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.
> 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.