“There is a whole intellectual structure, architecture, and, ultimately, strategy bound up with the idea of how to disrupt society, disrupt the West, overthrow the traditional order,” M.L.R. Smith tells Epoch Times.
According to Smith and David Jones, authors of The Strategy of Maoism in the West: Rage and the Radical Left (2022), the conduct of the America’s radical Left resembles that of the Red Guards and others during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s in China.
The authors got the idea for their study from the riots that swept the U.S. after the killing of George Floyd. These rage-filled protests-turned-riots made them think of Maoism:
- Defacing and toppling of monuments, reminders of the pesky past.
- Shouting down and “cancelling” speakers. (Sometimes physically as well as verbally assaulting them.)
- Abject kneeling and self-criticism in response to alleged wrongdoing, including “‘white guilt’ genuflection.”
The parallels are real, even though the scale of the humiliations and destruction that we have seen is nowhere near that of the Cultural Revolution, when millions were tortured and murdered.
Jones says Maoism was bred in China and hothoused in Paris but “achieved its global appeal in the Ivy League schools of the United States,” where it is manifest in thinking about race and gender.
The authors explore the nature of rage as a motivating force and strategy, “an energy to be harnessed as a mode of power.” This is the fuel of many a revolution, where mob action serves as a kind of open terrorism. Histories and treatises are filled with it.
America’s Founding Fathers feared such rage, hence in their revolution they stated principles in elegant but clear sentences. They expected argument and readily engaged.
But now?You can’t reason with rage.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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6 replies on “Haunted by the Specter of Mao”
There is one small difference between the Chinese pulling down monuments to those no longer “approved of” and removing monuments commemorating the Confederacy. The Confederates took up arms against their country, in most places, including ours, such an act is called treason. Noone outside the southern states officially recognized the CSA as a country. The monuments were not erected until after the rebellion was put down. There were not heroic Americans, they were traitors. While we do need to be constantly aware of their treason, we do not and should not celebrate it.
While I am not exactly enthusiastic to take a side with the Confederacy, Victor Justes has the Confederates quite wrong.
The Confederates were not traitors, for secession is quite constitutional.
Secession movements started in the north soon after the adoption of the Constitution, and while unionists disagreed with the advisability of disunion, they did not lead with the Constitution, since the document is quite clear: all powers not explicitly delegated to the general government and prohibited to the states reside in the states and in the people. Secession is not mentioned in the Constitution. Therefore, secession was not prohibited. And, therefore, Lincoln’s suppression of the secessionist states on grounds of “insurrection” (which does not apply) was itself treasonous. Lincoln’s illegal war ended the Constitutional order of free states. It freed the slaves, in the end, which was good, but that was not his prime focus (it was the union) and it came at the cost of shackling us all to an imperialistic nation-state.
Also, the monuments to the Confederate soldiers were largely (by their public statements at the time) attempts at reconciliation. The idea was to honor the lost and accept the southerners back into the union. Now the wokies wish to suppress any thought of honoring white southerners and midwesterners, whom they hate with a fury impossible not to notice. They don’t want to reconcile with people they dislike, but wish to conquer them all over again.
Further, the wokies are not just attacking monuments of the Confederacy. They’ve destroyed (and forced quisling officials to remove) statues of Jefferson and even Frederick Douglass. And many others. These people are not proponents of liberty. They are mobbing factions of a quite twisted totalitarianism. Defending them in any way is to promote the revolutions they demand.
Some suggest that the parameters that Lincoln set up were to give lip service to the idea that the war was about slavery. A brilliant albeit costly move given the decades later ramifications, but it served the purpose of making it politically incorrect for the other empires of the day, specifically France and Spain, from aligning and abetting the South.
Specifically, that his Emancipation Proclamation only freed the succeeding states slaves; that it had an implemented date where it wouldn’t be enacted if they returned; and that he promised to add slavery specifically to the Constitution if the South would merely return and resume paying the bills.
Amen.
Sadly, victors write history. It wasn’t a civil war. Civil wars are fights over who will control the existing government. This was properly a war of secession. Just like in 1776. A war between the states, if you want to stay neutral. But definitely not a civil war.
Most accurately it was the War of Northern Aggression. The North was the aggressor. The South just wanted to leave, as all original 13 colonies did from England.
Not only were there secession movements in every sector of the U.S. up to then, Lincoln, the hypocrite, spoke in favor of people being able to leave (secede) if they so chose when Texas broke away from Spain/Mexico. Of course, he also claimed to be a constitutionalist even as he jailed opposing newspaper publishers and closed their newspapers, held people in violation of habeas corpus and imposed martial law to prevent freedom of speech, assembly and association. The despot also gave the US its first unconstitutional income tax to pay for his war. He also turned loose his army to target noncombatants, women, children, old people, their homes, farms, businesses, churches in his scorched earth destruction of Georgia and the Carolinas, in direct conflict with the centuries’ old Christian Just War doctrine.
As long as we’re correcting the “victors’ ” propaganda, understand that Lincoln was an unapologetic white supremist. He was completely against blacks intermixing with whites, holding political office or intermarrying. He literally worked to his dying day to get blacks to return to Africa. His emancipation order, as addressed above, only affected slaves in states that had seceded. All northern slaves were expressly exempted. It was a war tactic, hoping to give the South thousands of “freed” slaves rising up; a second front in the war.
None of this was secret or unknown at the time. Lincoln was despised by large segments of northerners as well as southerners. He was elected with a pitiful 40% of the vote. Huge riots broke out in New York over his war policies. A century and a half of the victors’ propaganda has resulted in next to no one knowing all this today, and those who are aware are useful idiots parroting the talking points.
No Southern generals or politicians intentionally targeted women, children and private property as did Sherman and other northern generals. The good guys and bad guys were clear at the time. History’s fog has changed that.
Posit it is not just rage that is feared but the anonymity inherent in a mob, that lets it function at its basest level. The lack of accountability and consequences that seems inherently libprog. As Jason Aldean sang in “Try that in a small town”, there is a socializing and civilizing effect when everybody knows your name, and reprehensible behavior reflects badly on your family the next day. And you have to account.
This was discussed brilliantly by Elias Canetti in CROWDS AND POWER.
Mob action is its own special creature.