From: Randall Parker 

Making my contribution to the fight against extremely drifted interminably
long threads .

There's a great article in March Reason mag about thought reform on campus:

http://www.reason.com/0003/fe.ak.thought.html
   Excerpts:
Thought Reform 101
The Orwellian implications of today's college orientation By Alan Charles Kors

The darkest nightmare of the literature on power is George Orwell's 1984,
where there is not even an interior space of privacy and self. Winston
Smith faces the ultimate and consistent logic of the argument that
everything is political, and he can only dream of "a time when there
were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when members of a family
stood by one another without needing to know the reason." Orwell did
not know that as he wrote, Mao's China was subjecting university students
to "thought reform," known also as "re-education," that
was not complete until children had denounced the lives and political
morals of their parents and emerged as "progressive" in a manner
satisfactory to their trainers. In the diversity education film Skin Deep,
a favorite in academic "sensitivity training," a white student in
his third day of a "facilitated" retreat on race, with his name
on the screen and his college and hometown identified, confesses his
family's inertial Southern racism and, catching his breath, says to the
group (and to the thousands of students who will see this film on their own
campuses), "It's a tough choice, choosing what's right and choosing
your family."
Political correctness is not the end of human liberty, because political
correctness does not have power commensurate with its aspirations. It is
essential, however, to understand those totalizing ambitions for what they
are. O'Brien's re-education of Winston in 1984 went to the heart of such
invasiveness. "We are not content with negative obedience.... When
finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will." The
Party wanted not to destroy the heretic but to "capture his inner
mind." Where others were content to command "Thou shalt not"
or "Thou shalt," O'Brien explains, "Our command is `Thou
art.'" To reach that end requires "learning... understanding
[and] acceptance," and the realization that one has no control even
over one's inner soul. In Blue Eyed, the facilitator, Jane Elliott, says of
those under her authority for the day, "A new reality is going to be
created for these people." She informs everyone of the rules of the
event: "You have no power, absolutely no power." By the end,
broken and in tears, they see their own racist evil, and they love Big
Sister.

Orwell may have been profoundly wrong about the totalitarian effects of
high technology, but he understood full well how the authoritarians of this
century had moved from the desire for outer control to the desire for inner
control. He understood that the new age sought to overcome what, in Julia's
terms, was the ultimate source of freedom for human beings: "They
can't get inside you." Our colleges and universities hire trainers to
"get inside" American students.

In , note these
cogitations from blucy{at}mediaone.net Bill Lucy:
> Subject: The concept of "Freedom"
> From: Bill Lucy 
> Newsgroups: homeless.barktopia.god.and.gov
>
> In article ,
John_Beamish{at}dmr.ca
> says...
>
> > I haven't been able
> > to look at "freedom" in a democracy or a totalitarian system (and
> > there is *precious* *little* to distinguish between them) in the same
> > way since.
>
> That's a part of what I heard yesterday. You can actually get supposedly
> "free" people to participate in totalitarianism while making
them believe
they
> are doing it of their own free will.
>
> The mind's capacity to believe what it wants to believe is incredible.
>
>

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