It's the term to describe the phenomenon. It isn't rational behaviour. It has become something regarded with suspicion I think, because of its association with Hitler's speeches. Mostly it is harmless, and as I said, no-one is immune to it. There may even be some benefit from it.
Why wouldn't it be? Being dull, sitting on the couch watching tv, eating popcorn and drinking beer - this is the desired human way to be?
Pretty much.. And with the declaration of the period of mourning, the leadership has banned any form of celebration for the time being. The footage we are seeing is somewhat disturbing though. Because it all seems so contrived and staged managed.
Why? Is Alex sick? He looks pretty healthy to me in his facebook photo, and not too bad for his age, but he does have a sarcastic half grin.
I expect it of Gedanken. She has SED syndrome. Severe Empathy Deficit. Other people should know better.
Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please. Are you attempting to point out things that you find to be politically incorrect, in order to minimize your own recent activity, Captain, activities that could potentially have real life consequences?
Bells, Geoff beat me to it, but doesn't your repeated usage of "brainwashed" kinda kick your argument square in the nuts? By the way, did you know that Stalin was adored by his people? Kruschev started the ball rolling on the end of the willingness of the Soviet people to sacrifice to a good cause by revealing to them the atrocities committed by their hero. Gorbachev pounded the nail in the USSR's coffin with further acts of honesty. Just as a curiousity, who killed and opressed more people? Joseph or Il? To elaborate further on this theme should be wholly unnecessary, I'd hope.
Didn't he buy his plot of radioactive East Korean vertical rice field on a train? Great place fer killin' thems as needs killin'.
I put Geoff on ignore. So I wouldn't know what Geoff beat you to. As for being brainwashed kicking my argument in the nuts. How so? The NK's are conditioned to praise and react like this because they know if they do not, it will be frowned upon. It happened when Il's father passed away, where reports were made of citizens who did not show enough emotion. There is an element of brainwashing and also fear, especially for those who live outside of the capital and are not deemed the favourites of the leadership. Those in the capital cry and wail because if they do not, they can lose their freedom or life at worst or be removed from the capital and placed amongst the other classes, losing what little privilege they have. So wail they do. That is what I meant by brainwashing. If you look at it, it is very staged managed to show the biggest and frankly worst reaction in my opinion.. (throwing body to the ground as a prime example).. He was adored as much as he was hated. The millions of people he had killed and their families I am sure would not have adored him. Nor did the farmers adore him. He was adored by the rank and file of the party because of his victory in the revolution and war and because he forced an industrial revolution in the former USSR. And any who did not adore him or disagreed with him were purged. You answered your own question in your next post. Joseph is estimated to have killed approximately 23 million. Mao is estimated to have killed anywhere from 45 - 80 millions people. Hmmm /Pat..
Yes, a friend of mine who is teaching in Japan joked about this rumour to me yesterday in an email.. That he was killed by his son in a coup or something the like..
What you are describing (people knowingly engaging in pretense to further their rational, immediate self-interest) is the exact opposite of brain-washing. Brain-washing is when your internal beliefs and values have actually been altered. Not just where you outwardly pretend that they have, for whatever rational reasons. If people are doing this as a theatrical display of false political allegiance, then they cannot be brainwashed. If they're brainwashed, then they're doing it for real. The scary thing about NK is that major portions of the population have been subject to pretty tight information isolation, constant propaganda, and vigorous discipline for a long time. Literally, generations. While I'd expect that the first generations of Koreans subject to this totalitarianism participated in the way you describe - as an act of political theater, undertaken for rational reasons of self-preservation - it is unclear that generations born decades later have any such critical distance. The whole point of totalitarianism is to literally make subversive ideas unthinkable, not simply to repress their expression. The way that works in NK has been to make the Dear Leader the central object of all expressions - not just political ones. Like any cult leader, the goal is to be omnipresent in the minds and consciousnesses of the subjects. And so the death of such a leader does cause real grief: not because people literally believe the propaganda, per se, but because their entire system for understanding and relating to the world is built around the Leader's role. For him to die does real violence to the psyches and identities of the subjects, quite indepeapart from how it figures into their material and political circumstances. Totalitarianism infantilizes the subjects - think of the reaction as that of a small infant who is alarmed and frightened by the unexpected absence of his mother, rather than as that of an adult undertaking a rational calculation of political and material interests.