Word: confesser
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Terror in the Cities. With "land reform" launched, Lo turned his attention to the cities. He had one piece of advice: "Two ways are open to all counterrevolutionaries : the way of death for those who resist, and the way of life for those who confess." People were told that by registering their names and stating their past misdeeds (such as having served the Nationalists), all would be forgiven...
...confess is better than not to confess" (a Lo phrase) became a handbook slogan for party workers. In cities like Shanghai (pop. 7,000,000), the terrorists made sure that people would know about "the way of death" by staging machine gun executions on the paddyfields, and sending through the streets open wagons bearing people bound hand and foot. Then one spring night in 1951 the sirens wailed in Shanghai, and all night long the police wagons sped about the city. Next morning there was nothing in the newspapers to indicate what had happened, but as people began checking with...
...physicians earned a certain notoriety, though not perhaps very large fees, by telling his royal patient that all that was wrong with him was that he was too greedy. That was no doubt unpopular, and politicians have no occupational bias in favor of unpopularity. But I must confess that something of the sort seems a fair description of us and our economy...
...like his own prize patients, with no untoward pain. Notable exceptions are women who have committed adultery: they often have long and difficult labor. Dr. Dick Read was amazed to learn of women who had been in painful labor for two or three days but who, when persuaded to confess their adultery, suddenly relaxed and "released the baby from the birth canal in a few minutes with no further trouble." These exceptions, the doctor argues, prove his rule: "Fear causes resistance to birth and that in turn causes pain. Confession removes the fear...
Only in agriculture does the Soviet Union confess great weakness. The new plan that so confidently ticks off industrial goals discloses no figures for past food production, and Pravda admits that the agricultural goals were not fulfilled. But the new plan demands 100% greater productivity on collective farms by 1960, which Western specialists think is an impossible target. "This new and dangerous stage in the attempt to assimilate Soviet agriculture," says the London Observer's Edward Crankshaw, "can mean nothing less than an unspoken declaration of war on the mass of the peasants...