A book on human nature details how easy it was for Cultural Revolution student leftists to embrace horrific, violent oppression of others
“This looks like what’s happening on college campuses!” I thought as I read Chapter 14 - Resist the Downward Pull of the Group (The Law of Conformity) in Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature.
The chapter illustrates the ease with which Chinese teenagers were induced to mindlessly embrace the ‘reforms’ of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and how it devolved into organized torture and violence at Yizhen Middle School, hundreds of miles from Beijing. The story begins in 1964 at age 12 for new student Gao Jianhua, whose goal is to be a writer and gain eventual admission into Beijing University.
Instead, he’s pulled into the Cultural Revolution by Fangpu, an older friend and mentor as detailed in Jianhua’s book Born Red: A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution.
The worst of what happened sixty years ago in China hasn’t occurred yet on North American college campuses, but some of the lead-up is frighteningly familiar. I believe it’s possible that a handful of today’s ‘pro-Palestinians’, steeped in simplistic binary oppressed/oppressor frameworks and the diminished compassion of woke social justice theory, might eventually turn to pogroms against Jews, and torturers of those who oppose them. Not all protesters have gone down that dark path, but the nerve center of overtly antisemitic protests is New York’s Columbia University, where some of the ‘protests’ included terrorizing campus custodians trapped by protesters. The campus custodian union threatened to sue.
The protests began on the same day as the October 7th attack on Israel, before anything concrete was established, since the protesters believed simplistically that Israel was (always) to blame. The road to amoral hell began with the universities taking days sometimes to acknowledge the attack, to more recent expressed solidarity and alliance with Hamas and Hezbollah. The protests, whether peaceful or violent, have demonstrated a near-uniform siding with Gaza and a complete lack of sympathy for attack victims. Some activists even denied the atrocities.
WARNING: Graphic details and semi-graphic imagery in this video
“Young people,” cautions author Greene about assuming what occurred was nothing more than ‘group adolescent behavior’, “often represent human nature in a more naked and purer form than adults, who are cleverer at disguising their motivations.”
It’s unclear how the protests will continue under a new US administration, but the cancer at Columbia University has already metastasized globally, resulting in attacks, abuse, threats, and intimidation of Jews everywhere.
You can see the eerie signs in a review of what happened to one student in China sixty years ago.
A brief history of what happened at Yizhen Middle School
Life was hardly free in Communist China but People’s Republic founder Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to purge capitalism and preserve Chinese socialism. It lasted ten years and today is regarded by the CCP as a colossal failure, marked by violence, purges, public torture, executions, and cannibalism of ‘counter-revolutionaries’, for ideological purposes, not famine. It occurred in the late 1960s in the Guangxi Province for at least 137 corpses.
Yeah, fun times in China back then. At YMS, the timeline began in 1966, when Jianhua was fourteen. If you’re paying attention to the Keffiyeh Kampus Krusaders, it’ll sound familiar. So:
Public intellectuals accused celebrated writers of concealing counter-revolutionary messages in their work; based on ‘careful readings of certain passages’, like SJWs do with content and social media today, looking for hidden racism, misogyny, gender conformity and other lack of groupthink. They began reviewing art, literature, lectures and lessons for alleged subversive messages by those suspected of attempting to halt the Cultural Revolution.
Mao, afraid China was slipping back into a ‘feudal past’, called on students’ ‘right to rebel’, except the way he phrased it was zao fan, which in Chinese means to turn everything upside down'. Sound sort of familiar, folks? China still engages in shaming culture today, often for minor transgressions just as WokeWorld has been doing for over ten years.
Witch hunts on insufficiently revolutionary teachers began with shaming and public humiliation for those who didn’t cooperate or confess to ‘crimes’, including, initially, mild torture (today’s radicals torture and destroy careers on social media over ‘microaggressions’).
Teacher ‘confessions’ brought more demands to ‘reveal the truth’.
Jinhua felt uneasy when his favorite teacher was accused of faking his switch to communism and was forced to wear a dunce cap and a board around his neck announcing his ‘crime’ (Counterpart: Endless demands for unaccepted apologies by offended wokies).
Not surprisingly, teachers fled YMS, as others today are getting fired or leaving their jobs over woke authoritarianism.
Mao-approved ‘Red Guards’, formed to support and defend the Cultural Revolution, sported fashionable and much-coveted red armbands. Jinhua got accepted because his father was a communist war veteran and government official. Or an ‘elite’ as we would call him today.
Returning back home for a visit, Jinhua found his father jobless and his family discredited after being accused of ‘revisionism’, (Marxist reformation).
Meanwhile, back at YMS, his old friend Fangpu had consolidated power and formed a new group called the East-Is-Red Corps and took over the school. Jianhua became frightened of Fangpu and recent events.
A few weeks later another student formed the Red Rebels, a rival group which advocated a more tolerant revolution based on reason and non-violence, which didn’t go over well with Fangpu and the R-I-E gang, but Jianhua found himself attracted to them nevertheless.
The Chinese military arrived to restore order; the Cultural Revolution had gone rogue at schools, government offices and factories. A corps of thirty-six soldiers called ‘The 901’ attempted to disband the factions and restore order at YMS but the students decided to fight back; so with one student armed with one single slingshot who slung exactly one shot, he wounded a soldier which showed the 901 these kids meant fuckin’ business, so they headed for the hills.
Just in case you’re not keeping score, we’ve got two factions, Red-Is-East and the Red Rebels (which I’ll admit sounds an awful lot like eighth-grade rival video game teams) and the Red Guard which gets no more mention. The two leading factions both were certain they represented the ideals of the Cultural Revolution and the other side was evil (sound familiar again?).
Young female revolutionary Yulan (I said Yulan, not Mulan!) was discovered by the RR to be an R-I-E spy; she was beaten to divulge more spies (so much for a kinder, gentler revolution!) but she refused to sing; she was later handed over in a prisoner exchange.
Red-Is-East seized an off-campus building for themselves, and captured some Red Rebels. No one knew how they were faring.
Blah blah blah: Skirmishes (more slingshots), counter-offensives, a murdered Rebel, a rudimentary munitions factory (for really ace swords and spears), and suicide by the aforementioned Silent Spy who yelled, “I’d rather die than surrender to you!” jumping complete with a super-dramatic red flag in one hand and the parting shot, “Long live Chairman Mao!” Yulan was found wrapped in the flag, with no explanation as to how she accomplished that during the short trip from the third floor.
Jinhua went home again to see his family which was always a bad idea; every time he left anywhere all hell broke loose. He returned to find Mao was taking charge and picking sides in various regional conflicts; he picked East-Is-Red which didn’t bode well for the Red Rebels.
And oh yeah, they’d turned the school into a prison, complete with a much more sophisticated torture chamber.
This is where things get not-yet-today’s-campus-protesty, but where I began to go, “Holy fuku, I can see today’s protesters one day pulling something like this!” Really godawful shoestring-budget torture ensued and screams resounded as blacklisted Red Rebels limped around campus, not wanting to talk about it AT ALL, thankyouverymuch.
The East-Is-Red rewrote history, doctored photos, and tortured a largely harmless teacher in a way you don’t know what know about for failing to confess to his ‘crimes’, he died in Jinhua’s arms, and a female teacher who refused to affirm the East-Is-Red’s b.s. fiction about the death was gang-raped.
A giant statue of Maoie Dearest was erected at the school gate.
And after, lots and lots of violence and destruction all across China. Today, the CCP changes the subject whenever the Glorious C.R. is mentioned.
Could campus protesters torture and murder ‘Zionists’?
Greene’s point is that it’s human nature to struggle against a common enemy, either outside or within. Like how the social justice crowd has been long observed to turn on and eat their own, especially on social media. It doesn’t take much for groupthink to seize the human brain and impel it to follow the maddened crowd. People think they’re joining for this cause or that, but they’re really just seeking a ‘sense of belonging and clear tribal identity’.
At some point YMS became a mere battle for power between rival groups, to the point where any act of violence could be justified. “There could be no middle ground, nor any questioning of the rightness of their cause. The tribe is always right, and to say otherwise is to betray it.”
China has never been a democracy with the ideas of liberty, human rights, and individual freedoms that America enjoys. What’s notable about the Cultural Revolution and today’s protests is that drive to believe in the infallibility of one’s beliefs on both sides, dehumanizing the other as ‘evil’. We see the same splintering today; at YMS it was Red-is-East vs the Red Rebels; today it’s the ‘pro-Palestinians’ vs those whose sympathies lie more with Israel.
Ironically, Mao’s new China came to resemble the oppressive feudalist devil he wanted to escape. The students who supported him became those evils, as did Mao himself. We see the same parallels in woke progressive expressions on college campuses that condemn Israel rather than Hamas, the attackers. Some espouse sound, humanitarian reasons for speaking up for the Gazans in the heart of the battlefield, yet tolerate no dissent and sometimes physically attack those who do, especially those they label ‘Zionists’.
October 7, and campus protests, touched off a swift, global wildfire of antisemitic incidents in the western world, on- and off-campus. The attacks and threats on Jews proliferate: In Zurich, in New Zealand, in Holland. In Canada, antisemitism is up 670%. In the U.S., it’s up 200%. Some blame might be attributed to campus protesters but it’s clear antisemitism is a dormant volcano waiting to explode under the right conditions.
Greene warned of the ‘technological prowess’ which enables tribalism and our ugliest nature, and speaks of how “Imagining differences is part of the madness of groups.” We watched activist warring factions on social media and in the news, driving hate and division and treating compassion as the most odious of human virtues.
Today the Gaza Gangs exhibit, as did their Chinese predecessors, the same hostility to intellectuals, to truth, to questioning narratives, to free speech, to teachers who know better than they. They openly celebrate ‘martyred’ terrorist leaders and declare allegiance to their violent organizations, while actively calling for the elimination of a sovereign nation and denial of the horrific abuses visited upon it over a year ago. They exhibit compassion only for the least sympathetic side, however fair some of their points about the way Gazans have been treated, or realistic critiques of the Israeli government and the IDF.
The book I just finished, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, notes what happens with opposing groups. “The stronger the tendency to see one’s own group as good—and this tendency is often surprisingly strong—the more likely one is to regard one’s rivals and enemies as evil. Such views may then provide easy justification for treating one’s enemies harshly, because there is no point in being patient, tolerant, and understanding when one is dealing with evil.”
There’s nothing especially significant about either the Cultural Revolution’s eager beavers and our current crop, except that the former was run by males and the latter by females. This is the story of human history; of genocides, of revolutions, of protests. The more one side becomes convinced of one’s rightness, the more they dehumanize the other side. We like to think we’ve learned the lessons of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but clearly we haven’t when some mourn dead terrorists and cheer for the psychopaths that burned people alive.
Do I think today’s protesters could turn into a modern version of Red Is East? Yes, unless Trump cracks down on them which he’s vowed to do.
We must resist the Law of Conformity.
Understanding evil begins with the realization that we ourselves are capable of doing many of these things….To understand evil, we must set aside the comfortable belief that we would never do anything wrong. Instead, we must begin to ask ourselves, what would it take for me to do such things? Assume that it would be possible. - Roy F. Baumeister, in Evil
In Wokeism, The Perfect Victim Is The Psychopath - Eva Kurilova, Eva’s Newsletter (highly recommend!)
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