/pol/ - Politically Incorrect

In the UK today if you get a bit too spicy at school. The "Designated Safety Lead (DSL)" at a British school has the legal obligation to refer to you Prevent. The DSL was once just an administrator or a teacher that looked for signs of domestic abuse, bullying or other problems, but in 2016 their role got expanded to counter political extremism. Prevent is the organization that the DSL first comes down for a "voluntary" talk, except Prevent remains in communication with the DSL, who can at any time send the signal up to another government department for an involuntary intervention. Channel can also do the same. Either the police, mental health services or child welfare departments are the ones who call for an involuntary intervention. It's the same laws they use on people at risk of suicide or taking kids off their father because of domestic abuse. They lean into the respective government departments for the referral for extremism.

The surprising thing to find was that very little of the Eastern bloc system of crushing dissent even admitted it was there. Both prevent UK and Profilaktika give a voluntary face, and put at least two government departments of referrals between them and the guy who orders you hauled away.

And because the Lithuanian Soviet Republic's KGB archives are open source, and the Hoover institute hosts them, there's another angle I found out about. The Soviets were often referring to people for Profilaktika for complaining about replacement Russian migrants in Lithuania. A risk factor that could have people referred to Profilaktika is having a nostalgic parent that remembers the pre-soviet days and showing an interest in Lithuanian nationalism. Pretty much the same as how the Brits have the plurality of their Prevent referrals being because of far right chuds complaining about their replacement migrants.

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https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/news/18-07-23-subjects_of_interest_preventative_policing_under_the_kgb/

>In Andropov’s analysis, behind the decline in crimes committed lay an increase in crimes prevented. Andropov went on to show that the KGB was issuing preventive warnings to tens of thousands of people each year– and to claim that these warnings were remarkably effective. Out of the 120,000 that received such a warning between 1967 and 1974...


>Did the KGB think profilaktika would change minds? One strand of the literature suggests not. In the 1950s Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer interviewed thousands of Soviet emigrants about their experience of Soviet rule. They concluded (Inkeles et al., 1959, 283) that Soviet rulers understood perfectly that many of their citizens held grievances and would have disloyal thoughts. They did not expect inner loyalty. They were satisfied to “assure reliable behavior regardless of how the citizen might feel about the regime.” In the same spirit Harrison (2016, 157–159) conjectures that KGB profilaktika achieved its successes through fear rather than by re-education.


>Harrison (2016, 144–145) and Cohn (2018a) note the traces of a medicalized terminology in KGB documentation. The word profilaktika itself is borrowed from medical science. Among the goals of profilaktika set out in a 1964 resolution of the KGB collegium was “protection of Soviet citizens from bourgeois ideology” (Chebrikov et al. (1977, 584); see also Elkner (2009, 152)).

>In the same spirit, KGB reports frequently lamented the public expression of “unhealthy” ideas. To give an example, one subject of a preventive warning, “while in a café, made unhealthy remarks” on various topics, including “specifically in relation to persons of Russian nationality.”23 The problem of such cases was not that the subject’s beliefs or norms were incorrect. What mattered was the risk of contagion: the subject let them slip in front of an unprotected audience, on the street, in the classroom, or at work.

>What kinds of people did the KGB identify for profilaktika? This is shown in Figure 3 (more details provided in Table C-1 and Table C-2 in Appendix C). Starting from the late 1950s, relative to the population of Soviet Lithuania aged 15 and over, we see that profilaktika subjects were much more male, substantially younger, and substantially less well educated.29 They were nearly all of Lithuanian ethnicity (in other words, with Russians, Poles, and other ethnic minorities largely unrepresented among them).

>The strongest concern, one that increased over time, was not for the subject but for the subject’s influence on others. There was a strong trend to medicalization of the subject’s behavior as “unhealthy.”

https://www.hoover.org/research/you-have-been-warned

>What did the KGB do when it was shielding the Soviet state? In Lithuania, KGB resources were spent on surveillance, information gathering, and analysis. The information gathered was used in many ways, but one important application was profilaktika.

>The word profilaktika translates directly as “prophylaxis” or “prevention.” In medical science, prophylaxis means the prevention of disease. Soviet rulers correctly believed that their power was stabilized by mass conformity to a fixed set of “healthy” ideas and behaviors. The KGB saw oppositional ideas and behaviors as a disease that could be spread from person to person through contagion. They developed the technique of preventive warnings to isolate “unhealthy” expressions and prevent them from spreading.

>A contagion model of the spread of political ideas and national and cultural identities has some foundation in behavioral science. Human beings copy each other from birth. Examples around us powerfully influence how we dress, whether or not we use recreational drugs, the importance we place on the rule of law, whom we have sex with and why, how many children we have, which stocks we buy, which churches we attend, who gets our votes, and whether or not we attend political rallies. This makes it good sense for repressive regimes both to stay alert for “bad” examples, exemplified by dedicated enemies or traitors, and to watch carefully the wider circles of those who do not intend to be or follow enemies, but whose behavior can be changed by the infectious example of others.

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>Many cases, like that of Algirdas Aulas, were of a more political character. The KGB was particularly interested in anyone who expressed nostalgia for “bourgeois Lithuania” (i.e., the independent state that had existed from 1918 to 1940), was indiscreet in letters to relatives abroad, or denigrated Soviet leaders or the Soviet way of life.

>Young people were a special problem. While some just wanted more fun than could be found in official youth clubs, others developed romantic feelings about political freedom and national identity. The KGB was continually treading on the heels of groups that discussed independent Lithuania, read nationalist poetry, or planned escapades involving leaflets and slogans. These were often students.

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< The author now does a Q&A in typical chan style, which will be reproduced in full:


>The libshits spent so much time, desperately trying not to *forget history* via Nazism.... They forgot to not relive Soviet history
I think the real problem is the romantic fantasy of rebelling against an authoritarian regime is so different in the movies and books that people get the wrong idea. You watch something like Running Man or The Hunger Games and they implicitly imply that authoritarian governments have a firm hand everywhere at all times, and are just in your face with the threats. While that was true for Stalinism and the Red Terror, in actuality the everyday function of authoritarian population control is the Good Cop/Bad Cop model and a heavy amount of gaslighting.

The East Germans perfected this technique by sabotaging a person's life in a way that'd cause a mental breakdown. They called it Zersetzung (Decomposition). They didn't give a fuck that you still had no-no thoughts, they just wanted you to be too burdened with other problems to function.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung

> Interesting thread, seems like prevent backfired spectacularly. Unless?
It seems to be following the same trajectory as the Soviet System from Brezhnev onwards in that there's a developing contempt for it. People are all laughing at the propaganda and making jokes about it, which they also did as the Eastern Bloc went into the 1980s.

It's a sort of domino theory at play and the contagion model the establishment in both the current UK and the past Soviet Union was focused on the idea of dissidence being like a disease. You see it repetitively in that Prevent UK emphasizes the "influence" of ideas, and doesn't really engage with the actual ideas themselves. They skirt around that question and just emphasize how believing in it makes you a loser, you've been "exploited" by malicious actors, that it can cause societal harm. From what I've read the Soviet preventive conversations followed basically the same model. You were considered to have "delusions of reform", being hoodwinked by malicious foreign actors, corrupting others.

but the reasoning is pretty solid because there is the factor of exponential growth. The Revolutions of 1989 came out of nowhere and were a viral process, and were solidly exponential. Solidarity in the early 1980s was borderline a success as well, showed exponential growth, but then the government managed to suppress it with martial law at the last minute. Both Prevent systems know nobody really believes in the government's ideological shit. The focus on the contagion of dissidence is because there's no other choice. If you can't convince people anymore then you have no choice but to nip the outspoken chuds in the bud and ruin their lives.

As for the most effective form of dissidence, it's just comedy and laughing at it. Mimic the tone, take it to absurd conclusions. Some of the first signs of rebellion in 1989 appeared in Romanian comedy clubs.

>(responding) or its just a placeholder to see how the proles react to it to figure out what actually to do later
That's exactly what the Soviets were thinking. Brezhnev himself asserted that they had "Fully Developed Socialism" and basically froze the process of historical materialism there. They basically stopped pretending that they were actually advancing to communism, accepted stagnation, and just blew out the state budget on gibs to keep everyone calm. Like an unloved stepfather that buys his wife's sons' love through buying them expensive toys with the credit card. This worked when oil and gas prices were high, but really fucked them over in the 1980s when they crashed. Around 1987 basically every Eastern Bloc country was in conversation with the IMF about managing their debt. And surprisingly enough, the IMF was willing to work with them without any promise of political reform.

Kier Starmer himself tested the waters with the "Island of Strangers" speech last year. Immediately it caused an uproar with those further to his left like Jeremy Corbyn and all the ethnic minorities. They're in a very hard spot because there's nothing they can pivot too.

They settled on Amelia because our enemies operate with a caricature of us in their mind. The leftist commissar that came up with Amelia that literally thought that because right wingers complain about dyed hair alternative girls giving shitty takes, making the nationalist girl a dyed hair alternative girl would make us hate her. It’s similar to how they always feature a hijabi in every pamphlet propaganda on social welfare or woman’s rights, because they’re always aiming to be catty and goad the conservative christian man who lives rent free in their head.

They can't even associate sexual success with believing the government propaganda anymore because they're so unfathomably obsessed with Andrew Tate. They can't do the old move of making the no-no think opinions come from a fat ugly white person because British whites are already rebelling against being the designated punching bag.

>my theory is that every regime eventually falls for their own propaganda, as in it is impossible to spread the message properly without believing it to some extend
One of the Polish head central planners in the 1980s, that parroted communist talking points his entire career, was discreetly reading Mises and Hayek during that time. Immediately after Solidarity's election, he and many of the other Polish Communist elites joined the new liberal order in implementing privatization.

There's definitely true believers but they're typically not liked in the system either, because they bleat too hard when there's needed reform or a pivot to another strategy. These sorts of authoritarian systems like cynical types as they're the ones that are self aware enough to keep the charade going. Actual committed communists were the ones purged after the Stalin years in favor of corrupt degenerates that just wanted to take bribes and relax in the sauna. Cult of personalities and actual ideological fanaticism caused damaging excesses like the Cultural Revolution in China. The entire Chinese government was doing damage control all through the 1980s to contain the fallout from the Cultural Revolution, peasants back then were openly beating government officials to death in the countryside and hanging their bodies from the rafters.

To bring the analogy to the UK and other western countries. The British government doesn't want people in power who genuinely believe in the intersectional framework fanatically because they're liable to run off in directions the government doesn't want. The excess fanaticism during 2020 BLM really made them see the risk of going too hard in stoking the fires of ideology. It's why since then you see this gay and patronizing propaganda about risk, and there's no longer anything aspirational. They don't even pretend we're heading towards some multiracial kumbaya utopia anymore.

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(further discussion etc at https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/527983869/. I hope the Antiwhite, illegitimate UK State gets replaced at once)

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>>55885
Nice work

>>55878 (OP) 
fascinating but not surprising. I don't think I'll ever be able to understand this level of evil bros, doesn't make much sense to me even as a former leftoid

>>58591
They basically have a selective version of the stasi mad possible because of the internet. But like all forms of control based on threats there's going to be a lot of upset people angry because they were hurt in the process. All while not being able to show it. That creates deep resentments