Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un gets near-unending applause from North Korean audiences in 2021. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote something similar about Joseph Stalin’s USSR audiences in the 1930s:
Here is one vignette from those years as it actually occurred. A district Party conference was under way in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. … For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause, rising to an ovation,” continued. … However, who would dare to be the first to stop? The secretary of the District Party Committee could have done it. He was standing on the platform, and it was he who had just called for the ovation. But he was a newcomer. He had taken the place of a man who’d been arrested. He was afraid! … And in that obscure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on — six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! … Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! … Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. … To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1, pp 69-70
Fast-forward to 2021.
- Replace district Party conference with the masses.
- Keep the fear.
- Replace the applause with COVID-19 masks.
- Keep all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation.
- Replace minutes with months or even quarters.
COVID-19 masks are hand-clapping for the masses.