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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An excellent article.. and pretty damn relevant if I may say so.
Circular politics.. Mao reinvented for the new breed of western liber-coms..
Indeed – and a direct line of descent, whether one traces the history of Maoism behind the German Greens and subsequently the EU (Rudi Dutschke, etc), or take cognizance of Peter Hitchens’ claims about Trotskyism inspiring the New Labour Movement.
Those of us who witnessed the cancellation/protest trade of the New Left at university in the late 60s and early 70s recognise the agenda, and also notice how those leading the movement then are the Establishment of today.
Not all the slogans were catchy – I remember how somebody painted across the facade of our local branch of Buyers “Long live the great victory of the glorious people’s proletarian Cultural Revolution!” It didn’t quite have the ring of “Free, Free, LSE, Free it from the bourgeoisie!” or “Ho, Ho, Ho-Chi Minh!”
But nowadays it’s hard to know whether John Lennon was right or wrong when he sang:
Somehow the woke seem to be making it with most of the influential people.
This madness has certainly prospered under the caring wings of the Tories.
The obsessive ‘name calling’ (right-wing, etc. etc.) against any and all dissenters, in the hope that eventually it will stick, is a Maoist technique.
Here’s a very good clip with Dr James Lindsay discussing the theoretical underpinnings of the attack on western liberal values that we have been experiencing.
Immensely important to know the enemy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6rk1mYiOAw
Good to see James Lindsay being referenced. For a rather more coherent description than the Epoch Times gives, setting out how woke is a reincarnation of Maoism, listen to Lindsay’s podcast “Maoism with American characteristics” – https://newdiscourses.com/2023/05/maoism-with-american-characteristics/
More on the topic, even from the same source, this article is deeply disturbing and I honestly cannot fathom how human beings can do this to other human beings. They obviously don’t see them as such. To say this is evil still wouldn’t do it justice. But seriously, how can these things be allowed to happen? Sick, evil, psychopathic scum!
”A U.S. doctors’ group is taking a stance on the Chinese regime’s industrial-scale murder of prisoners of conscience for their organs, urging U.S. authorities and doctors to do what they can to stop enabling the abuse.
“Overwhelming evidence” indicates that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been incarcerating and committing forced organ harvesting on religious, ethnic, and other minorities in China, according to a statement released by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons earlier this month.
“We unequivocally condemn it. It’s absolutely barbaric, inhumane, unethical. There’s no way to justify this at all,” Dr. Richard Amerling, former president and current board member of the AAPS, told The Epoch Times. “You cannot forcibly take someone’s organs, that’s the grossest violation of bodily autonomy that could exist.”
“They essentially execute a living person by removing their heart, they’re still technically alive, they’re not brain dead. It is absolutely horrific.”
The tribunal also concluded that imprisoned adherents of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice systematically persecuted by the regime for over two decades, are the principal source. Uyghurs and other persecuted minorities in northwest China are also at risk, along with Tibetans and House Christians, experts have said.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/absolutely-horrific-us-doctors-group-comes-out-against-ccps-forced-organ-harvesting_5399481.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=DrLoupis&src_src=partner&src_cmp=DrLoupis
Of course it’s Maoism. The only reason that so many are still so blind is that this time it has a vast number of institutions in its grip – not least the medical profession. Worse, it has taken its time and shifted things left, left, left over time. Of course, when people attempted to stop them in their tracks thirty years ago, the general trajectory was denied. Back in the eighties and nineties, this was possible because the changes were still relatively modest – a common age of consent with no question of “equal marriage”, for example. Now they just keep pushing for the opposite reason – they have the power to crush dissent. Just as the SS used to advance behind civilians in the closing stages of the doomed 1940 campaign, so the left advances stealthily behind self righteous “liberals”.
I genuinely fear for the future more than ever. COVID-19 was a measure of how far Maoist ideals had spread across the world. The press had people in such a lather that in some places, if you were found not to have been ‘vaccinated’ I think people would have torn you limb from limb. When you see students throwing soup over works of art in galleries, when you see Just Stop Oil disrupting cultural events, when Stinky Rebellion jam up streets, it’s Maoism in action. And, of course, we saw what happened in Cambodia, thanks to those French-educated students who founded the Khmer Rouge.
The simple question is: how do stop this? How do we fight back? If we can’t, how can we take all the treasures of 1,000 years of Western progress and flee to preserve them?
Nobody starved to death during the so-called ‘Great Famine,’ and nobody was killed during the Cultural Revolution. Those are pre-Internet stories, maintained by the same media that are still lying to us about everything.
Here’s the real story:
6 years after the Communists took power nothing had changed in the lives of the peasants. Dismayed by urbanites and Party officials living privileged lives, Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution to emancipate 400,000,000 voiceless peasants whose social status had not changed in 3,000 years and remained unchanged. He succeeded. Throughout the CR’s ten years, Mao drove inequality to the lowest level ever recorded while growing the economy six percent annually–twice America’s rate–and mechanizing agriculture.
By the end, rural literacy was taken for granted and rural people (no longer ‘peasants’) were as intolerant of oppression and corruption, as vocal about their priorities, as enthusiastic about voting, and as eager to voice complaints as their urban cousins. For the first time in history they were full citizens who could point to the infrastructure they built, the agricultural advances they had made, and the problems they had solved. Though hundreds of millions of rural people benefited from the Cultural Revolution, many elites felt that, by destroying the traditional hierarchy, Mao had destroyed the culture itself–a charge that resonated with foreign elites. They were wrong.
Though hundreds of millions of rural people benefited from the Cultural Revolution, many elites felt that, by destroying the traditional hierarchy, Mao had destroyed the culture itself–a charge that resonated with foreign elites.
It is true that officials and intellectuals, especially those responsible for running the country, had struggled to maintain their sanity in the midst of an administrative nightmare while many more were subjected to public humiliation or spent years in prison. A handful, crushed by criticisms they found incomprehensible, committed suicide. Some fled abroad and published semi-fictional books about their sufferings and few forgave Mao.
A small price to pay for the emancipation of 400,000,000 people.
During the CR, Mao put a satellite in space, founded the ocean-going ship building industry, miniaturized a nuclear reactor for the sub, miniaturized the fusion bomb for the solid fuel icbm, and integrated a whole variety of technologies that many countries still find difficulty in wielding today before Deng began his reforms in 1978.
Lol, what a saint!
Says the David Irving of Chinese history.
There’s a bunch of people who turn up on websites with pre-written responses. The Godless person who printed the above at the behest of his masters doesn’t actually address the article. These pre-written essays are in effect along the lines of the article’s reference to: ‘It allowed a person with limited knowledge to come up with a retort when challenged.’
Oh, yes – he’s clearly a mischief maker; but he’s also a vicious, malignant red, happy to spread poisonous lies denying a genocide – hence my Irving reference. And the sheer brass necked indifference to hellish suffering which is necessarily involved in spreading such lies still appals. The one or two casual downvotes which appear here and there also suggest some degree of malicious activity – either by one or two trolls, or by the same unlovely troll working through more than one account. This is typical red behaviour: continuous aggression and provocation, which bespeaks a personality so soaked in resentment that the shame preventing Liberals and Conservatives from going on to red websites and behaving in the same way is wholly absent. Nothing can actually add to the wrath and anguish of a lost soul, so it freely vents its poison and gains a degree of temporary relief – at the cost of even greater misery long term.
It sounds interesting but when said book is on sale hardcover-only for a mere £85, I find myself far less willing to engage.
This is a barmy price for a book.
On the other hand – could we all be taking Woke a bit too seriously: https://youtu.be/e0FFZ8_nbdI
Here’s a response I put up to a pro Extinction Rebellion video on YouTube which combines a summary of the scientific emptiness of the whole Net Zero hypothesis and agenda with the same Cultural Revolution parallels made in this very good article:
Let’s do some fact checking on the claims being made in this interview:
Far from being threatened with imminent mass failure crop yields both in the UK and round the world are at near record highs, deaths from climate or weather related problems at record lows, no evidence of any significant or threatening sea level rises, wildfires cannot be started by direct solar or terrestrial heat and are nearly always human caused eg via arson or camp fires (very occasionally lightning strikes), far from being brought about by the continued use of fossil fuels the cost of living crisis / energy and general inflation increases are being hugely exacerbated by the switch to relatively inefficient, unreliable and expensive ‘alternative’ versions such as wind and solar, no evidence that the unusually prolonged rainfall last year that led to a particularly widespread but relatively non-fatal instance of Pakistan’s endemic flooding has any connection to human-caused C02 levels in the atmosphere, at a basic level zero credible evidence that global temperature changes over time are occurring in anything other than a completely normal, natural and non-threatening manner never mind the preposterous claim that humanity’s 5% annual contribution to a trace gas measured in parts per million and which itself only comprises around 3% of overall ‘greenhouse gases’ (vast majority made up of water vapour / clouds) could possibly be the main driver of the earth’s climate, etc etc.
All this false information is designed to justify a bullying ‘do as we say or else’ fascist / marxist totalitarian campaign and agenda.
Oh and the idea that groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil are acting in some sort of subversive and seditious manner is hilarious, they are simply being used by the state as shock troops to further cow a population into accepting the increasingly oppressive and impoverishing Net Zero agenda (in exactly the same way as the Chinese Communist Party stood behind the so-called ‘spontaneous uprising of radical youth’ known as the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s).