You know you have full spectrum dominance well in hand when you have to teach people the truth about history in order for them to even be able to censor and erase history from existence. That's seriously how good China has brainwashed and manipulated their citizens.
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It's fucking scary shit if you think about. This is exactly what 1984 predicted. It's like 1984 was made to mimic communist politics. The "Party" was the name for the government that had people like Winston Smith work to erase documents from existence. Documents would be found that contradicted the current narrative of the "Party". Then Smith would dump the documents down the memory hole to be erased. Anyone who spoke in contradiction to the "Party" and it's fabricated history by upholding the truth would risk being persecuted and killed.
Well the New York Times recently published a piece on China's strikingly similar censorship and history erasure program. Technology is paramount for the execution of this control of the past to ensure dominance of the present and future:
hina has built the world’s most extensive and sophisticated online censorship system. It grew even stronger under President Xi Jinping, who wants the internet to play a greater role in strengthening the Communist Party’s hold on society. More content is considered sensitive. Punishments are getting more severe.
Once circumspect about its controls, China now preaches a vision of a government-supervised internet that has surprising resonance in other countries. Even traditional bastions of free expression like Western Europe and the United States are considering their own digital limits. Platforms like Facebook and YouTube have said that they would hire thousands more people to better keep a handle on their content.
Workers like Mr. Li show the extremes of that approach — one that controls what more than 800 million internet users in China see every day. Beyondsoft employs over 4,000 workers like Mr. Li at its content reviewing factories. That is up from about 200 in 2016. They review and censor content day and night.
“We’re the Foxconn in the data industry,” said Mr. Yang, comparing his firm to the biggest contract manufacturer that makes iPhones and other products for Apple.
Li Chengzhi is one worker in these factories, and he didn't even know about the Tiananmen Square crackdown that he needed to censor and erase information about. He had to be taught the truth in order to erase it. That's how effective the Chinese control of their populace is. This poor sap was already a successful mind controlled slave to the Chinese government. Now he helps to create more brainwashed fools like himself.
The future will be full of people who don't know history, and won't even know they are being lied to. This isn't just for China. We already have people who don't even care to learn about what happened, and just accept the mainstream version.
But the threat of the truth is still out there. Facebook and YoutTube have already begun the censorship wave in the Western world as they crackdown on counter-establishment narratives that upset the apple cart of "authoritative" doctrine about what has happened.
The effort to remove inaccurate, misinformation or disinformation through authoritative measures of censorship is a segway into greater control of information and what is allowed to be put "out there". Big tech will be followed by big government who will mirror what China is doing. We're all slowly being boiled in water, and many don't see the cage closing around us.
Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.
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A little scoop from the inside (from someone who has been living in China since 2008). I've taught at various levels here (esp. middle and high school).
First, a quick fact/observation. Roughly 70% of the entire internet is inaccessible from China without a VPN (which speaks volumes).
Oddly, Wikipedia Chinese version is banned while the English version is commonly (but not always) accessible.
In line with the theme of your article, at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018 I taught a course to high school students which focused on George Orwell's 1984. We covered all the related themes and I must tell you that even youngsters (even 7th graders I had previously taught) are well aware of more that you would think, despite massive censorship and selective history. These are very bright young minds (at least in the better/top-rated public and private schools), despite the implied limitations of the archaic education system.
I will give you a nice sampling of an exposé written by one of my high school students in my 1984 course:
17 year old Chinese student destroys the White Helmets as complete fraud in steeming Exposé.
So, just something to think about. Don't think that even tough these dystopian forces are at play, that the cleverness of Chinese youth isn't completely subdued by their Communist overlords and educational shackles.
There is hope, after all.
And I think that the more the current power structure continues to impose ever increasing dystopian surveillance-and-control measures, the more they are sealing their destiny and digging their graves as a mere tiny speckle of dust in the Middle Kingdom's 5,000 year history.
Nice to meet another expat in China, and it's rare to meet one who's been here longer than me. I've been here continuously since 2014, and in and out since 2012. I got here on my first longer-than-visit in Fall 2012, just in time to see "Xi Dada" sworn in and even then I could pick up on how fast things changed.
All that said, I've had students who have ripped the lid off the lies as well, but there's a problem. The only kids I've had who could do that, were the children of Party elites (as is evident by the fact that I'm able to even teach, say, Orwell's literature to them in the first place while their peers are still dumbly and mindlessly memorizing Confucian texts) who are going to grow up benefitting from the very system we're vainly hoping that their cleverness will enable them to clean up. Why would they bite the hand that's feeding them?
I basically lost hope when I switched to a public school in Beijing and saw what is happening to the rank and file of their education system. You talk about "learning the truth?" These kids haven't even learned the lies yet. At my middle school, I was specifically told by the principal "these kids are going to fail the Zhongkao and never go to high school and that's okay because their parents were poor so they deserve to be poor all their lives as well." They're not learning anything, true, false or otherwise. They're being trained to be domestic servants, laborers, and basically Human cattle. If we continue the 1984 analogy (which is pretty freaking accurate), they're the proles, and as Winston Smith learned in his conversation with the poor sap in the tavern who just wanted a pint, there's no hope to be found in them.
Also, as a side note, take another look at the "5,000 year history" cliche. Nothing prior to Qinshihuang could even remotely be called "Chinese." Saying that the kingdoms before him were Chinese is like calling Powhatan and Hiawatha American. "2,500 year history with frequent breaks" is more accurate.
Holy fuck. Talk about class warfare when that's supposed to be "gone" with Communism... what a joke. That's what communism ends up becoming every time it's tried out it seems. Just greater class divide and more enslavement. The Party of 1984 is exactly Communism that Orwell was alluding to.
Too true. Of course, the reason China has outlasted most of the world's other Communist Parties is that they are quite well aware of the fact that they're not working toward any kind of egalitarianism, whereas previous Communist regimes pretended they were. The so-called "Communist" Party of China rarely ever gave more than lip-service (albeit fanatical lip-service) to Marxist theory, which is really the only reason they've lasted longer than the USSR did.
They used the terminology of Communism because they learned from Zhongshan's Republic that they had to make it sound modern and hip, but it was really more of a reversion to China's ancient Imperial system (and when I say "ancient," the Mao era more closely resembled the Qin or Shang Dynasties than anything else) with new labels ("communes" instead of "shared households," "the Party" instead of "the Mandarinate," and "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" instead of "Mandate of Heaven").
There's a joke here in Beijing.
"What does 'China'stand for? Communist Headquarters In Name Alone."
The fact that Taiwan has actually achieved something that's pretty close to a free society and in doing so has actually achieved a greater living standard than any part of the Mainland except the coast, and they did it all by outright rejecting Marx and more-or-less embracing Western ideals (with a few alterations made for their own cultural legacy of course), absolutely infuriates the neocomms.
Well that's good that there are still some sharp minds outwitting the manipulation and psyop at the national level. Same over seas ;) Good work being done in your class!
I would say they have no monopoly on this. Much of what I was taught as a child regarding history were lies, and they are changing what they said back then now. I have read many posts here on ancient people and how evidence strongly suggests high levels of technology. Read about giant men walking the earth that schools don't really talk about. I could ramble on, but the last point I would make is the way a certain religious institution rolled through the world using the countries military to crush native populations found, stealing their knowledge as it used drastic coercion to eradicate those ways from them. I wish I could see what they have in their archives. I am sure it has helped separate them from the herd in most ways.
Okay...
I grew up in the US, and I have spent the last 5 years living in China. Without intending to step on toes, let me shoot this straight.
If you think that Western propaganda (where the truth is spun, bent, and occasionally swept under the rug) and Chinese propaganda (where they don't even have a concept of the fact that "truth" and "the word of whoever is in charge" are not, in fact, synonymous... where complete and utter fabrications from beginning to end are the norm... where anyone who dares to even ask "what if" vanishes) are the same thing, then you're seriously not paying attention.
That's like saying "my papercut is no different from your bayonet-wound to the chest. I deserve a purple-heart."
I can't state anything for certain, but not sure how much worse things can get when your country is saying a group called Isis is a terrorist organization we need to fear and not question liberties taken with our freedom due to them, then send these same people money and weapons and call them rebels in their partnership to overthrow Assad in Syria. I could mention the many examples of government collusion with sex trafficking, the war on drugs that should begin at the CIA and not the common person on the street, etc etc.
This is just some of many examples I see, but if things are worse there then my heart goes out for them.
Then come over here to China and see, because after five years living in Beijing I CAN say quite a lot for certain.
US government lies compared to Chinese government lies are like a summer squall compared to a typhoon. First and most glaring example, the US is not rounding up dissidents en masse, shooting most of them, throwing the few they don't shoot into Orwellian indoctrination centers and consigning them to a level of poverty that would make the poorest American blush, then forcing their children to attend schools that are deliberately designed to make them incapable of anything other than such brutally menial labor that they will be lucky to see their 40th birthday, then digitally blocking any flow of information from outside the country that might clue the populace in to the fact that this is actually not normal.
China is.
Seriously, if America seems that bad in your eyes, passports are cheap and China is desperate for Westerners with business skills of any kind right now. Come on over and see first hand just how much worse it can get.
Indeed, it's quite drastic in degrees.
Yes, much has been fabricated in history. But they aren't brainwashing people with removal of content and having to teach them the truth to help them keep erasing history. Big difference. If only we could hav access to a real-history, the things we might see... but we can't really know if fantastic claims about ancient times are true or not... just speculation. ;)
Exactly, see Napoleon's quote in the thread below...
Truth, lie, history, what does it all matter? Civilization is but a set of lies agreed upon by its component members. The West believes in the fiction of freedom, democracy, equality, rights, and some such nonsense to dull the peasants into cooperating with their betters. The CCP is more obtuse and brutal in their sociopolitical control mechanism. The older, more civilized societies used religion and moral fiction to guide the masses into cooperation. Human social organization always opetates in hierarchy with power as its only coin. The only choice for the masses is acquiescing to more elegant or more obtuse means of control. More the lesser men are allotted influence, more obtuse the control mechanism devolves.
I wonder when they banned System Of A Down.
They're trying to build a prison, for you and me to live in.
Don't talk about fight club :/
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In light of the oncoming blockchain regulations in China, coupled with recent efforts to make the Steem blockchain more accessible to the Chinese community (and the resulting conversation between WhereIn and myself) I do think this is a conversation that needs to continue. I guess I know what I’ll be writing about over the next few days (in between everything else).
Is Firefox governed by China like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc? I love that book named 1984 and it is scary and My Christmas 2018 post was downvoted as I said there are 2 genders. Here is an upvote.
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Good post https://steemit.com/partiko/@steemcategary56/my-selfi-cv5gwx1b
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Good post https://steemit.com/partiko/@steemcategary56/my-selfi-cv5gwx1b
Posted using Partiko Android