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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The goal of the Cultural
Revolution is to render all those who
resist the ruling elites politically and
socially invisible. The
goal isn't to play nice and share power
and wealth with the losers of
financialization-globalization; the goal
is to liquidate their influence in
politics and society via relentless
negative stereotyping by the
elite-controlled mass media and an
Orwellian reversal of identity that
makes the dissenters into threats to
democracy while elevating the elitist
oppressors into selfless guardians of
democracy--the
exact opposite of reality.
In China's Cultural
Revolution, the Red Guards mindlessly
destroyed much of China's priceless
cultural heritage as
part of the deranged agenda of
destroying whatever was traditional and
valued by "counter-revolutionaries." Out
with the old, in with the new--the
time-honored pattern of power grabs
masked by utopian goals.
If in doubt, purge,
destroy, denounce. This
is the Inquisition nature of all
Cultural Revolutions.
China's ruling elites
don't want any unedited history of the
Cultural Revolution to leak into the
public sphere because virtually everyone
who was killed, tortured, imprisoned or
denounced was innocent. Virtually
every one of the millions of victims of
the Cultural Revolution was a loyal
cadre or average citizen going about
their lives. "Counter-revolutionaries"
were an illusory, fabricated threat.
Since we have many
friends in China, we've heard the
reality of the Cultural Revolution in
private conversations, spoken in low
tones even in the U.S. Nobody dares
speak openly about what happened or the
Party's role. One friend's father was an
officer in the People's Liberation Army,
a man whose loyalty was unquestioned. He
was imprisoned. Another friend's father
was put in house arrest for years
because he'd visited Eastern Europe (at
the Party's behest, of course) and was
therefore suspect.
In Cultural Revolutions,
the "crimes" are fabricated but the
destruction is real.Take
a look at the mainstream media coverage
in France, the U.S. and the U.K. of the
yellow vest dissenters. Make a list of
all the public officials, intellectuals,
actors, media pundits etc. who publicly
defend the yellow vests and how many
denounce them. Did you find any articles
on the yellow vests on Page One? What
percentage of the corporate-state media
depicted the yellow vests as violent,
unreasonable, and so on?
If you pursue an
objective survey, you'll find few public
figures supporting the yellow vest
movement and little mainstream media
coverage that presents the yellow vest
movement in a positive light.
That's how Cultural
Revolutions roll. The
Nobility in our neofeudal system will
work all the levers of power to
marginalize, demonize, stereotype and
disenfranchise any threats to their
power.
The goal of the Cultural
Revolution isn't to persuade, it's to
enforce compliance. Virtue-signal
your compliance in social media every
day (i.e. wave your Little Red Book
publicly) or you become suspect. Nobody
cares what you actually believe, the
point is to prove your compliance and
complicity to those enforcing compliance
and complicity.
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