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Activism See other Activism Articles Title: Mao and Again It is becoming a cliché that America is undergoing its own version of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Obama’s 2012 reelection strategy unleashed energies reminiscent of those that plagued China from 1966 through Mao’s death in 1976. The most obvious example is the current urge to topple statues of past American heroes, which is reminiscent of the countless attacks on Chinese cultural sites by youthful Red Guards, such as the ransacking of Confucius’ tomb in 1966. The Cultural Revolution was largely perpetrated by young people told to feel oppressed by their country’s past. Social justice could be achieved only by the destruction of the weight of Chinese culture. Their slogan was “Smash the Four Olds”: old customs, culture, habits, and ideas. But that’s not the only analogy between late-1960s China and 2018 America. One of the mainsprings of the Cultural Revolution was a vindictive aged actress out for revenge on the producers and actresses who had cost her roles back in her prime. Mrs. Mao, Jiang Qing, had been a movie starlet in 1930s Shanghai, when she built up a lifetime of grudges that she acted upon when her husband let her take control of Chinese popular culture in the 1960s. Her squads beat up aging film figures and reedited old movies to conform to new political prejudices. She would have considered the recent American custom of terrified novelists hiring “sensitivity readers” to censor their manuscripts for them a step in the right direction. “Like an American social justice jihadi, Mao believed that bad thoughts were the cause of bad realities.” Mrs. Mao banned traditional operas, instead sponsoring eight model plays featuring heroic peasants battling demonic landlords. Her kind of simplistic division of the world into good guys and bad guys, whom you can tell apart just by looking at them, appeals as well to today’s youth, and those who want to manipulate them. As NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt recently noted: A funny thing happens, when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions. You tell them that one side in each binary is good and the other is bad. You turn on their ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle. Many students find it thrilling; it floods them with a sense of meaning and purpose. As a friend pointed out to me last week, the Cultural Revolution was driven by the mounting evidence that the reigning ideology had failed. But, of course, that was impossible, so the only solution was to double down upon the ideology. Indeed, Mao was the ultimate social constructionist. Like an American social justice jihadi, he believed that bad thoughts were the cause of bad realities. Like Hillary responding to the BLM massacre of Dallas policemen by saying, “We need to look more into implicit bias,” Mao demanded “thought reform.” Paul Johnson wrote in Modern Times: ...Stalin insisted in 1949, that Mao was not really a Marxist at all: “He doesn’t understand the most elementary Marxist truths.” While he used the Marxist formulations, and indeed considered himself a great Marxist thinker, much superior to Stalin’s contemptible successors, [Mao] never in practice attempted to apply objective Marxist analysis. He did not believe in “objective situations” at all. It was all in the mind: he might be described as a geopolitical Emile Coue who believed in “mind over matter.” Please share this article by using the link below. When you cut and paste an article, Taki's Magazine misses out on traffic, and our writers don't get paid for their work. Email editors@takimag.com to buy additional rights. http://takimag.com/article/mao_and_again/print#ixzz53E6v748J Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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