by Al Benson Jr.
Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America
Awhile back New American magazine’s Alex Newman, did an exclusive interview with Professor Michael Rectenwald of New York University. Professor Rectenwald has been an informed critic of what is called today the “social justice movement” in this country. He has written books about it, apparently to the disgust of some of his colleagues–to the point where Professor Rectenwald has filed a defamation lawsuit not only against NYU but also against four of its professors. Rectenwald is known for his criticism of “social justice” and political correctness–not traits that exactly endear him to the socialist milieu present on most college campuses in our day.
A brief article about Alex Newman’s interview was on the LRC Blog for October 12, 2019 under the title Cultural Maoism. The article, by Charles Burris, noted that “Professor Rectenwald highlights the enormous danger that the so-called ‘social justice’ movement poses to freedom and civilization. This ideology of tyranny is now being taught to American students at schools and universities, threatening everything good. Rectenwald also discusses the hidden history of this dangerous movement.”
Continuing, he noted: “Here is an excellent article on the Chinese Cultural Revolution from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s. I have ironically been thinking about this subject over the past couple days in regards to the continuing escalating violence and dangerous inflammatory rhetoric directed at President Trump by the left, both within the institutional mainstream regime media and entertainment industries, as well as on and off university campuses in the militant street brigades of Antifa or Black Lives Matter. I think that the term ‘cultural Marxism’ has become obsolete and should consciously and repeatedly be replaced with ‘cultural Maoism,’ stressing the repressive puritanical nature of these ideological thugs. Cultural Maoists are the savage equivalent of ISIS in seeking their apocalyptic death wish of destruction of the past (think about the widespread nation-wide campaigns against anything relating to the Southern Confederacy or what they describe as ‘white privilege’)”
Rectenwald may well have a point. Cultural Maoism way well be descriptive of what goes on in this country today with these “social justice” groups. Certainly much of what is currently taking place here does hark back to what happened in Red China during the Cultural Revolution.
Philip Jenkins did an article in The American Conservative on June 28, 2017 called So You Want a Cultural Revolution? Jenkins observed: “Horrified byo images of American students shouting down and visibly attacking speakers on their campuses, some commentators have reasonably invoked memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The problem with that analogy is that it is simply lost on most readers, including more younger than middle age.” In other words, if you are younger than middle age you have never been taught about any of this. Your “educational institutions” have just dispensed with all of this, most especially if it made any communist country, like China, look bad.
Jenkins continued: “So what exactly was this ‘Cultural Revolution’ thing anyway? The U.S. media does a wonderful job of recalling atrocities that they can associate with the Right, while far worse horrors stemming from the Left vanish into oblivion. In reality, not only does the Cultural Revolution demand to be remembered and commemorated, it also offers precious lessons about the nature of violence, and the perils of mob rule. In 2019, Communist China will celebrate its seventieth anniversary, and in that short time it has been responsible for no fewer than three of the worse acts of mass carnage in human history…” But, as these occurred in a communist country, the “news” media does not deem them worth the mention. If you could even say that our news media in this country, as least most of it, was up to the level of being utterly corrupt, up to the level of even being bought and paid for journalistic prostitutes, you would be paying them a complement! They don’t even begin to measure up to that “lofty” standard!
Jenkins starts to close his article with this: “Presently, our own neo-Cultural Revolutionaries are limited in what they can achieve, because even the most inept campus police forces enforce some restraints. If you want to see what those radicals could do, were those limitations ever removed, then you need only look at China half a century ago. And if anyone ever tells you what a wonderful system Communism could be were it not for the bureaucracies that smothered the effervescent will of an insurgent people, then just point them to that same awful era of Chinese history.”
Even Wikipedia had a brief article on this, relating to the Red Guards. It stated: “Red Guards were a mass student-led paramilitary social movement mobilized and guided by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 and 1967, during the first phase of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which he had instituted.” So dear old, lovable Mao, that grand old man of agrarian reformers, turned his bloody carnage loose on his own people!
Now those in our own country who deify the likes of Chairman Mao are trying to do exactly the same thing to us. It would seem that our “social justice” warriors are little more than the spiritual descendants of Mao’s Red Guard–and if some of them were honest enough about their agenda for us, they would be glad to admit as much, but they can’t, not quite yet, lest they give the game away too soon.
revisedhistory 