The Chinese Cultural Revolution – a terrifying decade of totalitarian purging of everyone and everything that did not conform to Maoist ideology – ended in 1976. But everything old becomes new again, so welcome to the new Cultural Revolution which is not on the rise in China but instead is eroding the freedoms of the Western world.
The architects of the Chinese Cultural Revolution employed the ruthless tactics of totalitarianism everywhere: public humiliation, capricious imprisonment, hard labor, torture and execution, the seizure of private property, and in China’s case, the forcible displacement of much of the young urban population to rural regions where they and millions of others were starved to death. And just as Muslim supremacists strive to erase any pre-Islam cultural and historical artifacts in conquered territories, the Chinese revolutionaries attempted to wipe the slate clean of pre-Communist history as well, ransacking cultural and religious sites.
Certainly such abuses are not underway in the democratic West – yet. But a similar totalitarian impulse is on the move among the radical Left. In America and England, for example, historical relics and artifacts are being destroyed as college activists radicalized by the Marxist professors who dominate Humanities departments clamor for the removal of monuments to the “slave-owning” Founding Fathers, to “colonialist” giants like Cecil Rhodes, and to “mass murderers” like Winston Churchill.
What has been the West’s response to such assaults on its cultural heritage? For the most part, it too often has been self-censorship, naval-gazing self-loathing, and apologetic compliance. The Left’s loud denunciations of so-called white privilege, colonialist imperialism, and cishetero-normativity have resulted not in pushback but increasingly in pre-emptive confessions of racial sin and gender intolerance.
National Geographic, for example, issued an embarrassing mea culpa recently titled, “For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It,” in which the editor admitted the magazine’s long history of a self-described “colonialist” perspective in articles and photo layouts featuring racial caricatures. “It hurts to share the appalling stories from the magazine’s past,” she wrote. But having confessed, the magazine had earned permission to move forward cleansed of its past transgressions.
