OnlySubs with James Lindsay, Episode 136
Book Club Series, Episode 4
This episode is available exclusively for New Discourses contributors on the following platforms:
Facebook
Locals
Odysee
Patreon
Subscribestar
Substack
YouTube Members
Welcome back to another exciting episode of James Lindsay’s Book Club, part of his James Lindsay OnlySubs platform, for contributors only! In this episode, I’m still reading from Frank Dikotter’s “People’s Trilogy,” specifically in this case The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957. Specifically, near the end of the book, Dikotter outlines an important point about Communist society: what I call the Iron Law of Woke Cosplay. That is, the propaganda campaign of the Communists is so thorough that it sets up fake institutions, hotels, schools, offices, factories, hospitals, villages, even cities, and shows these to important Party figures and virtually all foreigners, especially those in journalism or diplomacy. As Dikotter writes, comparing it to a giant Potemkin village, “China was a theater.” Join me to hear about how this tendency played out then and how it manifests now.
Additional episodes of the OnlySubs Podcast can be found here.
