“Mao managed to light the fuse that would lead to that huge explosion, the Cultural Revolution,” wrote [Simon] Leys. The sequence of events he described that led to that upheaval makes the process sound methodical, but the rage and violence unleashed defy rational analysis. Roving mobs of Red Guards composed of teens and children murdered with impunity. Ancient statues, temples, and buildings were destroyed. All books, films, and magazines that predated the Cultural Revolution were withdrawn, and universities and schools were closed. Professors were harassed by the “Workers-Soldiers Propaganda Teams of the Thought of Mao Tse-Tung,” and were sent to factories or the countryside. “Proletarians” replaced them when the universities tentatively reopened in 1972. This policy did not prove to be successful. Re-educated professors were allowed to return to teaching, but only under the watchful eye of the worker-soldiers propaganda teams. The content of the classes was now predominantly political theory.
The traditional university entrance exam system was eliminated. Replacing it, Leys observed in Chinese Shadows, was an admissions system that was “tightly political: a candidate who is not the son of a worker or a poor peasant has practically no chance of admission
I note that Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying have read extensively about the Cultural Revolution (I have not). Do I need to have a “Cultural Revolution Watch” title ready for future blog posts?
Frank Dikötter’s final book of his trilogy on China – The Cultural Revolution (2016) – is informative on that era. Julia Lovell’s 2019 book “Maoism – A Global History” provides a good analysis of the cultural revolution in the context of Mao’s special brand of authoritarianism.
“The three body problem” has one of the more readable takes on those times.
YES on the “The Three Body Problem”, very readable novel, with great section on “those times”.
Thanks for the recommendation, my son was looking for better information on the topic of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. I’m glad I found this blog. Thanks to the author for the post!
If we, as a society, are going to do our cultural revolution properly, we need a modern day equivalent to the “Little Red Book.”
Any candidates? What should I read first?
Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance.”
I’ve read The Red Book, and it’s mostly short quotes from Mao that are often hollow ideals (i.e., vague on details), or which greatly precede the CR period.
The interesting thing about the book would be to ask where each of Mao’s statements falls on the current American spectrum going from
1. Extreme Radical Left (<5% support)
2. Woke-Left
3. Center-Left
4. Mainstream
5. Respectable-Right
6. Problematic-Right
You might think it would be 1 or 2, but I am not joking at all when I say that on average Mao's statements are probably 3.5 or higher these days. Sometimes you have to replace 'class' with 'race' and do other translations from Marxism-ese into the equivalent idea but with updated jargon in CRT / Woke-ese, but the general meaning is the same.
"In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class." (1937)
"We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports." (1939)
"History shows that wars are divided into two kinds, just and unjust. All wars that are progressive are just, and all wars that impede progress are unjust. We Communists oppose all unjust wars that impede progress, but we do not oppose progressive, just wars. Not only do we Communists not oppose just wars; we actively participate in them." (1938)
"We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun." (1938)
"The world is progressing, the future is bright and no one can change this general trend of history. We should carry on constant propaganda among the people on the facts of world progress and the bright future ahead so that they will build their confidence in victory." (1945)
"In order to build a great socialist society it is of the utmost importance to arouse the broad masses of women to join in productive activity. Men and women must receive equal pay for equal work in production. Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole." (1955)
"The political authority of the landlords is the backbone of all the other systems of authority. With that overturned the family authority, the religious authority and the authority of the husband all begin to totter…. As to the authority of the husband … the basis for men's domination over women has already been undermined. With the rise of the peasant movement, the women in many places have now begun to organize rural women's associations; the opportunity has come for them to lift up their heads, and the authority of the husband is getting shakier every day." – (1927)
These perhaps score a 5 or 6 these days:
"Anyone should be allowed to speak out, whoever he may be, so long as he is not a hostile element and does not make malicious attacks, and it does not matter if he says something wrong. Leaders at all levels have the duty to listen to others. Two principles must be observed: (1) Say all you know and say it without reserve; (2) don't blame the speaker but take his words as a warning. Unless the principle of "Don't blame the speaker" is observed genuinely and not falsely, the result will not be "Say all you know and say it without reserve". " – (1945)
"In the final analysis, national struggle is a matter of class struggle. Among the whites in the United States, it is only the reactionary ruling circles that oppress the black people. They can in no way represent the workers, farmers, revolutionary intellectuals and other enlightened persons who comprise the overwhelming majority of the white people." – Statement Supporting the American Negroes in Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism (1963)
“Anyone should be allowed to speak out, whoever he may be, so long as he is not a hostile element and does not make malicious attacks …”
But we know that anyone who says, say, “all lives matter” is a racist and racists are by definition hostile elements. A statement like “the higher black crime rate may account for some of police attention to blacks” by denying white privilege and the role of the police in oppression is a malicious attack on all blacks and must be suppressed–along with the person who said it.
Anyone in China who thought Mao believed in free speech quickly learned the opposite.
Just like a lot of tyrannies like to pretend they are ‘democratic’ (Union of Soviet Socialist *Republics* – indeed, ‘soviet’ itself meaning “an elected government council at the local level” – or *Democratic* People’s *Republic* of Korea), a lot of tyrants like to pretend they favor free speech too.
For example, there is Mao above, Stalin’s Soviet Constitution of 1936 (Articles 124-124 being like the First Amendment and guaranteeing freedom of religion, speech, and assembly), and going back 230 years:
Robespierre, 1792.
This was preliminary to the trial of Louis XVI, arguing against the Girondin proposal to put the matter of the king’s guilt to popular vote in local assemblies in order to give the trial more ‘legitimacy’. Robespierre was against it, and anyway, the Guillotine has already been oiled in anticipation of the foregone conclusion.
The Little Red Book was ubiquitous in U.S. high schools and colleges in the late 1960s. I had my copy. If you were a cool, hippie-political kid, you read it assiduously and displayed it prominently. And if you were like myself and my peers, you usually had to confess, usually while on drugs, that The Little Red Book was pretty much a bore. Drugs actually smothered a lot of latent radicalism in the late 1960s.
Don’t forget the struggle sessions, where people accused of violating the party line (often political insiders who had been in good graces until recently) were subjected to mass humiliation and forced to recant their heresies in front of a jeering crowd. That was one of the first things Deng Xiaoping got rid of as soon as he took over after Mao’s death.
With the cultural revolution there was a single figure, Mao, who could to some degree start and stop it as he pleased. It was started because Mao had fallen from grace in the party due to the failure of the Great Leap Forward. When the young had served their purpose of reminding the party that Mao was boss, he sent most of them off to the countryside so they wouldn’t cause too much trouble.
There is no Mao figure that can say “stop” in our situation.
Question:
Given that you’ve taken to pushing buttons relentlessly like this, do you feel you have any responsibility at all?
Sure, I’ll take a stab. It’s obviously an analogy and even my feeble mind can decipher what works vs. doesn’t work.
Here’s what works:
Irrational fervor and revanchism…check
Little red books…check
Rioting…check
Tearing down of statues and other historic symbols…check
Public censoring of books, movies and television shows…check
Firing of university professors due to ideology…check
Elimination of university entrance exams…check
Public humiliation of people that don’t accept the new religion…check
Government sponsored re-education programs…check
Here’s what doesn’t work:
Mass murders, cannibalism, etc….nope
Top down government initiation of the cultural transformation…nope
Supreme Court green light to prosecutions under Bostock civil right protection to transgender might qualify for top-down govt initiation of cultural transformation.
The prosecutions have I believe commenced.
What are you suggesting that Arnold has responsibility for?
Tom,
What do you mean by pushing buttons? What does taking responsibility look like for you? I see in this blog post a historical analogy with many parallels to current events. It went very poorly last time, and we’re left wondering if there is a historical lesson to be learned in order to avert a similar catastrophe.
Are there any positive claims you would like to make and defend about the historical situation or current events? Who is your audience for these trivial sniping critiques?
Perhaps, Tom, it would be best for you to better protect your buttons from strangers.
Tried to find the source of the italicized text by searching a chunk of text and got a piece from Quillette about Simon Leyes: https://quillette.com/2020/09/28/analyst-of-totalitarianism-reading-simon-leys-today/
When the piece came out in Quillete I was impressed enough with Leyes to buy Prospect a book of his about time on a French fishing boat. Sorry, maritime books will always be more interesting than politics. The author of the quillette piece, David Adler, is really sharp though and I was well rewarded by reading his other pieces on Quillette and at the Alturas Institute, a worthy foil for radicals of my persuasion whose status deserves boosting.
The husband-wife team of Weinstein and Heying are interesting, but I could not find much of anything from them in print about the cultural revolution. Must be in the videos or podcasts. Heying has a nice long manifesto-like tweet thread on totalitarianism in the academy and ideals, well worth reading.
Elsewhere, Joel Kotkin did a City Journal piece the other day that balanced the shallow roots of the cultural revolution in the overall population versus its threat and dominance in culture industries. He suggests “Yet before surrendering basics like equality of opportunity, social order, and free speech to leftist authoritarians, we should consider whether they’re the ones who will wind up getting canceled.”
https://www.city-journal.org/cultural-revolution
John Stadden of Duke recently wrote at Campus Reform a piece that said “Higher education has begun a transformation along the same lines as the 1966 Maoist “Cultural Revolution” in China. Like the cultural revolution, the energized identity-politics movement presents itself as a cleansing force.”
Rod Dreher had an American Conservative piece three days ago on “Cultural Revolution in King County” that includes a lengthy quote from a reader who survived the actual cultural revolution
and who says the techniques being used today by totalitarians are the same as those used by the Red Guards.
And a couple of months back senator Tim Scott said Biden/Harris want a cultural revolution.
So, yes, plenty of support out there for a “Cultural Revolution Watch” category. Nevertheless, their are also a lot of similarities with other non-Chinese totalitarian revolutions, perhaps a more inclusive tag would be “Totalitarianism Watch.”
Thanks. Nice summary. I can only hope that Joel Kotkin is right…
I spent a semester in Beijing in the mid 90s, which turned out to be a period of relatively exceptional openness. The Cultural Revolution was one of the things that was acceptable to talk about, and we asked two of our teachers about it.
One, who was in her late 50s/early 60s, responded with a very pained expression, sighed, and said, “it was a very hard time, very painful,” and we left it at that. The other, who was probably in her mid 30s, said, “well, my parents and I moved from the city out to a farm in the countryside for a year. I enjoyed having all the space to run around and play with the animals. I think my parents didn’t like it very much though, and we never talked about it after we came back to the city.”
I bought a Little Red Book from a street vendor, with a printing date in the late 60s, right in the thick of it. Whenever I hold it I wonder about the person who carried it–were they a young revolutionary flush with pride and certainty until the government declared them the enemy?–or maybe were they just an average Jiu, hoping that it would protect them if the mob showed up at their door.
Could a Cultural Revolution happen here? In the Chinese form, no–Sam Colt and the 2A put a pretty low limit on the number of potential victims of physical violence. Likewise, I think it would take a real revolution in 1A jurisprudence to make hard speech codes possible. Facebook et. al. could decide to fully anathematize criticism of SJW shibboleths, but if they actually do so then the rise of MAGABook becomes inevitable.
“Facebook et. al. could decide to fully anathematize criticism of SJW shibboleths, but if they actually do so then the rise of MAGABook becomes inevitable.”
No; these things don’t work that way.
Facebook will eventually do that, and nothing will happen. The top colleges have basically done that, and nothing happened.
The assumption that there is no important market failure or barrier at work, and that the risk of open competition will always be operative and provide salutary incentives for discipline and the entry of new alternatives just doesn’t hold in certain sectors.
In particular, it doesn’t work in areas where there are elite fashions and taste-makers, and political ideas including norms about acceptable expression come from an intellectual fashion industry. That’s why, in analogy to “market failure”, I call these “Social Failure Modes”.
A lot of conservative and libertarian commentary holds this assumption to be an article of faith, and the writers seem as if they simply cannot bring themselves to believe otherwise. But reality is what’s still there even if don’t believe in it, and the reality which everyone can see is “socially-natural monopoly”.
Am I being unfair when I say it’s a ‘faith’? Maybe, but I don’t think so. One characteristic of a faith is a tendency towards unfalsifiability in the sense of having a kind of catch-all answer for when evidence weigh in favor of a contrary conclusion. When you point to the empirical observations in favor of “socially-natural monopoly”, the catch-all answer is, “Well, this is just revealed preference then. People may complain and say they care, but they don’t really care, as revealed by the fact that they just keep on choosing to use the monopolies.”
This is kind of bizarre, because the same commentators complain that they are certain that there is something clearly very wrong with academia, and don’t seem to buy the same response, “Well, everybody keeps choosing Harvard, so in reality … ”
Daniel Klein just wrote an interesting letter to GMU President Washington about the road to fully anathematizing criticism of SJW shibboleths, and he has published other research which indicates that we all already there or well along that path at pretty much every top, prestigious university.
But we don’t have some alt-Harvard, alt-Yale, alt-Stanford. The top STEM schools like MIT and CalTech were once kinda sorta those alternatives, but not anymore. There is teeny, tiny Hillsdale which is the exception that is only notable because it proves the rule. You may think there must be plenty of Christian institutions that must also be exceptions, but they are all now clearly on the woke train too, even BYU.
Do you see the problem? There are times when it seems like open competition might work to help the ideological monoculture, but it doesn’t. That’s not how prestige works, and it’s not how fashion works.
If it’s prestigious fashion in art that goes down the toilet, we can survive the utter collapse and disappearance of a culture of aesthetic excellence, as proved by the fact that we have survived it, for several generations.
Indeed, the more untethered from objective criteria and divorced from feedbacks from reality, the more susceptible any field is to this degeneration, which is why it “reached fixation” most comprehensively in art first. Everything becomes politicized when everything becomes personalized, that is, when it doesn’t matter “Is this correct?” or “How good is this?”, but only, “Who is cool?” and “Who does this help?”
But when it comes to ideological ideas, this kind of degeneration will eventually manifest itself in terms of harmful policies and political upheaval.
The problem is that the way the mechanism of centralization in information works means that uncoordinated individuals still make decisions which are individually profitable and collectively harmful. The only way to break the tendency towards socially natural monopolization is with organized coordination.
That doesn’t have to be through “coercion” or “the state”, but maybe it doesn’t matter in practical terms and only in the technical legal sense. If an organization good at coordinating is big and scary enough to intimidate people into making big changes in the way they do things, and it is free to do so, then the state has not effectively monopolized a domain of coercion, and the lines between that coordinated body and a state begin to blur.
Having propped up your straw man you sure gave him quite a thrashing.
Attending Harvard or MIT buys you a chance at being a first round draft pick in the global economy’s great annual debutante ball. Joining Facebook gets you free access to stupid memes posted by people you were glad to lose touch with after high school. But sure, one is just like the other.
My proposition is that if Facebook starts to overtly take sides and actively block posts that cite Glenn Loury or Roland Fryer, then within 1-2 years we will see significant user migrations to alternative platforms.
This doesn’t mean a large number of right-leaning people will stop using Facebook altogether, but they will see it as a place to get baby pictures and liberal indoctrination, while going to MAGABook for discussion of news, politics, religion, guns, and other things Facebook decides to rule out of order. I jokingly refer to this as MAGABook and it might emerge as one Facebook-like site to unite all the disparate strands of the right, but it could also be some entirely different constellation of platforms that decide ~50% of the US population is an audience worth accommodating.
MAGABook doesn’t exist yet because it’s not necessary yet. I can post stuff by Fryer or thoughtful criticisms of Fauci and the WHO, and the owner of the pizza shop I worked for in high school can post bat$#@! crazy pro-Trump memes.
“My proposition is that if Facebook starts to overtly take sides and actively block posts that cite Glenn Loury or Roland Fryer, then within 1-2 years we will see significant user migrations to alternative platforms.”
I’m not sure people would seek out Facebook (or Twitter or Google or YouTube) substitutes under those circumstances. Your hypothesis is likely going to be tested soon enough (Facebook and Twitter regarding the NY Post; but also Netflix blocking Shelby Steele).
I think most people on the right will do what most already do (what we’re already doing here), keep using the the left wing platforms for most stuff, while occasionally seeking political retreat in low-traffic, right-of-center blogs. That may be ok for individuals on the right, as they still get to interact with like-minded people, but in small, self-selected ghettos with .001% the attention Facebook and Twitter get. The flow of communication for the right will have been mostly throttled.
Correction: Amazon, not Netflix.
I don’t think the 2A or 1A would make much of a difference. The 1A because it wouldn’t be the state doing the censoring, it’d be bands of activists. Sympathetic local politicians have a good amount of leeway to engage in non-enforcement, especially if the activists generally stop short of murdering people. That’s literally what happened in major cities over the summer. Where I live bands of racial activists were wandering the streets threatening and intimidating random white people with impunity. Hardly anyone owns a gun, no one would call the police because they wouldn’t show up. Even if one does own a gun, the smart decision is to not use it and just do what they tell you or take your beating, since if you use it, best case scenario is you get acquitted and have to live the rest of your life in Alaska under an assumed name.
I think federalism limits the extent to which a cultural revolution type scenario could happen in the US. States and cities where local law enforcement aren’t sympathetic to the mob would put a damper on it, and that’s probably most places. But in big cities where the ideology is strong (and gun laws are fairly stringent) and especially college campuses, where victims would have nothing to gain by fighting back, the impediments are pretty weak.