2016/11/28 by J. Paul Goode, Ariel I. Ahram · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Populism, Right-Wing Movements
paper · doi:10.1111/ssqu.12339
Writers, artists, and teachers have long understood that repressive governments manipulate the ways we understand them, twisting knowledge and education to their own ends.In seeking to justify their existence, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Mao's China (to name a few) generated national histories, educational systems, and scientific doctrines in line with official ideologies.While social scientists initially emphasized terror as the "lifeblood" of the totalitarian system (Fainsod, 1953;Friedrich & Brzezinski, 1956;Gleason 1995), state violence invariably waned over time.Perhaps more relevant to understanding totalitarian rule, writers like Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Arthur Koestler saw distortions of history, empirical facts, and truth as intimately connected with a stultifying, repressive bureaucracy that celebrated its own image while punishing individuals who publically disclosed the ways it really worked.Reflecting on their own life experiences, Eastern European dissidents like Vaclav Havel and Gyrgy Konrd produced powerful accounts of individuals as isolated and powerless