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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMAGA/ DOGE young hackers are our Chinese Red Guards who led the Cultural Revolution against education and the educated.
**My commentary: Very young people with little to know life experience were given unlimited power by Mao with a mission to destroy the FOUR OLDS which were were 'old ideas', 'old culture', 'old customs', and 'old habits' They targeted intellectuals, party officials, and anyone associated with the previous government. They led purges, public humiliation, and destruction of cultural artifacts and symbols. Education centers and the educated were their primary targets. Estimates are that at least 1-2 million died and many more harmed during this period called the Cultural Revolution.
Sound familiar? ***
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/11/the-cultural-revolution-50-years-on-all-you-need-to-know-about-chinas-political-convulsion
What was it and when did it begin?
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a decade-long period of political and social chaos caused by Mao Zedongs bid to use the Chinese masses to reassert his control over the Communist party.
Its bewildering complexity and almost unfathomable brutality was such that to this day historians struggle to make sense of everything that occurred during the period.
However, Maos decision to launch the revolution in May 1966 is now widely interpreted as an attempt to destroy his enemies by unleashing the people on the party and urging them to purify its ranks.
When the mass mobilisation kicked off party newspapers depicted it as an epochal struggle that would inject new life into the socialist cause. Like the red sun rising in the east, the unprecedented Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is illuminating the land with its brilliant rays, one editorial read.
In fact, the Cultural Revolution crippled the economy, ruined millions of lives and thrust China into 10 years of turmoil, bloodshed, hunger and stagnation.
Gangs of students and Red Guards attacked people wearing bourgeois clothes on the street, imperialist signs were torn down and intellectuals and party officials were murdered or driven to suicide.
After violence had run its bloody course, the countrys rulers conceded it had been a catastrophe that had brought nothing but grave disorder, damage and retrogression.
An official party reckoning described it as a catastrophe which had caused the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the party, the country, and the people since the founding of the Peoples Republic in 1949.
Buns_of_Fire
(18,966 posts)MLAA
(19,647 posts)tonkatoy8888
(167 posts)Suddenly, in mid-January, it dawned on me that this all smelled a lot like Maoism. Tear down all of the "olds" and created a newly flowering paradise. A paradise created by ideologues with no knowledge or appreciation of history. And a keen desire to erase any history they did know if it ran counter to their ideology.
As an aside, in my graduate school studio there was a Chinese guy who had been Principal Clarinet in the Beijing Philharmonic....until the Cultural Revolution. He and his wife were sent to the countryside for several years. He didn't have much good to say about it.