Commenter “huxley” observes, first quoting commenter “Irish Otter49” in a discussion of the man who committed suicide after being insulted in an anti-racism training mandated by his employer:
“So he took his own life because he couldn’t deal with harsh words from a stupid female woke black race hustler? Very sad.”
IrishOtter49:
Well, yes. I believe I’m with you.
I rather dislike the anti-racism folks, but if someone imputes that I am a white supremacist, or really any other smear, it’s on me if I kill myself.
Maybe lawfare in this case is good tactics, but in the long run it reinforces the woke “hate speech” strategy which works against conservatives and the Constitution.
The thing is, this is not a case of a random person coming up to someone and calling him a name. This was done by a person whose business it is to do this as a professional hired by another business which is an employer. As far as I can tell, the training is mandatory and therefore a condition of the job. According to this article, it can render the targeted person “unemployable” and cause the person to be ostracized.
Nor does it ordinarily involve a simple nasty comment. In my post on the subject, when I described these trainings as “struggle sessions,” I was being only somewhat hyperbolic. They are actually forms of brainwashing meant to break a person down psychologically and then reconstruct that person’s value system in order to get the person to see the world – and himself or herself – differently and with guilt and remorse (if white) or blaming others (if black). They are public humiliations in front of colleagues, as well, and the trainers have methods of invalidating all attempts by the target at self-defense, labeling them racist no matter what the person says in his or her own defense.
There is no way out except for the very strongest among us. People on the right are probably more resistant, for the simple reason that they don’t already buy into the premises. But people on the left or even in the middle are very vulnerable. You might think you could shake it off quite easily, and perhaps you could. But don’t be so sure, unless you’ve undergone something similar and been able to emerge intact.
When I was quite young, about twelve or so, I read a book entitled The Rape of the Mind (yes; I seem to have had an early interest in the topic). It was about brainwashing. Orwell also gives an account of brainwashing, helped by torture, in his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston Smith resists, but in the end he’s a broken man who loves Big Brother.
I’m not saying an anti-racism training is the equivalent of imprisonment and torture; it is not. But you might be surprised at how destructive and effective and relentless the pressure can be, especially to someone with a tendency to any sort of self-doubt or conscience. Group pressure is an especially powerful tool.
This is from the book’s description at Amazon:
In The Rape of the Mind [the author, Meerlo] goes far beyond the direct military implications of mental torture to describing how our own culture unobtrusively shows symptoms of pressurizing people’s minds. He presents a systematic analysis of the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and coercion, and shows how totalitarian strategy, with its use of mass psychology, leads to systematized “rape of the mind.” He describes the new age of cold war with its mental terror, verbocracy, and semantic fog, the use of fear as a tool of mass submission and the problem of treason and loyalty, so loaded with dangerous confusion.
The first chapter is called “You Too Would Confess.”
What does Meerlo mean by “verbocracy”? This:
Propagandistic lies and catchphrases are an inexorable feature of totalitarianism. Repeated countless times from countless angles, the effect is to drill the desired thinking until accepted as truth. “Double talk” characterizes much of the narrative, with words like “freedom” redefined to support the lies. Words become emotional triggers and conditioners instead of sources of independent thought.
In such a training, the idea that white people are all guilty of some sort of white original sin that cannot be expunged or denied but only accepted and atoned for, and that black people are always the innocent victims, is a big part of this. The more the white person mounts a defense, the more guilty and anti anti-racist (therefore, racist) the person is deemed to be. It is an intense and sophisticated psychological public pressure that taps into a highly emotional element of people in America today: their attitudes towards race and the racial history of the country.
