Chapter 83 Section 36. The power of the centralized system

Zhang Xianzhong may be crazy, but the question is: Why do his tens of thousands of subordinates still bow to this madman and meticulously carry out any crazy orders of this madman? This is the power of the Eastern centralized system.The characteristic of this system is that there is no restriction mechanism on the supreme power, so one person's wisdom will be magnified into the victory of all, and one person's madness will be magnified into the crime of all.Before Zhang Xianzhong, there was Zhu Yuanzhang who massacred heroes out of his own selfishness, and almost all heroes were slaughtered honestly.

As for the ordinary soldiers of Zhang Xianzhong's department who hold knives and kill innocent residents like melons and vegetables all day long, what kind of psychological state do they have in their hearts when they perform these tasks? In Yukio Komata's "Journal of Japanese Military Reporters", interviews with Japanese soldiers who participated in the massacre may help us understand Zhang Jun hundreds of years ago: Because he was often exposed to a large number of corpses and blood on the battlefield, his nerves were numb.I have to admit that whenever I saw the large number of Japanese soldiers who died in battle, it would arouse a kind of vengeance that wanted to revenge the enemy, and a sadistic mentality would flash out.

We were stationed in Xiaguan at that time.We tied the captured captives into bundles of ten with wire from barbed wire, pushed them into the well, and then poured oil on them and burned them to death.There is a method of killing called "Le Cao Bao", which feels like killing a pig.Doing this will make you indifferent to killing.Because this is too commonplace for us... Besides, because it is an order, we don't think about it too much. Zhang Jun, who was born as a farmer, of course knew that the people they killed were completely innocent.They are not driven by revenge, so when killing people, all they have in their hearts is numbness, which is commonplace, "because it is an order, I don't think too much about it."

The whole task of Chinese peasants in the world is to be "obedient citizens" who provide surplus products.As Lu Xun said, the rulers of all dynasties only wished that they did not have poisonous needles like the slender-waisted wasp, otherwise, they would not be afraid to turn the peasants into caterpillars without brains and only labor.Trapped by nature, clan, regime and ideology for a long time, peasants lost their sense of self.The farmers' independent personality, free personality, and subject consciousness are all in a dormant state. Even if they unite, they can only become tools of others.

As we will see later, when Zhang Jun heard the order to point the blade at his comrades who lived with him day and night, he was also out-and-out.These farmers who have changed from being slaughtered sheep to extremely ferocious wolves because of the earth-shaking changes are still full of sheep nature of "obedience to authority, avoiding thinking, and always following the crowd".Even after Zhang Xianzhong passed away and his heirs changed course and stopped killing innocent people indiscriminately, they still regarded Zhang Xianzhong as the old master, and said "Old Long Live" one by one.