Far from being some ennobling act of atonement, the violence and chaos evident in the wave of riots across our nation seem compelled more by vitriol and radicalism than anything else. The brazen destruction of many of our nation’s monuments, attacks on local businesses and individuals who don’t kowtow to the movement, and growing enmity toward our history and values eerily echo some of the extremism found in the near and distant past around the world. Though we’re still nowhere near the levels of such extremism, these four examples serve as a stark reminder for us as Americans bear witness to the misguided and, at times, violent antipathy toward our country.
1. The Cultural Revolution
In some respects, the current protests bear the closest relationship to Mao and his Cultural Revolution. Mao’s infamous Red Guard was primarily made up of young adults as well. According to the National Review:
“These kids were told to stop trusting their parents and teachers, and to seek out secret capitalists everywhere. “
The Marxist ideology that informed Mao and his cohorts is an inherent aspect of Black Lives Matters as an organization and is a prominent ideology among Antifa as well.
Marxism has also been a mainstay in academia for decades in the form of Critical Theory where so many young men and women have been radicalized by their professors.
The Guardian recounts the marauding wave of the Cultural Revolution as it sought to lay waste to religious institutions, traditions, and values opposed to its Marxist ends:
“Schools and universities were closed and churches, shrines, libraries, shops and private homes ransacked or destroyed as the assault on…traditions began.”
The founding members of BLM openly claim to be Marxist in thought and also insist on rendering traditional values obsolete.
On the official website, BLM activists openly refer to one another as “comrade” as they list their radical demands, including the dissolution of the traditional family structure as much of the world has come to know it:
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”
One can’t help but hear the echoes of the Cultural Revolution when so many of these current protests rail against capitalism, faith, and tradition. The initial demands of the Cultural Revolution resonate with eerie relevance:
“Our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road… so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.”
Angela Davis, a famous activist, a former fugitive and now a professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, made a similar proclamation just weeks ago. According to WBUR, Boston’s NPR station, Davis said, “There is no capitalism without racism.” She also insisted that law enforcement and correctional facilities are “the most dramatic expression of structural racism.”
Davis was also a Vice Presidential candidate for the Communist Party USA. In 2019, she wrote a letter for People’s World, a socialist website, in which she subtly advocates for violence in the name of socialism:
“Dear Comrades, I join you in celebrating the Communist Party USA and its one-hundred-year history of militant struggles for working-class democracy, for racial, gender and environmental justice, and for socialism, which is the only viable future for our country and the planet…”
While we are not close to the extremity of Mao’s violent revolution, the current protests do signal an increasing cause for concern amid the growing exhortations against America from the likes of Antifa, BLM and popular activists such as Angela Davis and Shaun King.
2. The French Revolution
The zealotry that fueled the infamous Reign of Terror during the French Revolution has some definite resonance with the ongoing protests here in America. The virulent attack on religion, in particular, in the form of dechristianization was particularly alarming and should give all of us pause. The Institute of World Politics provides some context:
“The program of dechristianization waged against the Christian people of France increased in intensity with the enactment of the Law of 17 September 1793, also known as the Law of Suspects. It was used to carry out more actively the following measures: 1) all priests and all persons protecting them are liable to death on the spot, 2 )the destruction of all crosses, bells and other external signs of worship, 3) the destruction of statues, plaques, and iconography from places of worship.”
One can’t help but find similarities in some of the rhetoric being thrown around today. The popular radical activist Shaun King recently demanded that all Christian iconography he deems “racist” be immediately taken down and destroyed. Kingtweeted out:
“All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down. They are a gross form white supremacy. Created as tools of oppression. Racist propaganda. They should all come down.”=
In a compelling piece for the Dallas Morning News in 2019, Joshua Whitfield also drew parallels from The Reign of Terror amid the ongoing hostile political climate in our nation. His comparative analysis is quite prescient considering it was written months before the current wave of nationwide protests and riots:
“Whereas in America…relatively strong political structures created public spaces ‘where freedom could appear,’ in France the ruling elite instead pandered to the impoverished masses. Instead of freedom, vague ‘happiness’ was made the goal of the revolution in France; instead of the good of the Republic, now the revolution served the shifting good of the ‘people.’ It was a sort of populism built upon promises of the political class, which in time, unsurprisingly, gave rise to little more than mob chaos, a reign of terror, the unfortunate masses having become enraged that happiness never came. Because they were merely the pandered empty words of the elite.”
While Whitfield offered criticism toward the president as well, he saved his most exacting words for the Left:
“I ask myself if these aren’t our modern-day sansculottes who in their angst would rather eliminate elements of our citizenry than understand them…when I hear progressive politicians push their plainly false tolerance, their thinly veiled hatred of traditional moralities and politics unlike their own, unlike whatever is the current creed of the zeitgeist. The left has their mobs too, and they would unleash terror as well.”
3. Year Zero
The violent takeover of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and the genocide that followed was compelled by an overarching desire to “start over” and erase all vestiges of the past, cultural and otherwise. According to the Asia Pacific Curriculum:
“Their idea was to wipe the slate of society clean so they could start over in building a new society at ‘year zero.’”
The particular brand of extremism embodied by the Khmer Rouge aimed to destroy all vestiges of religion, tradition, and commerce in the region as detailed by the Cambodia Tribunal Monitor:
“The Khmer Rouge also began to implement their radical Maoist and Marxist-Leninist transformation program at this time. They wanted to transform Cambodia into a rural, classless society in which there were no rich people, no poor people, and no exploitation. To accomplish this, they abolished money, free markets, normal schooling, private property, foreign clothing styles, religious practices, and traditional Khmer culture. Public schools, pagodas, mosques, churches, universities, shops and government buildings were shut or turned into prisons, stables, reeducation camps and granaries. There was no public or private transportation, no private property…”
It’s worth noting that a corrosive sense of distrust became widespread during the Khmer Rouge’s reign as well. Allegiance was demanded and dissent was summarily punished. The Asia Pacific Curriculum elaborates further:
“The degree of distrust within Democratic Kampuchea became all-pervasive as more traitors were ‘discovered’ and increasing numbers of real or alleged associates were identified in forced confessions.”
These sorts of “discoveries” on the part of the Khmer Rouge seem to have small but compelling parallels with the exhausting witch-hunts online that occur at the hands of cancel culture. So many are now forced to recant or profusely apologize for past indiscretions or risk outright ruin at the hands of online mobs.
Even worse, BLM and the NAACP are beginning to socially enforce the idea that many need to apologize for their very existence. Such a demand is fraught with extremist overtones as evidenced by the site, I Take Responsibility:
“This begins with white men and women taking responsibility for their personal role in eradicating racism in America — taking a stand and committing to change. It is not enough to not be racist. We must be anti-racism. That’s humanity.”
Essentially, many must actively prove their allegiance and worth or risk being ostracized by the “woke” mobs for their perceived privilege. This “soft” totalitarianism is becoming increasingly prevalent.
4. Razing the Past
While the current protests in our nation are not at all comparable to the brutality and terrorism that ISIS meted out across much of the Muslim world, there is still one unsettling connection to be drawn. ISIS attempted to raze all evidence of a rich, complex past when they occupied places like the Syrian city of Palmyra. They wanted no evidence of history or civilization beyond their barbaric scope. According to The Guardian:
“Militants rampaged through the city’s museums and ruins, blowing up the 2,000-year-old towering Temple of Bel and the Arch of Victory along with other priceless artefacts.”
Now countless monuments, buildings, and businesses have been destroyed by the fanatical mobs rampaging our city streets. If and when the dust finally settles, the devastation may prove to be the costliest ever on record.
Many on the Left are so selective in their assessment of all the continued destruction that it almost leans toward parody. Writing for that bastion of progressive thought Mother Jones, Camille Squires recently wrote:
“For all the handwringing over the ‘senseless’ property destruction that has accompanied the past week of protest, a number of the damaged sites have a perfectly sensible connection to the protesters’ chief grievance: anti-Black racism. Throughout the United States, protesters have burned buildings and toppled statues that have stood for years as overt reminders of the country’s history of chattel slavery, racial apartheid, and the war fought to uphold it.”
Implying that somehow the wanton destruction is “sensible” provided their overarching aims are met seems to be exactly the kind of rationalizing extremists offer when condoning such violence.
ISIS also granted no quarter to beliefs or views it deemed contrary to its own. The New York Times reported that the need to purge all evidence of such beliefs compelled ISIS toward its own reign of terror:
“The Islamic State has said that the historical objects and sites it destroyed were heresy to its ideology, which is rooted in Wahhabism. In Palmyra, for example, the group blew up two historic tombs, one of a Shiite saint and another of a Sufi scholar, because it considers them to be forms of idolatry.”
The comparison between the likes of ISIS and the aims of the current protests is all the more compelling when progressive extremists like Shaun King call for the destruction of religious iconography. A number of churches have already been vandalized and burned across the country in possible relation to the current outrage. And, lest we forget, some on the Left even celebrated the burning of the Notre Dame Cathedral.
Again, radical activists in America are not “ISIS-lite.” The point is that their war on our country’s history is based on similar, deeply flawed views about culture that is a slippery slope toward the erasure of the past.
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Similar to the examples provided above, the abolishment of the very idea of America seems to be the aim of much of the radical-left outrage and chaos. It no longer seems like just some misguided attempt at absolution for past injustices. A violent desire to completely supplant our nation from the philosophical, religious, and historical roots that hold us together informs many of these protests.
Writing for the National Review, Victor Davis Hanson, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, perhaps best summarizes our current ordeal in a recent piece on the protests and riots:
“Every cultural revolution starts at year zero, whether explicitly or implicitly. The French Revolution recalibrated the calendar to begin anew, and the genocidal Pol Pot declared his own Cambodian revolutionary ascension as the beginning of time. Somewhere after May 25, 2020, the death of George Floyd, while in police custody, sparked demonstrations, protests, and riots. And they in turn ushered in a new revolutionary moment. Or at least we were told that — in part by Black Lives Matter, in part by Antifa, in part by terrified enablers in the corporate world, the new Democratic Party, the military, the universities, and the media.”
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