Renee Nal
“At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, young Red Guards went from house to house, seeking to eradicate all vestiges of what they called “the four ‘olds’ “–old ideas, old customs, old culture and old habits. Nothing better exemplified the four olds than books.” – Jim Mann of the Los Angeles Times, 1985
There are unmistakable parallels from Mao Zedong’s “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” and Marxist movements today across the West. The Cultural Revolution started with book-burning and quickly turned into tearing down statues and changing the names of places and “especially street names.” Then, the Red Guards would drag “enemies” out of their homes and publicly shame them during “struggle sessions.” Finally, the Red Guards would go from house to house, confiscating property and sometimes torturing and killing the people they considered to be against the communist revolution.
The Cultural Revolution was about purging non-communists. The effort came after forced collectivization during the “Great Leap Forward” from 1958 – 1962 led to massive famine “that cost more than 40 million lives.” In the wake of the horrific Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong had to destroy those who started to shift from communist thought. On August 8, 1966, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) explained:
“Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and endeavor to stage a come-back.”
In order to cling to power, the CCP explained that their objective:
“…is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic ‘authorities’ and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.”
Mao had to suppress opposition, as all communists must to keep power after it is made clear that their disastrous policies wreak havoc on citizens. Mao’s Cultural Revolution claimed the lives of 7.73 million innocent human beings and spanned from May 16, 1966 until Mao Zedong’s death on September 9, 1976. Mao “unleashed the [Cultural Revolution] movement by urging young people to rise up against their parents and teachers”.
The feared Red Guards, who oversaw the vast destruction during that evil period in China, consisted of militant high school and university students who were tasked with “eliminating all remnants of the old culture in China” and “purging” party leaders deemed “insufficiently revolutionary.” The Red Guards were simply heavily indoctrinated teens used by Mao “to enforce communism by removing capitalist, traditional and cultural elements from society” and are reminiscent of Hitler’s Brown Shirts in Germany and Antifa in America and across the West today.
Citizens were only allowed to read from “The Little Red Book,” or “Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong” and other limited communist propaganda. According to the BBC, “[T]he Ministry of Culture aimed to distribute a copy to every Chinese citizen and hundreds of new printing houses were built in order to achieve this.”
The images below reveal the militant nature of the Cultural Revolution; featuring Red Guards tearing down Buddha statues, reading the Little Red Book and burning forbidden books.
During that reign of terror, nobody was safe from the Red Guards, who could, without warning or evidence, target anyone as being an enemy of Mao and drag you to a “struggle session,” where you would be humiliated and even tortured and killed for hours on end in front of audiences that came to witness the spectacle and who delighted in the mob’s rage. Or, they could just torture people in their homes.
Very little about that period is documented and today’s Chinese Communist Party strategically works to convince citizens that times have gotten much better since the time of the Red Guards. As communists do, they have attempted to erase the brutal era from history and maintain strict controls of any reminiscences from that period or of the great famine.
Many of the surviving photos of the Cultural Revolution were taken by CCP-Approved photographer Li Zhensheng who painstakingly maintained a secret stash of negatives, carefully documented with time, names, and locations and stored under the floorboards of his home until he could smuggle them to the United States. Li Zhensheng passed away just last month at the age of 79. His photographs are essential to understanding the brutality of the Cultural Revolution.
The below images show people who for whatever reason, were perceived as not following the communist line. They would be humiliated for hours at a time as large crowds berated them, often forced to stand hunched over with signs hanging around their necks or dunce caps proclaiming their guilt as “rightists” or “capitalists.”
Fan Shen, who was 12-years-old in 1966, describes his experience as a young communist in the fascinating book “Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard.” He details his youthful excitement in participating in the revolution following the footsteps of his communist parents, and his slow disillusionment as he was forced to face the brutality of his actions and those of his comrades. Shen’s book is particularly important because his account matches the few images preserved in graphic detail.
Watch Fan Shen discuss his experience here:
During the Cultural Revolution, propaganda posters were everywhere, and sometimes depicted good citizens smashing “The Four Olds”:
(Dasui jiu shijie, chuangli xin shijie), 1967, Beijing
As described at Columbia University:
This propaganda poster is a classic example of early Cultural Revolution Red Guard art and illustrates the anti-traditional, anti-imperialist iconoclasm that persisted into the 1960s. Notice that the worker is smashing a crucifix, as well as a Buddhist statue and classical Chinese texts.
The posters portrayed Mao Zedong as one of a long line of legendary and murderous communists, which indeed he was.
It should noted that literature surrounding the Cultural Revolution is often written from a revisionist perspective in the attempt to downplay the communist element of the period and presenting it as an anomaly.
Knowing that the left cannot progressively scrub the brutal history of the Cultural Revolution, which claimed the lives of millions of people over twenty years after the atrocities of nazi Germany, many do mental gymnastics to separate Mao’s reign from the tyrannical tendencies of contemporary communism.
In fact, the Cultural Revolution is the essence of communism.
Watch the following video drawing parallels between the Cultural Revolution and the Leftist Mob behavior today:
Amy Mek
RAIR Foundation
Great article! Thank you!
The people, in this country, who want communism, over what we have, are idiots. The system we have in place has made us the most prosperous country the world has ever seen. Ours is the system of success. Communism is the system of failure. Look at the USSR. After 50 years it fell apart because it could not sustain itself. What I see and read, saddens me.
Very well said. Thank you.
I watched a documentary years ago on Mao Zedong. He basically was a Chinese Hitler, but because Mao wasn’t gathering everyone into concentration camps, dragged this out for several years, and was never a big part of a World War, no one really knows anything about him.
I can only to ad to this that in the red little books the authors are being replaced by tech. Twitter appointed a Head of China, (yet are themselves banned there), Google and FB, all are complicit at allowing their platforms now to be a censored environment with zero consistency. Any true liberal knows censorship in any form is horrendous. It leads to one place and one place only. The only way darkness can be overcome is in the light. How soon these idiots forget that Jewish thought was deemed violent, their books, stores and eventually they themselves burned to death into the millions by once “good people.” We see these platforms allowing millions of fake accounts, in most cases spun up by foreign backed bots created for the sole purpose of unleashing Helter Skelter.. Twenty somethings today have grown up pampered and indoctrinated. They will soon if they do not pivot quickly know what real tyranny (not some media manufactured tyranny), looks and feels like. Then again, maybe they will be the ones striking the blows. I have traveled to 30 plus countries and spent hundreds of hours in conversation with those who fled this and others like it. No one felt it could happen. I spoke with a woman in Toronto who at 7 turned her parents in, unknowingly. When she came home from school her parents were gone, and her grandmother spoke not one word to her or would even look her in the eye. An Uncle and Aunt showed up at 2am and they smuggled her out of China, eventually ending up in S Korea and eventually to Canada. Only years later would she realize in horror that it was she who had her parents murdered. A client for a bank had his Mother reveal to him only a few years ago that as a teen in her classroom with her beloved teacher, the teacher criticized Mao… several teens pounced on her and beat her to death. His Mother fled, holding forever the guilt that she had been helpless to stop it… Polish scientists who fled as students from Poland, hunted by the communist guards. To this day after living in Canada for over 40 years the Father insists on a family plan of evacuation.. such is his belief that no system is ever secure. And most recently I sat on a plane last summer with an elderly couple, fleeing Venezuela.. leaving their 400 acre farm and their entire lives behind thanks to the collapse brought on by rampant socialism and now totalitarian attacks. 5 of their older children and their families fled to Germany, France, and Canada. They worked their entire lives to build that farm. They were broken. It disgusts me what is happening. It should disgust anyone with an ounce of historical awareness. Luckily for these assholes, most do not have it…. and tech is more than happy to lend a hand.. not bright enough to witness what Xi has done to 1.5M gov’t employees, and recently to Jack Ma. Maybe when they have everything confiscated and are held us as capitalist pigs… their ignorance will recede… and it will dawn on them the very role they have played to make it happen.
This is such a succinct and thoughtful response. Canadian society is fighting this battle too, and all of my bourgois lefty friends are ushering it in hook, line and sinker, and of course the requisite air of moral superiority.
All patriotic Americans who believe in God given rights have a moral responsibility to prepare to defend the homeland and themselves. When our soldiers go to battle overseas, they don’t consider or ask what kind of person is the enemy, they don’t consider about their family or opinions, they know who is the enemy. American citizens have to be honest with themselves, for they too know who is the enemy that is planning their demise.
“Nike is ‘a brand of China and for China,’ CEO says during earnings call”.
Boycott all Nike products!
Mao was helped into power by Skull and Bones, Yale, look it up, Mao was inspired by
Lenin, find out who financed Lenin.
An absolute must is to read “Life and Death in Shanghai” by Nien Cheng (1986).
This is about the terrible experiences of a fine lady who survived the cultural revolution in China. This book should be read by every young adult in the West – especially those who are so ignorant and naïve.
The Communist Chinese killed well over 100 million of its citizens. If you include the one child policy they easily killed a billion.