• Login
  • Register
The Daily Sceptic
No Result
View All Result
  • Articles
  • About
  • Archive
    • ARCHIVE
    • NEWS ROUND-UPS
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Premium
  • Donate
  • Log In
The Daily Sceptic
No Result
View All Result

‘Woke’ Activism is Driven by Maoist Ideas Originating in Cultural Revolution, China Experts Warn

by Richard Eldred
16 July 2023 5:00 PM

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.

Tags: ActivismCultural MarxismFar LeftMao ZedongWoke

Donate

We depend on your donations to keep this site going. Please give what you can.

Donate Today

Comment on this Article

You’ll need to set up an account to comment if you don’t already have one. We ask for a minimum donation of £5 if you'd like to make a comment or post in our Forums.

Sign Up
Previous Post

How Stonewall Dictates Policy and Exerts Influence Over Taxpayer-Funded Organisations and Politicians

Next Post

Under Labour’s Plans, Union Reps Will Get Paid Time Off to Campaign on ‘Equalities’ Issues, Including Trans Rights

Subscribe
Login
Notify of
Please log in to comment

To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.

Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.

16 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

NEWSLETTER

View today’s newsletter

To receive our latest news in the form of a daily email, enter your details here:

DONATE

PODCAST

In Episode 35 of the Sceptic: Andrew Doyle on Labour’s Grooming Gang Shame, Andrew Orlowski on the India-UK Trade Deal and Canada’s Ignored Covid Vaccine Injuries

by Richard Eldred
9 May 2025
4

LISTED ARTICLES

  • Most Read
  • Most Commented
  • Editor’s Picks

BBC Quietly Edits Question Time After Wrongly ‘Correcting’ Richard Tice on Key Net Zero Claim

9 May 2025
by Will Jones

Hugely Influential Covid Vaccine Study Claiming the Jabs Saved Millions of Lives Torn to Shreds in Medical Journal

10 May 2025
by Dr Raphael Lataster

News Round-Up

10 May 2025
by Toby Young

Electric Car Bursts into Flames on Driveway and Engulfs £550,000 Family Home

9 May 2025
by Will Jones

Ed Miliband’s Housing Energy Plan Will Decimate the Rental Market and Send Rents Spiralling

10 May 2025
by Ben Pile

News Round-Up

55

Teenage Girl Banned by the Football Association For Asking Transgender Opponent “Are You a Man?” Wins Appeal With Help of Free Speech Union

21

Hugely Influential Covid Vaccine Study Claiming the Jabs Saved Millions of Lives Torn to Shreds in Medical Journal

21

Ed Miliband’s Housing Energy Plan Will Decimate the Rental Market and Send Rents Spiralling

14

What Does David Lammy Mean by a State?

27

Hugely Influential Covid Vaccine Study Claiming the Jabs Saved Millions of Lives Torn to Shreds in Medical Journal

10 May 2025
by Dr Raphael Lataster

Reflections on Empire, Papacy and States

10 May 2025
by James Alexander

Ed Miliband’s Housing Energy Plan Will Decimate the Rental Market and Send Rents Spiralling

10 May 2025
by Ben Pile

Nature Paper Claims to Pin Liability for ‘Climate Damages’ on Oil Companies

9 May 2025
by Tilak Doshi

What Does David Lammy Mean by a State?

9 May 2025
by James Alexander

POSTS BY DATE

July 2023
M T W T F S S
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31  
« Jun   Aug »

SOCIAL LINKS

Free Speech Union
  • Home
  • About us
  • Donate
  • Privacy Policy

Facebook

  • X

Instagram

RSS

Subscribe to our newsletter

© Skeptics Ltd.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password? Sign Up

Create New Account!

Fill the forms below to register

All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • Articles
  • About
  • Archive
    • ARCHIVE
    • NEWS ROUND-UPS
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Premium
  • Donate
  • Log In

© Skeptics Ltd.

wpDiscuz
You are going to send email to

Move Comment
Perfecty
Do you wish to receive notifications of new articles?
Notifications preferences