Via Billy
The lesson of China's Cultural Revolution in my view is that once the lid blows off,
everything that was linear (predictable) goes non-linear (unpredictable).
There is a whiff of unease in the air as beneath the cheery veneer of free money for
almost everyone, inequality and polarization are rapidly consuming what's
left of common ground in America.
Though there are many systemic differences between China and the U.S., humans in every nation
are all still running Wetware 1.0 and so it is instructive to consider what can be learned
from China's Cultural Revolution 1966-1976.
China's Cultural Revolution was remarkably different from the Party's military-political victory
of 1949. Where the political revolution was managed by the centralized hierarchy of the
Communist Party (CCP), the Cultural Revolution quickly morphed from a movement launched by Mao
into a decentralized mass movement against all elites, including
Party and state elites which had been sacrosanct and untouchable.
The Cultural Revolution is not an approved topic in China today, and that alerts us to its importance.
More @ Of Two Minds
"a decentralized mass movement against all elites, including Party and state elites"
ReplyDeleteThe Cultural Revolution ended up persecuting and torturing not "elites" in the sense the term is used today in the US. The Red Guards went after people who could read a European language, or someone who played Mozart on the piano. THAT was the sort of "elite" targeted by the Red Guards. The victims for the most part were not the equivalent of parasitic hedge funders, nor traitorous politicians, nor leftist academics, nor Hollywood sexual predators.
In the US "elite" currently means privileged fools, hypocrites, and outright criminals who escape justice through a variety of means. The "elite" who were tortured by Red Guards in China were overwhelmingly ordinary people who had some education and were not utterly illiterate peasants.
The Red Guards went after people who could read a European language, or someone who played Mozart on the piano.
DeleteThanks and also Pol Pot.
https://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/2018/03/before-after-gun-confiscation-cambodian.html