
Pretty sure the Variable Joel video in question is a Nebula exclusive.
Ahhh thats probably where I saw it
edit: thank you, I found it!
Authoritarianism, at it's core, is "You will do what you're told and it doesn't matter what you think because we've got the guns."
The reason Orwell (and his ideological successors) fixated on this "we must convince them to love us" thing is that it really was the practice in the USSR at the time. Prisoners in the gulags would send Stalin fucking birthday cards, it was a whole thing. The fact that it didn't apply as much to Nazis was part of the point—people like this wanted us to be primarily afraid of communists