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.”