(+) 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.
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!