Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/84

 disappears also personality and sense of responsibility. Personifications of social power seem to animate the world. Only expected, official activity is experienced as real activity. The unofficial projects of an individual human being seem to happen in a social vacuum, cut off from the real life of humanity; they are experienced as empty intervals of inactivity. Estranged power is experienced as the only real community. Personified power is internalized as the only form of human power. ''—The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that in it the individual, who in becoming an adherent to a new movement feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of being alone, receives for the first time the picture of a greater community, something that has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most people. The same man, in the frame of a company or a batallion, surrounded by all his comrades, would set out on an attack with a lighter heart than he would if left entirely to himself. In the crowd he always feels a little sheltered even if in reality a thousand reasons would speak against it. The community of the great demonstration, however, strengthens not only the individual, but it also unites and helps in creating esprit de corps. The man who, as the first representative of a new doctrine, is exposed to serious oppression in his enterprise or his workshop, urgently needs that strengthening that lies in the conviction of being a member and a fighter of a great embracing body. But he only received the impression of this corporation at the first common mass demonstration. If he steps for the first time out of his small workshop or out of the big enterprise, in which he feels very small, into the mass meeting and is now surrounded by thousands and thousands of people with the same conviction, if while looking around he is carried away by the powerful effect of the suggestive intoxication and the enthusiasm of three or four thousand others, if the visible success and the approval of thousands confirm the correctness of the new doctrine in his mind and waken for the first time the doubt about the truth of his previous conviction—then he himself succumbs to the magic influence of what we call mass suggestion. The will, the longing, but also the force of thousands accumulates in every individual. The man who comes to such a meeting doubting and hesitating, leaves it confirmed in his mind: he has become the member of a community. —When an organization is rooted in the needs of the people, attacks on that organization or on its leaders are understood and resisted as a more visible form of the daily oppression of the entire people. —Thus the mass defense of the Party can be viewed as an opportunity to unite fragments around support of the group which is in the vanguard. —As the movement recognizes the enemy and the serious terms of the struggle, we view our own defense as part of the people's defense—a fight for survival. —We continue to speak about repression and exploitation, all the time relating that back to the repression of the Party and oppression''