Little despots running around in red neckties, aiding the state to enact new forms of oppression. This is how totalitarianism thrives, with shiny gold stars and delighted murmurs of parental assent -- at once self-serving and willfully ignorant.
Encourage budding torturers, fete future informants, coo at the precocious operators who will one day run the guillotines. Baby steps!
Cultivate a sophisticated cadre of censors, with vision so skewed they don't even see their own excisions, much less their scissors.
Celebrate new innovations in state brutality; pioneer brilliant modes of creative suppression. Laud random violence, egg on self-styled vigilantes, three cheers for ratting out your no-good, treacherous neighbors.
Report on your parents, turn in your friends, indict your uppity teachers with a fabricated revelation. Disown those relatives, wash your hands of them and wish them well as they are shipped off to labor camps -- you are competing to fulfill the revolution.
Doused in patriotism, transmitting empty words, painted with unseeing allegiance: a tall national tale draped in a cherry-hued banner, dyed in a missionary zeal.
Let's look for more villains to stab! More public enemies to expose! Black classes against whom we rave and rant, categorical criminals against whom we can chant. More guilty civilians to condemn and jail, beat, impale, and perhaps even investigate.
Martial shouts as we drag out bookcases, full of tomes, to build a bonfire, gleefully tossing wooden instruments atop the crackling blaze. More sheafs of poems for kindling, more etudes to feed the flames, more lemmings to follow over the cliff's sheer edge -- vanguard to nowhere, smashing the old, it's time to raze the temple, raise the flag, and burn down everything behind us.
