By Helen Raleigh
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
I’ve been avoiding the news lately because it pains me to
see my beloved country so divided, with people so bitterly angry at each other.
All the shouting, violence, and destruction of historical monuments have only
brought up a feeling of déjà vu.
America is clearly undergoing a Cultural Revolution that
is eerily similar to Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which took
place in China in the 1960s. Maybe Karl Marx was right after all when he
declared that “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
Both Movements
Started On Campuses, And Spread
China’s Cultural Revolution was triggered by a group of
students at Beijing University, the most elitist college in China. They called
themselves the Red Guards because they worshiped China’s communist dictator Mao
and his socialist/communist ideology feverishly. In their manifesto, they
questioned the usefulness of knowledge, and condemned their professors and
university administrators for harboring “intellectual elitism and bourgeois
tendencies” and for stalling China’s progress towards a communist utopia.
Mao immediately realized that he could use these
over-zealous and ignorant teenagers as a political tool to purge his enemies
and shape society to his own liking. He elevated the Red Guards’ status by
appearing at a massive Red Guard rally on August 18, 1966 at Tiananmen Square.
This event lent Red Guards political legitimacy, and officially kicked off the
Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards’ ideas quickly spread from colleges to high
schools.
No one on campus dared challenge the Red Guards.
Capitulations from school authorities only emboldened them. They led students
to strike, refusing to take classes from people who were deemed less than ideologically
pure. Professors, teachers, and school administrators were paraded and forced
to make numerous public self-criticisms about “transgressions” against
government-sanctioned orthodoxy. Soon, college entrance exams were suspended
and many schools, from universities to high schools, were closed. The entire
education system was paralyzed.
Without schools to go to, the Red Guards traveled all
over China to spread their ideas and tactics to the “real world.” Other people,
such as factory workers unhappy with the shortages, organized their own groups
to challenge leadership of their own work units. Since no one was working,
businesses, factories, and many government agencies were shut down. The entire
country fell into lawlessness and chaos.
American College
Students: Resurrecting The Red Guard?
Like Mao’s Red Guards, some American college students and
their supporters have been shouting down anyone who dares to disagree with
them. These modern-day Red Guards demand that college campuses be an inclusive
and safe place, but are bent on making sure the campus is an unwelcoming and
unsafe place for anyone who doesn’t show unconditional support for students’
sanctioned orthodoxy. From Yale to Middlebury, college professors and
administrators have caved to these students mobs’ preposterous demands. Exhibit
A is Nicholas Christakis, the Silliman master at the center of Yale’s debate
over Halloween costumes. His very public self-criticism probably would have won
over Maoist Red Guards in China, but failed to gain sympathy from privileged
Yale students.
Now that kind of zealous demand for thought conformity
has expanded outside campuses to the “real world.” When James Damore, a Google
employee, raised questions about Google’s diversity training in a memo, he was
fired by Google. As Sumantra Maitra wrote, “Nothing could be more dystopian
than the largest information, communication, and documentation hub controlling
your thoughts and punishing you for wrong think.”
Both Movements
Sought the Destruction of History
The Red Guards firmly believed that in order to build a
new world, they had to wipe out the old one. So they traveled around the
country, eradicating anything representing China’s feudalistic past: old
customs, old cultures, old habits, and old ideas. Museums, temples, shrines,
heritage sites, including Confucius’ tomb, were defaced, ransacked, or even
totally destroyed.
One of the worst instances of destruction took place at
the Ming Dynasty(1368-1644) tombs near Beijing. The Red Guards dug up the
remains of Ming emperors and empresses, denouncing their oppression against
Chinese people, before burning the remains with burial treasures, including
priceless ancient artifacts, books, and manuscripts. Much personal property,
including my own family’s genealogy book—containing 50 generations of
information—was confiscated and ended up in the fire. In the meantime, many
cities and towns renamed their streets with new revolutionary names. Mao
pictures and statues were everywhere. Such drastic efforts to erase the
influence of the past and remake the society in a revolution-sanctioned image
have left irrevocable damage to Chinese culture and people.
That intensity and zeal to cleanse the past is repeating
itself in America. Since recent events in Charlottesville, calls to remove or
destroy Confederate statues in the U.S. have only gotten louder. Some places,
such as the city of Baltimore and Duke University, already took actions to
remove Confederate statues. Over the weekend, however, more and more historical
monuments, some having nothing to do with the Confederacy, were vandalized.
It’s true that Confederate soldiers and generals fought
to maintain an immoral system. They should not be celebrated. But as Peggy
Noonan of the Wall Street Journal
wrote over the weekend, “when a nation tears down its statues, it’s toppling
more than brass and marble. It is in a way toppling itself. When you tear down
statues, you tear down avenues of communication, between generations.”
I always believe if we want to define our future, we have
to learn from the past. But if we don’t have a complete picture of the past,
how can we make sure we learn the right lessons? Every civilization, every
country, every generation of people, has its own good, bad, and ugly. “The most
effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own
understanding of their history.” We owe it to ourselves and future generations
to preserve a full picture of the past and make sure lessons in full context
are passed on.
Both Movements
Justify Violence on the Basis of Their Perceived Moral Authority
The Red Guards were fanatic about social classes and
political identity. They believed they were the rightful heir to Mao’s
socialist revolution and that only they and their chairman were on the right
side of the history. Thus, they shouted down anyone who dared to show the
slightest disagreement with slogans, such as “a complete confession is the only
road to survival. Anything less will lead to death!”
The Red Guards were sources of terror. Professors,
writers, scientists, artists, and even government officials were publicly
paraded, denounced, humiliated, and tortured in public by the Red Guards and
their supporters. Suicides among the persecuted were very common. The Red
Guards even amplified their militant and violent nature by wearing special
outfits: olive green People’s Liberation Army’s uniform with a red arm band.
As the Red Guards spread from schools to the rest of the
society, they also increased their use of force. They didn’t just fight with
their fists, either: they fought with real weapons. Some Chinese cities were
engulfed in violence to such an extent, order was only restored through
military takeover.
If you think that level of violence and lawless will
never take place in America, just watch the videos of violent protests at Yale,
Berkeley, and Middlebury College. Fringe groups such as Antifa insist that
violence is justified against anyone they deem
to be haters, racists, or fascists. Once again, after these groups honed
their vicious tactics on college campuses and faced little consequences or push
back, they took their tactics to the “real” world. During a 2016 campaign rally
in San Jose, anti-Trump demonstrators violently attacked Trump supporters and
local police. Since Trump’s election, such belief in “righteous beating” have
received support from mainstream left leaning media, even some politicians.
This so called “legitimate violence” from radical left fueled the violent
response from far right groups, which led us to Charlottesville.
We Have To Learn
From Mistakes Of The Past
Our nation has fallen into a vicious cycle: violence from
one side induces a violent response from the other side, which becomes an
excuse to justify more violence.
Mao’s Cultural Revolution movement was the darkest
chapter in China’s history. It should be called “Cultural Destruction.” It
brought the Chinese people nothing but misery. It did fundamentally transform
Chinese society: millions, including a generation of China’s intellectual
backbone, perished, and an entire young generation grew up without any formal
education. It tore the social fabric that used to unite people, and overturned traditional
close relationships among families and communities. Its irreplaceable
destruction of China’s cultural heritage left Chinese people in a spiritual and
moral vacuum.
“Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.” We
should be alarmed by the similarities between today’s American cultural
revolution to China’s Cultural Revolution. Let’s never forget that evil can
come from the pursuit of progress.
American’s cultural revolution is endangering the Republic we hold dear.
To preserve it, we have to find “the energy of a common national sentiment” and
re-affirm the “uniformity of principles” that once united us as Americans.
No comments:
Post a Comment