It's worth noting that the mea culpa letter that these dudes wrote strikes the exact, identical tone of countless such letters of "self-criticism" and apology for "straying from the true path" written is societies like the former USSR, China, Vietnam, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, etc etc. It is really the exact same thing.
There is an overarching theme of wholesale confession of rather large, vague, abstract -- and all the more terrible for that -- sins, the expression of obligatory gratitude to the Party and Community for showing the right way, the promise to go out and learn from the virtuous masses and to give back in the same (abstract and ineffable) measure that one has somehow taken away. Through it all, through the dense and impregnable cant and party line jargon, there sounds a note of a sort of harrowed sleaze, an insincerity that is as deep as the terror that accompanies it is real. I've seen quite a few such letters in my readings, and they are all the same; and this is certainly one of them.
What is really remarkable is that in the other societies I mentioned where such letters were routinely produced, the moral authority of the Party and its Year Zero diktats was backed by the threat and reality of wholesale violence, torture and execution. That is not the case in Asheville, North Carolina; no one will come knocking on these manginas' doors at night and lead them away to a very nasty and cold basement if they failed to prostrate themselves before the Party and confess their sins. But the power and hold of today's Year Zero ideology is so complete that it compels a Viet Cong level of harrowed abnegation without having to enforce it with the threat of deadly violence.
This is a reality that would have confused Comrade Stalin and his pals a great deal; they wholeheartedly believed that if you don't chop off heads -- a lot of heads, the more the merrier -- nothing really gets done, and no one will listen to what you have to say as if it really mattered. And it's a very reasonable assumption; but today's Year Zero commies have managed to go from strength to strength and get the letters written with nary a head being chopped. Somewhere in their graves the old ghouls must be pensively twirling their mustaches and wondering what the hell is going on.
There is an overarching theme of wholesale confession of rather large, vague, abstract -- and all the more terrible for that -- sins, the expression of obligatory gratitude to the Party and Community for showing the right way, the promise to go out and learn from the virtuous masses and to give back in the same (abstract and ineffable) measure that one has somehow taken away. Through it all, through the dense and impregnable cant and party line jargon, there sounds a note of a sort of harrowed sleaze, an insincerity that is as deep as the terror that accompanies it is real. I've seen quite a few such letters in my readings, and they are all the same; and this is certainly one of them.
What is really remarkable is that in the other societies I mentioned where such letters were routinely produced, the moral authority of the Party and its Year Zero diktats was backed by the threat and reality of wholesale violence, torture and execution. That is not the case in Asheville, North Carolina; no one will come knocking on these manginas' doors at night and lead them away to a very nasty and cold basement if they failed to prostrate themselves before the Party and confess their sins. But the power and hold of today's Year Zero ideology is so complete that it compels a Viet Cong level of harrowed abnegation without having to enforce it with the threat of deadly violence.
This is a reality that would have confused Comrade Stalin and his pals a great deal; they wholeheartedly believed that if you don't chop off heads -- a lot of heads, the more the merrier -- nothing really gets done, and no one will listen to what you have to say as if it really mattered. And it's a very reasonable assumption; but today's Year Zero commies have managed to go from strength to strength and get the letters written with nary a head being chopped. Somewhere in their graves the old ghouls must be pensively twirling their mustaches and wondering what the hell is going on.
same old shit, sixes and sevens Shaft...