Article by Stasia Decker-Ahmed in The American Thinker
Police State? Genocide? Could It Happen Here?
It happened in the late spring when thousands of demonstrators took part in the Cultural Revolution. Students on campuses everywhere came together to make radical changes in the nation. The old ideas, customs, and beliefs had to be put away and a shining new society ushered in. Young people marched in the streets, tore down signs, and toppled statues. Media outlets throughout the country praised this unprecedented movement.
Did this happen in Seattle? Portland? The streets of Chicago? No, this was Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution that started in May 1966 and ushered in one of the bloodiest eras in China’s history. This particular cultural revolution ended with millions being murdered.
While what did happen in Seattle, Portland, and other American cities in 2020 started because of George Floyd’s death and primarily involved challenging racism and police brutality, it quickly escalated and evolved into so much more. One of the primary leaders of this movement referred to herself as a “trained Marxist.” Another activist tweeted, “Tear them down,” referring to statues of Jesus and Christian churches. In 2020, BLM rioters burned a Bible and American flags in Portland and decapitated a statue of Jesus in Miami.
These comments, and the actions of many of the protestors, bear a striking resemblance to another movement besides Chairman Mao’s Marxist makeover of Chinese society. There also was the Bolshevik Revolution. Nearly fifty years before Mao made his move, Lenin’s revolutionaries ushered in the first Marxist state. While creating their socialist Utopia, they went on to burn churches, execute priests, and ultimately kill millions once civil war ensued. While this rioting and burning that took place throughout 2020 diminished in 2021, the angry sentiments and striking division in our country has continued to grow.
Brutal dictatorships and bloody revolutions have always been part of the human condition and continue to take place around the globe. Yet Americans often think that extreme brutality, including persecution, will never happen here. It can and it will if the vast majority remain asleep at the wheel of democracy and freedom.
Jacqueline Murekatete, an attorney and Rwanda genocide survivor, has written the following regarding how genocide normally starts.
As I always tell my audience when I speak on this topic, people do not just get up one day and want to systematically murder their neighbors. Genocide is always proceeded by a number of steps, including state sanctioned discrimination of the would-be-target group, a dehumanization process in which the target group is portrayed as the “other” or the “enemy,” and a culture of impunity.
If that sounds eerily familiar, it’s because it’s currently happening in the United States in the form of cancel culture and the increasing censorship of voices and ideas that don’t line up with the mainstream worldview. The conditioning of the masses always proceeds persecution.
It happens when people compare those who voted differently than they did to terrorists and Nazis.
It happens when Chase, the biggest bank in the country, refuses to do business with conservative groups.