One analogy that keeps coming to mind is the religious rapture of a medieval or early modern crowd as a witch is burned, an act they sincerely believe is good and necessary to save the soul of the person they're burning.
> “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
- C. S. Lewis
The tyrannies going on right now are more insidious, because people can be more insidiously cajoled into compliance and more surgically atomised from each other, and out of their moral frameworks.
It's when a hot revolution happens that these highly visual acts of repression happen, as it's a feature not a bug to signal who's boss now. But if everyone already perceived and agreed to who's boss and rendered all their power to the service of the new regime, and there was no need to appease the new ruler's revenge thirst, then all of these struggle sessions would have been wasteful.
Performative struggle sessions are to be expected if there's an active resistance.
Which means it was mostly unplanned mass hysteria...
Classic Maoism is NOT unplanned. It's is all about taking advantage of the dumbest members of society to enforce arbitrary dogma that is pushed by the state.
Except for what's going on in the Uyghur internment camps. Which does look a lot more like what went on back in the day. And (in the CPC's view) it's for their own good, no less.
No, instead they torture the tiger until it becomes a zookeeper itself.
They are many things at that point. A source of inspiration, a lesson in how to maybe not be locked up yourself. A target for rebels to rescue (that would be embarrassing).
Getting more extreme doesn't fix it... if you simply execute them, then they're martyrs. It can't be fixed later (like with prisoners, potentially). You don't get to un-martyr them.
The question is how you erase them from existence itself. And the totalitarians have started to figure out the solution to that problem in the 21st century, I fear.
The totalitarian brainwashing definitely serves ideology, but the technique is not unique to any particular ideology, any more than the concept of a loop is unique to any programming language. Pre-communist imperial Chinese society was pretty totalitarian in its own right. Over a longer historical scale Chinese history abounds with examples of hyper-authoritarianism, eg printing the emperor's full name in a dictionary was grounds for the execution of your entire family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_taboo