The West's Descent into
'Cultural Revolution'
By Charles Hugh Smith
January 24, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
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A Cultural
Revolution is a movement designed to
preserve the political and financial
power of a ruling elite by social rather
than political or financial means. Thus
the primary tools of a Cultural
Revolution are not redistributing power
via elections (politics) or financial
reforms; the primary tools are public
shaming and denouncements, purges of
those in positions of authority, show
trials, guilt-by-association, wholesale
denouncements of entire classes and
widespread accusations of
anti-progressive
("counter-revolutionary") tendencies in
which guilt is defined by all-or-nothing
litmus tests of one's loyalties to the
Cultural Revolution's strict ideology.
You haven't memorized
Mao's Little Red Book? Off to
re-education camp you go. Or
house arrest, banishment, beatings,
imprisonment or if the mob's blood lust
demands it, execution.
The key dynamic of a
Cultural Revolution is the oppressors
appropriate the language of liberation
as their favored tool of suppressing
dissent, denouncing
opponents and fueling widespread purges
of anyone who might harbor the slightest
potential to question the social
suppression of dissent.
Now, more than a
half-century after the Cultural
Revolution began, there is little public
discussion of that period in China. What
some have called the nation’s collective
amnesia has only gotten worse in recent
years as leaders have walked back
efforts to reckon with the country’s
modern history.
To those launching a
Cultural Revolution, the solution to a
diversity of opinion is to crush dissent
and narratives that threaten the ruling
elites' power. This
is of course the
exact opposite of democracy and
Enlightenment-era liberalism. But
the point of a Cultural Revolution isn't
to broaden political enfranchisement or
representation--the point of the anti-Deplorables
/ anti-Brexit / anti-yellow vest
campaigns is to strip dissenters (those
who disagree with the ruling neoliberal
elites) of political and social
representation.
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