The American University Meets Chinese Re-education Camps
People who've emigrated here from communist countries are increasingly shocked at the direction America is heading -- the elite America, on campuses. However, campus poison spills into the society at large, because college-educated elites largely make up the population of people in media, whether on TV, writing news or other articles, or writing the occasional op-ed.

At The American Mind, Habi Zhang writes:

As a teenager, I saw old-stone American university buildings on TV, and was enthralled by their dignified appearance. Later, I came across a book in my hometown that explained that the American university was a special place, unlike its Chinese counterpart, as devoted to the cultivation of the enduring longings of the human soul. To assist in man's hunger to know, to understand, and to seek truth, is its highest mission.

The longing for a spot in one of those buildings tormented me for decades. I longed to meet great minds and curious souls and explore the essential ideas with them. How could one not yearn for a place where students were challenged to think the unthinkable, to question convention, and to debate each other on ideas, when she had been imprisoned for years in the Chinese classroom where all subjects were stripped of all elements of beauty and imagination and left with only naked utility?

Two decades later, I sit in one of those buildings, having claimed my spot only to find that thinking is discouraged, dissent suppressed, and ideological loyalty is the prerequisite for flourishing in the institution of higher learning.

Last week, I was sitting in yet another equity meeting, listening to a reiteration of the principle that we must discriminate against some people in order to achieve equality of outcome. The instructor and attendants regurgitated phrases on educating oneself to promote diversity. "What are you doing to educate yourself on becoming an anti-racist?" has become a recurring question parroted in faculty meetings, job interviews, and graduate seminars. Superficially innocuous, this question is both unfounded and malign, postulating that one is in fact racist, and that this racism requires vigorous self-work to cure it.

Struggle Society

Self-education is a uniquely Maoist creation, originated in the Yan'an Rectification Campaign between 1942-1945. Lu Tingyi, the head of the Central Propaganda Office of the CCP, in a 1957 article commemorating the campaign, defined it as "a self-educational movement within the Party, a movement for ideological reconstruction". Maoist self-education typically involves thorough reading of a prescribed reading list, followed by criticism in mass forums and forced self-criticism, all to enforce conformity to the "correct mode of thought" while uprooting the "erroneous ideologies."

The Unanimity Imperative

Totalitarianism presupposes a final human utopia as well as a determination to bring it into being by any means possible. Total control of society is necessary to realize the utopia. Total control of society requires getting hold of the man in his entirety, which begets a seemingly eternal struggle between man's free will and the state's repression. To end this struggle necessitates the constant remolding of human beings in the image of the regime's ideology. This constant remolding of human thought is a never-ending revolution, as clearly exemplified in Mao's 27-year reign, which was marked with dozens of savage mass movements.

Thought control must start with children at the earliest possible age. The Hitler Youth, the Balilla, and the Young Pioneers all served this purpose. Hence, the educational system within the totalitarian regime must be transformed into an institution of indoctrination and training in the service of "making" communists or fascists or progressives. To instill a set of beliefs that cannot be questioned is the means to forge a general pattern of thinking in generations to come; for example, the belief that white people are inherently racist. Education is married to ideology, readily identifiable by the domination of official textbooks while censoring competing ideas, learning by rote, symbolic rituals, slogans--all to ensure that everyone thinks the same.

Totalitarian militants vow to "fundamentally transform" society and reconstruct reality into perfection. Because they see themselves as the embodiment of the revolution, any disagreement with their view is felt to be an existential threat to their righteous cause and even as violence against the state. Totalitarians have a passion for uniformity and unanimity, which are often delivered by lie, intimidation, forgery, or naked terror, with the help of propaganda, censorship, and PC tyranny. The goal is not to fabricate the appearance of justice but to squash the individual will to entertain alternatives and to resist indoctrination. No tyranny is more powerful and hence more detrimental to freedom than taking away the inner will to think.

...The demand for unanimity begets intolerance of dissent in a totalitarian regime because dissent is tantamount to blasphemy. To subject one social group to punitive measures, or as totalitarians would call it, re-education, is thus inevitable. The mere absence of opposition is not enough, positive action is demanded to demonstrate dedication to the totalitarian movement. Whoever is put under the grip of the regime must compete in loyalty to its ideology. Ideological politics won't stop until it destroys the existing society, as the Chinese Cultural Revolution has demonstrated, because nothing intoxicates the human soul like absolute power.

The havoc in culture and ethics caused by endless persecutions, denunciations, and false confessions, however, attests to a loss of humanity that carries a darker shadow. The loss of spirituality, human dignity, and interpersonal trust is profound and irrevocable. I saw this with my own eyes in the more than 30 years I lived in that crippled society.