We are in the throes of a Cultural Revolution

13

Hanson nails it. Again.

How Cultural Revolutions Die — or Not

BY Victor Davis Hanson, June 18, 2020:
Unlike coups or political revolutions, cultural revolutions don’t just change governments or leaders. Instead, they try to redefine entire societies. Their leaders call them “holistic” and “systematic.”Cultural revolutionaries attack the very referents of our daily lives. The Jacobins’ so-called Reign of Terror during the French Revolution slaughtered Christian clergy, renamed months, and created a new supreme being — Reason.

Mao cracked down on supposed Western decadence like the wearing of eyeglasses and made peasants forge pot iron and intellectuals wear dunce caps.

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Muammar Kaddafi’s Green Book cult wiped out violins and forced Libyans to raise chickens in their apartments.

The current Black Lives Matter Revolution has “canceled” certain movies, television shows, and cartoons, toppled statues, tried to create new autonomous urban zones, and renamed streets and plazas. Some fanatics shave their heads. Others have shamed authorities into washing the feet of their fellow revolutionaries.

But inevitably cultural revolutions die out when they turn cannibalistic. Once the Red Guard started killing party hacks too close to Mao, it began to wane.

If toppling Confederate statues is required, what then about Nancy Pelosi’s own mayor father, who once as Baltimore’s mayor dedicated honorific statues to Confederate generals?

If racists understandably do not deserve their names on national shrines, what to do with the iconic liberal graduate program at Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? It was named for a president who did more to further segregation and racial prejudice than any chief executive of the 20th century.

Stanford and Yale, coveted brand names of the progressive professional classes, are named after people whom protestors now deem racists.

It is easier to target Fort Bragg, the iconic military base named after a Confederate general, racist, and military mediocrity than to see one’s MBA or Ph.D. lose its Yale luster, or to confess that a liberal presidential icon perpetuated racism.

Once a cultural revolution gets going, there can be no contextualization of the past, no allowance for human frailty, no consideration of weighing evil vs. good.

Eventually, the architects of cultural upheavals always make two miscalculations.

One, they presume that destroying things will never apply to themselves, given their loud virtue signaling.

Two, if they are fingered by the mob, they assume they can somehow use their clout and influence to win an exemption.

In other words, once cultural revolutions turn anarchic and eat their own, they lose support. When quiet sympathizers conclude that they too may be targeted, to survive they turn on their former icons.

We are seeing that now. Liberal sympathetic bystanders are wondering whether downtown arson and looting will go private and reach their suburban homes. Do they really want their marquee universities or the Washington or Jefferson monuments defaced or renamed? What happens when calling 911 gets a constant busy signal?

When a liberal mayor or black police chief or progressive governor or white leftist who diverges from the party line is targeted by the mob, then who really is safe?

Answer? No one. And so the cultural revolution sputters to irrelevance.

What deflated the MeToo movement was the high toll that the accusations took among the Hollywood and cultural elite. Suddenly, progressive celebrities began demanding evidence and insisting on presumed innocence when their careers were destroyed.

What burns out these cultural upheavals is that today’s revolutionary can be denounced as tomorrow’s sell-out. No leader wants to share Robespierre’s rendezvous with his own guillotine.

There is one caveat.

Sometimes cultural revolutions don’t die out — if they are hijacked by a thug or killer.

The National Socialist movement was an irrelevant nihilist mob of crazies until Adolf Hitler turned it into his personal genocidal cult. A murderous Stalin resuscitated the absurdities of Lenin’s failing Bolshevism.

The present madness will wane like a virus, as it eats its own and terrifies its sympathizers that they may be next — unless, of course, a would-be Napoleon uses a “whiff of grapeshot” and turns the mob into his personal cult.

The armed rapper Raz Simone, who some say lords over the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” in downtown Seattle, so far has neither the diabolic talent nor the resources to spread his anarchy.

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knightsstrength
knightsstrength
3 years ago

Many interesting articles
https://www.churchmilitant.com/

Robert Spencer gives a run down on Muhammad.
Pope Seeks ‘Pathways’ for Muslim ‘Invasion’
https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/pope-seeks-migrant-pathways-as-muslims-invade-italy

Vatican Hails BLM as ‘Non-Violent’
https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/vatican-hails-non-violent-black-lives-matter

Merkel gave Antifa supporter 1 million euros for left-wing propaganda
https://voiceofeurope.com/2020/06/merkel-gave-antifa-supporter-1-million-euros-for-left-wing-propaganda/

UK: Major British firms will pay reparations for slavery
https://voiceofeurope.com/2020/06/uk-major-british-firms-will-pay-reparations-for-slavery/

TD
TD
3 years ago

“Merkel gave Antifa supporter 1 million euros.. ”

I call ANTIFA, “ANTIF_cked”.

pardon my french, or German in this case.

Maranatha
Maranatha
3 years ago

Chinese ”cultural revolution ”started in May 1966….
May…
May 26?….I am not sure..

famouswolf
famouswolf
3 years ago

Funny, there I thought it was a cultural de-evolution.

carpe diem 36
carpe diem 36
3 years ago

Burning and culture do not mix. You either burn whatever or you do not. If you choose to burn you demonstrate that you have no culture.

Jim
Jim
3 years ago
Reply to  carpe diem 36

“Burning and culture do not mix.”

It does, if you aim is to destroy your enemy’s culture and replace it with your (communist) culture.

It’s a classic example of Sun Tzu’s axiom: Destroy your enemy before you get to the battlefield.

durabo
durabo
3 years ago

Nor a “cultural: revolution; it’s a COMMUNIST revolution, 103 years after the Russian one

Jim
Jim
3 years ago
Reply to  durabo

It is communist and cultural. Read up on Madam Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Also, there is an excellent Military History Channel video on Madam Mao’s cultural revolution (I can’t recall it’s name). The parallels are are numerous. The show seems to repeat every now and then. Another good show on MHC is called “Declassified: Chairman Mao”.

The U.S. communists obviously use her cultural revolution techniques, after modifying and adapting them to the U.S. culture. That is the purpose of “multiculturalism”, to destroy our culture, rattle the cages, get us confused as how to behave, to weaken us Sun Tzu style (i.e., to destroy us before the battle), making it easy for them to take over and dominate.

Jim
Jim
3 years ago
Reply to  Jim

Maybe people can’t see it because the U.S. communists are not waving little red books.

(Not yet at least.) Nevertheless, when you study Madam Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and keep your eyes and ears open, you will be surprised by the parallel techniques. The purpose of knowing how the model works, is to find ways to defeat it. You can’t defeat what you can’t see.

durabo
durabo
3 years ago
Reply to  Jim

Agreed – but the typical American citizen is too ignorant and uninformed about world events. He/she depends on the Marxist pabulum offered in everybody’s MCD (mind control device).

IAMARICK
IAMARICK
3 years ago

“whiff of grapeshot”

Jim
Jim
3 years ago

This is what I have been saying for quite a while. The communists in this country are mapping Mrs Mao’s Cultural Revolution on top of the U.S. They’ve been working on this for at least the last 50 years. We’re too stupid to recognize it and take action against it. Intelligence is defined as the ability to foresee consequences and take action against them. By this definition, we are dumb. because we refuse to believe it and refuse to take action against it. This is why they succeed.

Merchantseamen
Merchantseamen
3 years ago

Great Article

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