As the 50th anniversary of China’s Cultural Revolution draws near, some of the former students who participated in its Red Guard terror have been trying to make amends to their victims. But if China’s former leftist fanatics feel remorse for the atrocities they participated in, the same can’t be said of their American counterparts.
Even as the Cultural Revolution was dying down in China, it reared its ugly head in the U.S. The Weather Underground drawing its inspiration from China’s Red Terror cited the Red Guard as a model for a “mass revolutionary movement.” And unlike China’s Red Guard, the Weathermen went main-stream. Instead of carrying on a futile campaign of bombing and bank robberies, they used the vast wealth and power of the system to train the next generation, and that next generation did the same. Each wave continued to erode civil liberties and undermine society. Although they chose to “change” from within the system, they are still animated by an unmistakable contempt and hatred for the country and its institutions. .
Obama, a child of the Cultural Revolution, is the very model of a modern Red Guard. While the Weathermen engaged in extreme rhetoric and actions, Obama uses extreme actions. He is calculating enough to avoid the verbal vindictiveness of Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright, but he still chose them as his mentors.
America under the Red Guard is run by liberals without liberalism. Locke’s “No one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions” is as alien a sentiment to them as if it were expressed in binary code. Its grounding in a National Law whose equality eliminates power relationship is utterly incompatible with the Red Guard’s obsession with power relationships.
The virtue of the creative individual has been displaced by the Red Guard’s virtue of outrage. Its members mistake the thrill of abusing others for the rightness of a moral crusade. This form of crowd-sourced political terror by elites and their pet mobs isn’t new – it’s only new to America.
Legislatures and laws are replaced with an alliance between the executive authority of Obama and the Red Guard activists. Activists demand, the media manufactures outrage and Obama uses executive orders to deliver.
When outrage displaces the process of law what remains is either authoritarianism or anarchy. But America’s Red Guard are not anarchists. What they are after is not less authority, but more of it. Not more freedom, but less of it. They are not fighting against power. They are fighting for power. They abide by no rule except those of their own ideology. Our Constitution and the rule of law mean nothing to them.
Under the rule of the Red Guard, rights do not transcend the ruling ideology. Freedom of speech and thought are only provided to those who say and think the right things. There are no rights, as we know them anymore, only a binding mandate of social justice. The right to speak your mind or donate to a political cause is valid only if it serves that mandate. There are no absolutes except social justice. A right either serves the cause or it obstructs it.
The Constitution is not a fixed legal structure, but a mandate for equality. Justice is not blind, she’s a community organizer coming out on the side of social justice against the greedy and ignorant majority. The entire system is a means of enforcing the mandate.
The new Cultural Revolution is aimed at shrinking the already narrow power and prosperity of the majority for the sake of the minority. Not the minority of racial or ethnic minorities, but the minority of elites that is determined to get its way by any means necessary.
The 50th anniversary of China’s Cultural Revolution coincides with a national election in the U.S. that will serve, in part, as a final referendum on the Red Guard reign of the previous eight years. Like the Chinese, Americans will be forced to confront the ruin of their institutions, the polarization of their society and the victims of the Red Guard’s political inquisitions.
50 years from now, will the students eagerly tearing down society and replacing it with outraged denunciations and media purges also regret their role in America’s new Cultural Revolution?
Read the Progressive Red Guard by Daniel Greenfield in full at this link.
