The Ice Sculpture Company in Changjin Lake and Cognitive Dissonance of Illegal Armed Groups in Mainland China

Recently, a film known as a gift to bandits has been screened in mainland China. Its box office has reached more than 5.4 billion, and it is expected to become the second highest box office in mainland film history. This result is not surprising. For this kind of gift film, the propaganda department of the illegal armed groups in the mainland will mobilize all over the mainland, and let all the Communist Party departments and various schools organize the viewing of the film. At the same time, its propaganda department is also actively blocking all kinds of negative voices about the film on the Internet. Some official accounts were blocked, and an investigative journalist was criminally detained for his negative comments on Weibo. Under such publicity efforts, the high box office of the film Changjin Lake is not surprising at all.

In this film, the most discussed part is the role of Ice Sculpture Company. Its general content is that a bandit army company is sent to snipe the United Nations army that is leading the civilians to retreat. However, due to the extremely low temperature in the Changjin Lake area of North Korea, the bandit army without cotton coats was frozen into ice sculptures in the snowy night of minus 20 degrees. And the passing U.S. military couldn't help but salute the group of ice sculptures.

Of course, in real history, there is no story of the entire company being frozen into ice sculptures, and there is no such thing as a US military salute to the ice sculptures, which at first glance comes from the Communist Party's Propaganda Department. But in this battle, there are indeed records of bandit soldiers being frozen into ice sculptures.

"Breakout"—The Chosin Reservoir Campaign has a fairly detailed description of the entire campaign

Sgt. Shaffer came over and told Davis that he had something he wanted him to look at. The lieutenant colonel and Shaffer walked a short distance and saw him lean over and drag out what looked like a large ice cube. It turned out to be a Chinese soldier, and he was still alive: Davis could see his eyes moving. There were also several Chinese soldiers nearby in the cave, snuggling closely to each other to keep warm, but most of them were already dead. These men were supposed to be sent out outposts, but the cold weather wiped them all out. Davis: "The guys from B Company have started to care for the survivors who are still breathing."

Among them, "several soldiers hugging together in a cave to keep warm" is undoubtedly more credible and reliable than the "superhuman will" of the bandit's propaganda department.

In addition, I also saw a very interesting paragraph.

Li Zhouen: "These people were former soldiers of the Kuomintang Chiang Kai-shek. They didn't parrot the boring communist propaganda. I asked them if they knew why they were fighting the U.S. military, and one of them replied in general terms that are common in China: 'There's no way.' Basically, the rough translation is: It's out of their control, or: It's beyond their control."

It can be seen that the history of Changjin Lake is by no means the same as the propaganda of illegal armed groups in the mainland. A group of soldiers with superhuman willpower attacked in the snowy night and actively sought fighter planes, but they were frozen into ice sculptures because of their fragility. Mao Zedong Thought can guide the slaughter of pigs, but it cannot strengthen their fragile flesh. The truth of the matter is that a group of soldiers who had neither any cold protection equipment, nor enough food, and no way to do anything, were driven out of the camp and asked them to hide in the heavy snow on a snowy night of minus 20 degrees to face it. The endless firepower of the U.S. military. Before the arrival of the U.S. military, they were already out of combat. Only a few lucky people can become prisoners who can only roll their eyes and wait for the rescue of the US military.

I read Robert Buettner as a student Orphanage. I can only remember the general plot, but I am deeply impressed by a passage in it. "When an officer writes letters extolling the heroism of his fallen soldiers, these letters can measure his mistakes. The braver the dead soldiers, the more serious the officer's dereliction of duty." When it pours into propaganda glorifying these frozen soldiers, it actually promotes the incompetence of its commanders themselves. In the Battle of Changjin Lake, the illegal armed groups in the mainland used the Ninth Corps, 150,000 people, to suddenly attack the 1st Marine Division of the United States in an attempt to completely wipe it out. However, after a hard fight, the First Marine Division paid the price of 751 dead and 2,891 wounded, and successfully broke through and took some civilians who had retreated with the army by the way. And the casualties of the ninth corps will be much more tragic. According to the war history "First Battle of the Founding of the People's Republic of China" written by an author with a background in the bandit army, the Ninth Corps had 19,202 casualties, 28,954 were attrition due to frostbite, 1,000 died of frostbite, and 3,000 died of frostbite. Frostbite attrition reached 32% of the total number of corps, and severe frostbite reached 22%. However, some mainland researchers who are not from the bandit army background believe that the net will actually be higher, based on the number of personnel replenished by the Ninth Corps after the fact. For example, Guangting, the author of Ice and Snow Changjin Lake, believes that after taking into account various considerations, it is estimated that the reduction of the Ninth Corps may be as high as 60,000. Another thing that was concealed was the fact that the bandit army did not have enough cotton-padded clothes to equip the troops. However, under the urging of the upper-level bandit chiefs, the Ninth Corps did not stop in the northeast to change clothes but directly entered North Korea. It can be seen that the entire Changjin Lake battle was a tragedy brought about by the commander's extreme incompetence and contempt for life. The planning, deployment, and execution of the entire battle were extremely bad, and I am afraid that only the battle of Guan Jiaxuan could be even worse.

But what makes people strange is that this kind of humiliating failure in the eyes of others has not only not become a pain in the hearts of illegal armed groups in the mainland, but has become a theme used by them to promote obedience and worship to bandits. This has to be said to be a manifestation of the political cognitive dissonance of illegal armed groups on the mainland.

Cognitive dissonance theory, proposed by American psychologist L. Festinger, is one of the theories to explain psychological balance; the main point of the theory is that individuals have a tendency to maintain psychological balance. In most cases, the inner cognition and the outer behavior are in harmony, but when the two are inconsistent, the balance is lost, which makes the individual feel nervous, and thus generates the inner motivation to restore the balance. The same is true of politics. Although propaganda and reality are often inconsistent, there is always a tendency to balance and coordinate the two. Cognitive dissonance has a typical application in psychology, that is, the patient's own thoughts and behaviors are inconsistent, resulting in dissonance. In order to coordinate and balance the two, patients are likely to change their cognition in order to adapt to their behavior.

Perhaps the same is true in politics. Take Xi Jinping as an example. As a generation that grew up in various movements and turmoils, as a generation that has gone to the mountains and the countryside, what he received could only be the kind of propaganda-style, extremely exaggerated false lies. But also because of this, his knowledge of illegal armed groups in the mainland is completely based on these lies, and he believes that this former Soviet affiliate is a revolutionary, rational, national party, not a group for profit Illegal armed forces that do not hesitate to betray their nationality and personality. Taking this as a premise, we may be able to understand the rationality of the absurdity of the bandit's propaganda. When real history clashed with the image of Xi Jinping and his generation, they developed symptoms of cognitive dissonance. In order for the two to live in harmony, they had to try to change some common moral judgments in order to gain inner peace. As a result, they believe that the ice sculpture company is extremely heroic, a symbol of courage and indomitable, and worthy of good publicity. But they didn't realize it, according to the most common moral standards of mankind, they were the ones who were stupid and incompetent should be responsible for the tragedy of the Ice Sculpture Company. With this premise, we seem to be able to understand why Xi Jinping, the bandit chieftain, would attack himself with his remarks that "a country's democracy should be decided by the people, and not a few people have the final say." This may also be Xi Jinping's self-treatment of cognitive dissonance.

To make matters worse, such cognitive dissonance seems to have some contagious effect. A video for the purpose of promoting rural informatization, the content of which is that a college student village official sitting in front of a screen transmits sound to the villagers through a dozen monitoring screens. Either to stop the illegal behavior of the villagers, or to express some concern for the villagers, or to discuss the private life of the villagers. If I didn't look at the publisher, I would have thought it was a 1984-like satire made by an anti-communist group. The pervasive monitoring of villagers is promoted as the result of rural informatization, and the degree of cognitive dissonance can be said to be very serious.

In general, illegal armed groups on the mainland are showing an increasingly serious state of cognitive dissonance. Due to the characteristics of the secret operation of illegal armed groups in the mainland, we cannot do a more detailed exploration of them, but it also makes us guess that perhaps the cognitive dissonance of illegal armed groups in mainland China has already begun, and Wolf Warrior diplomacy and the Belt and Road Initiative may also be a manifestation of cognitive dissonance .