Reddit mentions of Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'brainwashing' in China

OP, you're old man is absolutely right that SJWs lifted they playbook right out of communism.

I encourage you, and anyone else, to read Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. It was written in 1961 about the Maoist Communists methods of indoctrinating populations and it shows that SJW leftism is almost a word-for-word copy of the shit that the old Communists used to do. I wish I were exaggerating. This book is probably more relevant today than it has been in the past 20 years.

Here's two snippets:

>Aware that he was not a likely candidate for this type of display,Hu worried about another kind of public exposure: the ultimate humiliation of the mass "struggle." He had seen a student considered to be a hopelessly "backward element" face an equally large audience to be denounced rather than redeemed; faculty members cadres, and fellow students had embellished upon his "reactionary tendencies/' his stubborn refusal to change his ways, his failure to respond to repeated offers of "help" which all claimed to have made. It had been made quite clear that this young man's future in Communist China was quite precarious, and the ceremony had been a grim warning to Hu and other students of questionable standing.

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>The third stage ends on a note of togetherness very similar to the one with which the program begins. The pattern of thought reform thus follows the classic Marxist sequence of harmony, struggle, harmony; in psychological terms—group identification, isolation and conflict, and reintegration. At every moment of thought reform, the intellectual has revised, rejected, and modified elements of his past in order to dislodge himself from what he was, and become someone else.

>As painful as it is, thought reform would never have a lasting effect if it did not offer a new and appealing sense of identity as its reward. I have so far mentioned only a few of the character traits which thought reform attempts to instill. In general, the reformed identity is based upon principles originally applied to Communist party members, the Elite of the Communist movement. This identity is therefore not an exact blueprint, but rather an ideal which neither the dedicated Communist nor the ordinary intellectual can hope to realize fully. But like the identity ideal of the filial son, it is one against which everything else must be weighed.

These aren't eerie similarities. Their intentionally the same tactics.

(continued)

On the other hand, an actual, real-life exit counselor who works with actual walkaways from actual cults has in fact pretty much formally declared MAGAts to be a coercive political cult of personality, using actual characteristics common across pro-Trump groups and comparing to evaluations of groups like Scientology and the Moonies. (It's worth noting here that said exit counselor actually has written one of the more thorough evaluation scales of the "cultiness" of a coercive group.)

And apparently he's not alone on this; the former head of psychological profiling at the CIA pretty much has completely separately identified MAGAtism as a classical political cult, and literally the person who defined the term "brainwashing" in English and wrote the very first book on coercive groups and thought reform tactics has in fact just written a book on political extremism that also in part defines MAGAtism in the exact same framework of being a coercive political cult as Maoists during the Cultural Revolution. (Considering Dr. Robert J. Lifton's initial studies were of persons involuntarily interned in Maoist "thought reform" camps during the Korean War up to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution...yes, as in the guy has literally written the books on the subject--methinks he'd know exactly what he's talking about when he's comparing MAGAts and Trump to the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong). Both Hassan and Lifton have also been contributors to a book that notes that Trump shows all the signs of being a malignant narcissist in the technical sense and which also include OTHER psychologists who have expressed concerns a personality cult exists around Trump (and feel strongly enough on it that they feel an ethical duty to warn a potential target of violence by a person, well, (pardon the expression) trumps the Goldwater Rule). Rick Alan Ross, another exit counselor, has likewise explicitly noted MAGAtism has all the characteristics of a coercive cult of personality--and Rick Alan Ross is actually a Republican (though very much in the "Never Trump" court).

(Pretty much the only major exit counselor that has NOT outright called out MAGAtism as a literal personality cult is Dr. Margaret Thaler Singer, and that's because she's dead.)

And we're just talking the redcaps posting MAGA and KAG memes on Twitter and Facebook--we're not talking members of Certain Subreddits Soon To Exhaust The Reddit Community Patience, or even sub-movements within (like QAnonsense--at this rate, pretty much almost universally regarded as a literal coercive New Religious Movement by every exit counselor that's evaluated it and which heavily cross-recruits with older cults like Ramtha--or the New Apostolic Reformation, which has heavily embraced QAnonsense and which (in a remarkable sea change from even fifteen years ago) is also pretty much universally regarded as an extremely coercive religious group within "Charismatic" Christianity).

Buy, learn: http://www.amazon.com/Thought-Reform-Psychology-Totalism-ebook/dp/B006M9RZQA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1380930479&sr=8-1&keywords=thought-reform

Read: Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'brainwashing' in China https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006M9RZQA/