit schitholes like NoKo and come back babbling effusively about how wonderful the smell is. Maybe the scumbags who run the place think if they dupe the easily-duped political class, the rest will follow along. If they read the comments to the internet media articles instead of the articles themselves, they would quickly be disabused of that idea.
I see no reason not to believe that most of the NoKo tears are genuine. Bewailing the king when he dies is traditional in most hierarchical cultures, and has been incorporated into the Religion of Kim. People have besides a real cause for tears: Kim Jong Il kept things stable; things might get worse now. However bad things are, they can always get worse.
Allahpundit should stick to what he knows about instead of speculating about what he doesn’t know about. Filtering East Asia through a Western perspective is not a good idea. Hasn’t he figured out that North Korea doesn’t care how its internal affairs look to its enemies? Derbyshire is partially right, but for the wrong reasons.
People who have a greater interest in North Korea and who pay closer attention aren’t so sure all those tears are real.
http://ampontan.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/altered-states/
“Allahpundit should stick to what he knows about instead of speculating about what he doesn’t know about. ”
Hey, the entire Blogosphere would instantly grind to a halt if that was the rule.
Cry or die, Norks.
Love Michael Totten, But the line is from Aristotle’s the Politics – roughly put the way for a tyrant to stay in power is to fill the society with spies so no one can trust each other. Thus every individual is one person alone facing the might of the state.
This also explains the tears, stage managed or not: the cult of personality demands that the relationship outlined by Aristotle above is not with the state, but a person or symbol of the state: in this case Kim jong il. Is it surprising that the removal of one is a traumatic event for many of the people raised in such a totalitarian dystopia? Tears come from many sources – unconditional love is not required, indeed such emotions are impossible to naturally occur under a totalitarian systems.
The scenes in Pyongyang remind me of the opening scene of ‘Boris Gudunov’ All that is lacking are the streltsi walking about with their knouts, saying to the silent, “Why are you resting your voices?” Are the NorKs in Pyongyang resting their tear ducts?
“Sophie Scholl: The Final Days,” which you mentioned, is indeed an excellent movie. There is also an earlier film, “The White Rose,” which I think is actually even a little better.