Article by Andrea Widburg in "The American Thinker":
In revolutions, the second generation, the one that’s been weaned on the revolution, is always truer and purer in its beliefs than the first generation. Like all true believers, these children of the revolution will brutally purge heretics, which is why revolutions always eat their own. The most famous recent example is Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which saw students violently destroy anyone who deviated from Maoist doctrine. We’re witnessing that now across corporate America, especially in the media, as college grads destroy the woke leftists who hired them.
China’s Cultural Revolution began in 1966. When it ended a decade later, tens of millions of people had been brutally persecuted, and hundreds of thousands, perhaps even as many as 20 million, people had been slaughtered in massacres across China. Then, as now, the revolution was incubated in the country's colleges.
Nie Yuanzi, a philosophy professor at Peking University, triggered the Cultural Revolution when she put up the first big character poster attacking the college president and others in the college as bourgeois reactionaries. Mao endorsed her poster, and the Cultural Revolution began.
James David Banker’s article about the Cultural Revolution describes how schools were turned into places of propaganda rather than knowledge and how the indoctrinated students brutally turned on their teachers, their families, and their friends. He then has this to say about the genius behind using public education to revolutionize students:
Mao’s decision to use China’s youth as his vanguard was, by fortune or foresight, instrumental to the revolution’s initial success. The young may be pure in heart, but they are also high on emotion and short on life experience. Simply put, they are natural philistines. Still in their identity-forming years, China’s young had few barriers to a complete identification with the Red Guards. Conformity and intolerance of dissent followed naturally. [snip] With undeveloped mental immune systems, their soft skulls were fertile ground for Mao’s secular Manichaeism. Manichaeism reduces society, with all the diversity and complexity of human experience, to a blunt dichotomy: light and darkness, good and evil, right and wrong, radical and reactionary. “There is no middle way!” became a popular slogan. Ideologies like these are intellectually and morally vapid, yet their simplicity and certainty are alluring, especially to the young. Thus, Mao’s child revolutionaries could—with youthful exuberance and clarity of purpose—chain a teacher to a radiator and bludgeon him to death with an iron bar, or force a teacher to eat nails and feces, among other tortures.
[snip]
Eating human flesh became a macabre proof of loyalty. The Party’s own investigations tell of students in Guangxi province cooking and eating their teachers and principals. In some government cafeterias, the bodies of executed traitors were displayed on meat hooks, while their flesh was served and consumed. The blank slate, it seems, can also be a dark abyss.
American college graduates aren’t eating people . . . yet. They have reached the phase of figurative cannibalism, which is most visible at media outlets -- the same outlets that have been at the forefront of pushing hardcore leftism on America and have wildly cheered the Black Lives Matters riots.
The biggest story comes from The New York Times. The old guard at the paper, which still has a residual sense that the paper’s opinion pages should showcase diverse viewpoints, invited Senator Tom Cotton to write an opinion piece about using military troops to quell riots in American cities.
The piece, “Send in the Troops,” ignited a firestorm. The storm, though, raged primarily within the four walls of the New York Times. Young staff members, indoctrinated in leftism at college and told that words will always hurt them, argued that Cotton, by urging Trump to use the same troops that helped bring Civil Rights to the South, staged a rebellion. (Outsiders also argued that the op-ed was “fascist.”) The Times’ management caved before the implacable children of its revolution and, in a further act of intellectual cowardice, hid behind a wall of lies about Cotton to do so.
The Maoist mob also attacked at Variety, the entertainment paper. Editor in Chief Claudia Eller took a knee for the paper, acknowledging that Variety had failed in its obligations to increase racial diversity. Ironically enough, considering that it’s “Pride Month,” Eller’s focus had been on what’s currently an irrelevant kind of diversity -- LGBTQ diversity.
A former reporter publicly stated that Eller’s racial grovel was inadequate, to which Eller responded that the reporter sounded “bitter.” The college-grad crybullies got “upset,” the news organization engaged in “soul-searching,” and Eller found herself bounced for a comment that would have been ignored a decade ago but that today was “plainly unacceptable.”
Meanwhile, at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the college-grad mob forced editor Stan Wischnowski to resign. His sin? He published an article saying an opinion piece decrying the mob’s wanton destruction and headlined it “Buildings Matter too.” To America’s Maoists, only black lives matter (for now). Wischnowski, despite issuing the ritual apology, was out.
America’s mini-Maoist madmen are de-throning their mentors, a symbolic form of cannibalism. Nevertheless, I doubt that ousted, older cohort of true believers will rethink their leftism. They will merely become professional apologizers for their ideological impurity, living forever in the hope that they will be welcomed back into the leftist fold.