Struggle Within

It's not just the left that does struggle sessions

Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation

The so-called “struggle session”—douzheng hui in Mandarin—emerged during China’s bloody Cultural Revolution, between 1966 and 1976. Millions, maybe tens of millions, took part in public denunciations where various “enemies of the revolution” were humiliated, abused, forced to confess their “crimes” and subjected to physical punishment. Victims had their hair pulled, were spat on and beaten, paraded through the streets bearing signs that listed, for all to see, the terrible things they’d done. Hundreds of thousands are thought to have died from their injuries or by suicide, unable to bear the shame.

The aim of the struggle session was not just to punish the enemies of the Maoist regime, real or otherwise, to break and bend their will as needed, but also, crucially, to build solidarity and class-consciousness among the mob carrying it out.

If you want to create a strong feeling of us, there’s no better way than to provide an equally strong feeling of them.

Readers of an historical bent will know that similar rituals of confession and shaming have taken place in other revolutionary states at various different times, for the same reasons. In Soviet Russia (the Show Trials). During the Jacobin Terror in France. We might even see elements as far back as the early Christians, who confessed their sins in public, to their fellow congregants, and received punishment and forgiveness in return. The Puritans revived this practice in England in the sixteenth century, and there are still records of Oliver Cromwell addressing his parish in church, years before he saved England and became Lord Protector.

The struggle session is with us now. In fact, it’s been normalised, made less spectacular and bloody, and integrated into our lives today in hundreds and thousands of little ways. Every day, we’re expected to make countless public statements demonstrating our commitment to the values of the Current Year and the new Cultural Revolution.

Or else.

One of the most insidious aspects of the latter-day struggle session is its dual nature, at once voluntary and coercive. You’re invited to make a “voluntary” statement or display while a Sword of Damocles hangs over you as surely as if you were in Mao’s China, standing in a square surrounded by peasants with pitchforks.

You can see the sword, everyone else can see it, but no-one is allowed to say. You all just have to smile and pretend it’s not there.

When you’re asked to add “your pronouns” to your Zoom profile or your company email bio, everyone knows the fate that will befall the idiot who doesn’t do it properly or forgets—or worse yet, the courageous dissenter who refuses out of principle.

The struggle session may be most associated with the left and our current woke tyranny or whatever you want to call it, but the right has its struggle sessions too, and they’re just as unedifying. Events of the last week or so tell us that loud and clear.

First, we had the lovely Sydney Sweeney deftly rejecting an interviewer’s attempts to make her “disavow white supremacy”—to make her cringe and squirm and apologise for her role in a perfectly harmless advert in which she showed off her admirable curvature and joked about having good jeans/genes.

I’ve watched that advert many times. Many times. It’s an advert for jeans, with an innuendo in it. Nothing more.

So what did Sydney do? She just said no.

“I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear,” she said.

And that was it. The interviewer’s grotesque condescension, a vile mixture of feigned sympathy and barely concealed threat—nothing. No effect. I’m not doing that. Fuck off, she smiles.

Compare this with the sorry state of things over at the Heritage Foundation, which has been tearing itself apart since its president, Kevin Roberts, posted a video in which he defended Tucker Carlson.

Tucker did a two-hour sit-down interview with Nick Fuentes a little over a week ago and all hell has broken loose since, with Con Inc. figures like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin and politicians like Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz calling for Tucker to be cast out from polite society forever along with the Groypers and “race realists” and the Buchananites and, of course, the anti-semites—who are all one and the same, or so we’re told.