Experts in the Epoch Times have warned that Maoist ideas are driving political activism in the West, from protests and cancel culture to ‘consciousness raising’ and perpetual rage, revealing a troubling connection to China’s Cultural Revolution. Is a dystopian, surveilled, woke technocracy our future? Here’s an excerpt:
Much of the activism currently tearing Western civilisation asunder are driven by ideas that can be traced back to Maoism – a Western interpretation of the writings of Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong – according to several experts on radical movements and strategic theory.
Not only have Mao’s ideas influenced some of the grandfathers of the current activist currents, but the tangible results resemble aspects of Chinese communism, inducing Mao’s most nightmarish project, the Cultural Revolution, according to David Martin Jones, visiting professor at the War Studies Department, King’s College, London, and M.L.R. Smith, professor of Strategic Theory at the Australian War College, Canberra.
“There is a whole intellectual structure, architecture, and, ultimately, strategy bound up with the idea of how to disrupt society, disrupt the West, overthrow the traditional order,” Mr. Smith told the Epoch Times.
The authors have summed up their findings in their 2022 book, The Strategy of Maoism in the West: Rage and the Radical Left.
The book’s premise came to them during the 2020 protests and riots that swept the United States and even other Western countries in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd.
They saw monuments toppled and defaced, they saw conservative and even some liberal speakers getting shouted down and ‘cancelled’, they saw people at all levels of society contort themselves in ‘white guilt’ genuflection and they realised such scenes bear uncanny resemblance to the communist Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, which began with students denouncing their teachers, obliterating cultural relics, and party members engaging in ‘self-criticism’ to confess their supposed crimes against the revolution.
The decade-long Cultural Revolution went much further than that. Students sometimes beat their teachers to death. Millions were executed or tortured to death, commonly after forced confessions to fabricated crimes. Children, even infants, were sometimes brutally murdered. Victims were sometimes cannibalised in frenzied bloodlust. The West has been spared such atrocities, but the parallels required examination, the authors concluded.
Was this just a historical happenstance, or was there an actual connection?
“It needed further elucidation, really, how, in fact, Maoist ideas had been transmitted to the West, because the general tendency in political thinking, in a liberal discourse, generally, is to assume that it’s the West that has an influence upon the other,” Jones told the Epoch Times.
“Very little attention is given to the way the other shapes us, has impacted Western self-understandings. And what became quite evident as we conducted some research is that Mao’s ideas deeply penetrated European thought on the left from the 60s onwards.”
Maoism obviously influenced various communist terrorist groups in Europe during the 1960s and 1970s, such as Lotta Continua in Italy, the Baader-Meinehof gang in Germany, and, to some extent, the Angry Brigade in the United Kingdom. American communists in the Weather Underground terrorist group called their 1974 manifesto Prairie Fire – a Maoist slogan.
But it was in the intellectual and cultural milieu of the European socialists, particularly in France, where Maoism seeded its lasting influence.
“The problem in the West in the ’60s was that America was always spelt with a ‘K’ as some evil empire because of the Vietnam War,” Jones said.
“But at the same time, Moscow had lost any attraction because of the activities of the Soviet regime in places like Hungary and Czechoslovakia. So China took on a new, stylish meaning in the Western Left, in the Western New Left.”
Wearing a Mao jacket and browsing through Mao’s Little Red Book became signs of ‘cool’ in the socialist crowd, he said.
“There was something hugely appealing to an anarcho-nihilist Western mentality about tearing down the old, about destroying your teachers, calling them ‘cow demons’ or ‘black influences.’ There was something very exciting about striking down monuments, destroying Confucian texts that have been around for two millennia. So, that aspect of Maoism always took on a redolence with an anarchically minded younger generation.”
Mao’s image as a ‘doer’ and ‘breaker of things’ appealed to the ‘jaded palates’ of French socialists, huddled at institutions such as the Sorbonne University and École normale supérieure, Smith said.
“It penetrated deeply the academic atmosphere, the actual academic environment of the French left bank, so thinkers as various as Sartre, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Tel Quel group, all embraced aspects of Maoism,” Jones explained.
This Western interpretation of Maoism provided a new way of “deconstructing Western thought” that was then advanced by authors such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak in their “post-colonial discourse theory”, he said.
“Through their efforts, we end up with, over time, the idea of ‘decolonizing the curriculum,’ the whole Maoist assault within our culture.”
As the West started to gain a broader understanding of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in China, Maoism lost much of its prima-facie appeal. By that time, however, its ideas had already been absorbed by the Left.
“As people like Foucault, Derrida, the Tel Quel group, became aware by the 70s, somewhat after the fact, that actually Mao’s Cultural Revolution was very destructive, they don’t apologise for their stupidity, they actually instead double down on aspects like human rights, the sexual revolution, liberation thinking, which inexorably, over time, gets taken up in American Ivy League universities where they all enjoy stellar careers from the 80s onwards,” Jones said.
“Maoism was bred in China, it was hothoused in Paris, but it achieved its global appeal in the Ivy League schools of the United States, and then has been circulated across the American mode of thinking critically about race and gender that has now been transmitted back to Europe in this interesting spiral of thinking.”
There’s evidence that Mao, when engaged with Westerners, tried to make his ideas appealing to liberals, whom he in fact despised.
“He was aware that there was a Western sympathy for the Chinese communists,” Jones said. “There was always a sense in which liberalism found something romantic in the Chinese revolutionary.”
As such, there emerged a distinction between ‘Mao’s Thought’ as taught in China until this day, and what some have called ‘Global Maoism’ – ”a doctrine which is pushed largely for Western consumption”, he said.
“In his three essays that he wrote, the three main philosophical essays on combating liberalism and on anti-Confucianism, Mao is profoundly aware of how manipulable liberalism is and how you can promote or use liberalism to defeat it.”
Maoism was much more accessible than the European-style socialism.
Socialists in the West tended to put a premium on theorising. They needed some knowledge of Hegelian dialectics, Marx’s criticism of Hegel and the Frankfurt School’s picking apart of Marx.
“Maoism rendered all that largely unnecessary,” Jones noted.
“It required just the citation of certain slogans like ‘the sugar-coated bullets of the bourgeoisie’.”
It was socialism dumbed down for the pseudo-intellectual college grad, he suggested, calling Mao’s Little Red Book a “marketing guide for the revolution”.
“It’s very simplistic messaging, which suits a Twitter-sort of audience really. It fits into a two-sentence understanding that you can roll out for whatever occasion,” he summarised.
It allowed a person with limited knowledge to come up with a retort when challenged.
“Mao has a set of slogans or aphorisms broken down to suit that immediate purpose. So that’s the appeal,” he said, later adding: “It made you look as if you knew something, which is also part of the faux nature of a lot of this. You feel that people are often putting it on because they’re hiding a great vacuum that they’re inhabiting.”
In addition, the ”abstract dialectics” and “intellectualising of all these European Marxist thinkers” was simply “boring” compared to Mao’s “appeal to get on and do revolution”, Smith said.
“Not to sit around and read about it in book, not to sit around and have a seminar about Herbert Marcuse or Adorno or Horkheimer, but to get up and tear down a statue or deface it or get up and go in a protest and cancel someone – this is what modern Maoism is about. It’s an appeal to action.”
Worth reading in full.
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Just to do a ‘Captain Obvious’ here and point out that education, before we even include the disastrous mess that is higher ed, has changed dramatically since the decades mention above. So it seems a no-brainer to me that “education has zero causal effect on fertility” and it’s more to do with the woke ideological crapola kids are being brainwashed with these days. Kids should be attending school to get educated, not indoctrinated.
I would say that western civilisations have much more choice about having children or having a career than most poorer countries, this can be put down to a better education.
Not so much choice in places like Niger so they just do what is nessasary
They will probably never have a career to pay for a pension so children are their insurance policy for old age, the more the merrier as upto 50% of their children may not make it to adulthood.
I certainly agree with your ideological element though, just look at that self important little git Rachel Zegler!
Yes and you raise a good point which is the difference in *motivation* between cultures for having children. Women in some poor country in Africa won’t have any of the opportunities or resources of their counterparts in rich Western countries, therefore their motivation will be based more on necessity, as you say, plus cultural norms/pressure and gender stereotypes will be way more rigid. Over here, women can afford to wait and have kids later in life, have fewer kids or none at all, because they’re no longer deemed an “insurance policy”, unlike generations ago.
Let’s be honest, many in the so-called ‘rich West’ literally can’t ‘afford’ kids anyway because they’re unable to even get on the property ladder, which is the norm before putting down roots and starting a family. And people don’t typically live in multi-generational households, which is normal in other cultures, so childcare is presumably a non-issue compared with here.
Increased wealth.
More live births, lower infant/child mortality, children no longer required as a labour source for the family economy requires reduced birth rates to maintain the “stock”.
Plus sending children to school instead of to work = a cost, not a contributor to parental fortunes.
Parents work fewer hours, have more leisure time and disposable income which they prefer to spend on that rather than children.
Maybe has something to do with it?
Maybe material prosperity has led us to overthink things
I don’t think education is a primary cause of low fertility, though it may be a secondary cause. I think a primary cause of low fertility is little or no religious faith due to increasing wealth. Look at the chart of where high birth rates are found. This cause and effect are summed up by the bible phrase “you can’t worship God and mannon (money)”.
I don’t think it is education per se that makes a person rich. There are many examples that everyone knows of people who left school with few or no exams thar have become rich through hard work.
Increasing wealth includes many factors that would tend to increase birth rates such as improved nutrition and healthcare but the low birth rates in rich countries run counter to this.
Decreasing wealth does seem to encourage higher birth rates. My father’s parents in the 1930s had around 10 children but 3 or 4 died in childhood of diseases that are easily cured today. They were poor but had many children perhaps because unconsciously they knew some would die.
I agree with your point but it’s mammon not ‘mannon’.
Once upon a time, I grew up in an avenue of newly-built 1950’s semis, where at one time up to 30 of us played out in the street, offspring of married couples born before the Second World War.
Then along came “-isms,” “-ists” and “-ism-ist ism-isms,” and the old order changed – for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, but nowadays up to half the time certainly not until death us do part.
The increased cost of housing is also a practical deterrent. Meanwhile on another forum…
https://www.louiseperry.co.uk/p/immigration-is-not-the-answer-to
“…What’s the solution to Britain’s fertility crisis? There are, broadly, three schools of thought:
One is that you can, through carefully structured incentives and social changes, encourage birth rates to rise to replacement levels.
Another is that the ageing population is, given the potential for automation, robotics and AI, actually not *that* much of an issue.
The final school of thought is that nothing can be done about the Western fertility crisis, and that the only solution is to supplement the working age-population with immigration. This, sadly, is the school which currently governs Great Britain.”
Take your pick – bad luck, the Party has already chosen for you.
No, but abortion does.
See this chart:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?facet=entity&uniformYAxis=0&country=~GBR
1950 total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.22
1961 introduction of birth control pills on the NHS, TFR 2.79
1964 late post-war baby boom peak of TFR of 2.93
1967 Abortion Act, TFR 2.68
1974 introduction of birth control clinics, TFR 1.92
1977 a TFR low of 1.69
2001 a TFR low of 1.61
2010 TFR recovered to 1.92
2020 TFR dropped to 1.57 and leveling off through to 2023.
TFR seems to have stopped falling recently – perhaps it will rise again.
If fertility is reducing and climate change adaptation becomes the preferred policy then fewer people will make the social adjustments easier. We might need robot careers for the old, but even that issue will eventually reduce.
Picking one variable which happens to correlate with another from a whole variety of others which interact, is certain to lead to the wrong conclusion except by chance. See: Climageddon (Arctic disappearing, London, New York, submerged, annual droughts and scorching Summers, etc) perpetually being delayed; predicted 1970s world over-population by year 2 000.