What happened in China during the Cultural Revolution is on such a different level of awfulness it just isn't even the tiniest bit comparable to anything controversial or problematic happening in West right now. Even today what is happening in China, and even the freer parts like Hong Kong, is still far removed from issues in the West. Even as a "thin end of the wedge" argument it's just weak.
It hurts legitimate and necessary criticism of actual authoritarian countries and it hurts legitimate and necessary criticism of real issues (such as that raised in the article above) in free, Western countries.
There is a nice sort of proportionality to how everything is hysterically overdone and out of proportion!
That said everything is on a sliding scale here, and the worst enforcement of orthodoxy on the mildest offenders can certainly be compared to much lesser attacks if they stem from similar impulses.
If you cannot make a comparison of this sort then the world would be a place with unconnected events and patterns, and no real way of defining or discussing how situations move from a not bad condition to a very bad one, or in the other direction.
There would never be such a thing as warning signs or worrying trends, because those things would not be relatable to absolutely awful things they might lead to.
Conversely if you were living with awful things there would be no reason to discuss how they could improve, because the improved version of life would not be comparable. How can you make legitimate and necessary criticism of actual authoritarian countries if you cannot compare bad with less bad?
When I looked more deeply in to it, the only mentions of people being held hostage came from far right sources, such as the youtube channel you linked, with little credibility.
Watching recordings of what happened it's hard to take you seriously when you say people are being held hostage.
It can simultaneously be true that the West is a long way from communism and that these scenes look a lot like what happened in times when communism was seriously tried. These are the same dynamics that got out of control and into the halls of power.
But this comment is just unhinged nonsense. This is akin to the claims that Jan 6 was a coup attempt. “The left” is not a homogenous organized force (rofl, come on, the trope is that the left eats itself) which has organized militants on standby.
Antifa and Patriots are both larping idiots alike. It’s the contagion and mutation of bad ideas that’s a bigger problem. A semantic pandemic.
America isn't at that point, but we do ourselves no favours by pretending that it can't happen here. The ingredients are available, even if the execution isn't yet.
Just looking from 1850 to Mao, there was: The Taiping Rebellion (30m dead), 2nd Sino-Japanese War (20m dead), Dungan rebellion (15m dead), Miao rebellion (5m dead), Red Turban rebellion (1m dead), Panthay rebellion (1m dead), Punti–Hakka wars (1m dead), Nationalist purges (1.5m dead), various Warlord Era conflicts (500k dead), 1911 revolution (200k dead), Boxer Rebellion (100k dead), and 1st Sino-Japanese war (50k dead). Not to mention residual deaths from the two World Wars not directly attributable to the conflicts above, but which would still number more than the losses the USA suffered in both wars.
The American Civil War was about ~750k dead. There is absolutely no comparison between the traumatic social conditions of 1940s China with even 21st century China let alone the United States. They were definitely not "role playing".
And the exercises of forced public contrition if you violate the orthodoxy are right in the middle of the cultural revolution. As is the gilt of class (now “whiteness”), or the liberal use of "fascism" in every sentence (now "white suppremacy" associated with everything in America on MSNBC).
Right-wing violence, no matter how apparently haphazard or the result of lone-wolf action, is the result of a tightly coordinated network of fascists taking orders (through covert "dogwhistle" channels) directly from conservative leadership, up to and including the White House if a Republican is in office, acting on a master plan to undermine democracy and overthrow the government in a coup.
Corollary: We're not the conspiracy theorists, the far right are the conspiracy theorists.
Here in Germany they have "alternative housing projects" complete with strategies to prevent the police from entering. Of course the organize and talk strategies. And they also have government support, politicians applauding when antifa beats up memebers of the opposition. They will also threaten third parties like restaurants that host meetups of politicians they disapprove of.
They are always on "standby" because they often have no jobs and hang out consuming drugs until a chance arises to get some action.
i) dweeb grad students who have read too much Left "theory" but are really just liberals,
ii) liberal punks whose primary goals are keeping cryptofascism out of their communities and cooking veggies from the local farmers market (not necessarily in that order), and
iii) anarchist punks whose primary goals are keeping Nazi punks out of dive venues and cooking vegan chili from dumpster veggies (not necessarily in that order)
You will have more success herding cats than in getting that motley crew to agree on a single policy action, let alone organizational action.
That such a group have invokes for you a specter of Weimar-era Nazis is kind of embarrassing, and speaks to an utter lack of diversity in social experiences. The teen smoking weed in a Dead Kennedys hoodie down the street from you has probably has an Antifa sticker on his laptop, and perhaps he'd love to throw a brick through a Starbucks window... but that's not Kristalnacht.
Taleb btw is nowhere near as fragile as to fear Antifa as some vanguard force for e.g. Nazism or sectarian ethnic militancy. He's literally more concerned about random bitcoin fanatics.
Turns out even "dweeb grad students" sometimes like to beat up folks, apparently.
That's right. People are being beaten to death, locked up in labor camps, mysteriously vanished and worse, all because they don't bow down to people who think there are different metrics worth using at least some of the time when judging science (or anything else). It's absolutely terrifying!
(+) and let's not overlook that UPenn is actively considering changing tenure rules just because a poor law professor made some actually racist remarks. Labor camps could be here by 2023!
This is definitely true, for a less-charged example:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/17/world/europe/serbia-media...:
> BELGRADE, Serbia — When Covid-19 reached Eastern Europe in the spring of 2020, a Serbian journalist reported a severe shortage of masks and other protective equipment. She was swiftly arrested, thrown in a windowless cell and charged with inciting panic.
> The journalist, Ana Lalic, was quickly released and even got a public apology from the government in what seemed like a small victory against old-style repression by Serbia’s authoritarian president, Aleksandar Vucic.
> But Ms. Lalic was then vilified for weeks as a traitor by much of the country’s news media, which has come increasingly under the control of Mr. Vucic and his allies as Serbia adopts tactics favored by Hungary and other states now in retreat from democracy across Europe’s formerly communist eastern fringe.
> “For the whole nation, I became a public enemy,” she recalled.
> Serbia no longer jails or kills critical journalists, as happened under the rule of Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s. It now seeks to destroy their credibility and ensure few people see their reports.
> That's right. People are being beaten to death, locked up in labor camps, mysteriously vanished and worse, all because they don't bow down to people who think there are different metrics worth using at least some of the time when judging science (or anything else). It's absolutely terrifying!
FYI, "reminiscent" does not mean "exactly identical in all respects."
"Rebuttals" like yours are obnoxious, because you can always find some difference in a comparison. If there's some merit to the comparison, you shouldn't try to knock it down as you did. You've accurately noted that the current social justice movement lacks the violence of the Cultural Revolution, but that does not mean it doesn't have other similarities. IIRC, it was far more common for the Red Guards to harass their opponents than it was for them to beat and kill them.
Most social change movements have similarities. The civil rights movement, the anti-slavery movement, the women's suffrage movement, the equal rights movement ... these all have similarities with the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It is precisely because they lack the violence that equating them to the CCR is a distraction and also poses its own dangers.
Yeah, but isn't it obvious that some are more similar than others? Did the woman's suffrage movement deface monuments or have the ability to enforce some of its ideological orthodoxy outside of its own activist institutions? There's obviously more similarity between the Cultural Revolution and the current social justice movement than they're both "social change movements."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Olds
> The first things to change were the names of streets and stores: "Blue Sky Clothes Store" to "Defending Mao Zedong Clothes Store", "Cai E Road" to "Red Guard Road", and so forth. Many people also changed their given names to revolutionary slogans, such as Zhihong (志红, "Determined Red") or Jige (继革, "Following the Revolution").[5]
> Other manifestations of the Red Guard campaign included...harassment of people, such as intellectuals,[8] who defiantly demonstrated the Four Olds.[4] In later stages of the campaign, examples of Chinese architecture were destroyed, classical literature and Chinese paintings were torn apart, and Chinese temples were desecrated.[5]
> ...This statue of the Yongle Emperor was originally carved in stone, and was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. A metal replica is in its place.
Not every "social change movement" does stuff like these examples, but they all have parallels in the current social justice movement.
But it also doesn't mean that the fact the I can use similar terminology to describe the Cultural Revolution and today (because of the broad meaning of various words in most human languages) implies that they are in fact meaningfully related, either.
In some ways they are meaningfully related, in some ways they aren't. That's the point. And the relation is not "because of the broad meaning of various words," since (for instance) they both contain instances of energetic radical youth movements seeking to enforce, with little tolerance for dissent, some orthodoxy on the wider society, etc.
The activists have not taken to beating to death landlords, but that is only a function of their not possessing the same level of social support as Red Guards did, but even without that they are capable of some level of harm. Don't mistake the lack of violence from a wolf in a cage as evidence of its benignity.
We live in a society where large corporations can destroy (or save) the economy of an entire town with a single investment decision. We live a society where a single corporation's employment policies dictate the life experience of more than 1.25 million people. We live in a society that spends that 10% of all federal income on the military (more than half of all discretionary spending), and that routinely launches disastrous wars overseas. A world in which the behavior of fossil fuel extraction industries threatens the current structure and distribution of contemporary human civilizations, yet they are largely beyond control. I could go on.
In the midst of all this, the idea that a small number of people who have a different idea of what constitutes justice and equality, most of them college age or not far from it, somehow represent an existential threat to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness is just laughable to me.
Anyway, I would not say they represent some sort of existential threat. Cultural winds can blow in either direction, and while they could become worse, it could also blow over and become a curiosity for the history books akin to a left wing version of the Red Scare. But that notwithstanding, my overall point is that these activists exhibit a similar attitude as Red Guards, even if they lack the same environment. The problem is not that they have 'a different idea of what constitutes justice and equality', it is that they have allowed ideology to subordinate both reason and empathy, so they see their political opponents as less than human, treat them as such, and cannot be persuaded otherwise.
I feel pity more for them than fear, however. Infighting is the nature of all political movements, and when you have such a worldview, it does not end well for you. For example, later in the novel, the former Red Guards meet with the physicist's daughter years later. In the intervening years, they had fallen out of favour and become some of the rusticated youth, being sent down to the countryside to work and living a subsequent life of hardship. And while I'm sure she's doing quite fine financially at the moment, I can't help but draw a similarity with Lindsay Ellis's experience getting cancelled apparently for saying that one TV show resembled another. Logically, of course, I'm sure you'll say she has little to worry about in terms of her livelihood, but that really is beside the point.
It's quite literally a mindless zombie remnant of the actual Cultural Revolution ideology of Lin Biao and the criminal Gang Of Four. That whole ideological memeplex was taken up by young radical leftists throughout the West in the late 1960s and 1970s. A generation has passed, and now those leftist students have grown up and become respected "liberal" and "progressive" leaders. Do the math, it's not rocket science.
Which is not at all surprising given how many young people in the West like to style themselves as Marxists.
Liu Cixin lived through that period, which inspired one of the scenes he wrote in the Three Body Problem. In it, a physics professor is submitted to a struggle session by his students for teaching counter-revolutionary science (relativity and quantum mechanics) and beaten to death.
While this story is fictionalised, it certainly was no exaggeration of the climate at the time.