The Red Guard & The College Campus

Flat-Circle

The old adage regarding history is that it is important to know so as to not repeat it. The patterns of civilizations, societies, and cultures, are cyclical in nature. Though civilized societies grow and advance, our nature as human beings does not. Because of this, we repeat the same patterns and events over and over again. The adage “There is nothing new under the sun” perfectly encapsulates this idea that trends and patterns are acted out cross-culturally regardless of era.

Glass Case

In recent years we’ve seen the narrative floating around regarding the “Teaching of history” and the content that is appropriate and inappropriate to subject students to. An idea expressed by academic, intellectual, and psychologist Johnathan Haidt in his book, “The coddling of the American Mind” delves into this idea of the growing unwillingness to teach information that could induce, “Emotional harm.” In the university setting where expressions such as “Safe Space” are frequently used and imply that students are too fragile to be introduced to topics and conversations that are uncomfortable. So rather than exposing students to these topics, we simply sweep them under the rug to “Protect students from emotional harm.” The truth about history is that it is largely made up of atrocities, horrible things being acted out upon people. This, combined with decades of watered-down education has resulted in generations of young people being completely unaware of our own history and especially the broader world history. Here in this essay, we’re going to have a brief history lesson regarding an ideology that resulted in over 60 million deaths in the 20th century.

Mao

The “Cultural Revolution” was a political and cultural movement instituted in 1966 by the Chinese Chairman of the Communist Party, Mao Zedong. The stated goal of the movement was to, “Preserve Chinese communism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society” and to institute the collective religion of the state. Mao sought to rid the culture of what he referred to as the “4 Olds” which included, old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. What he sought to do was eliminate all traces of “Bourgeoise Capitalism” to usher in the age of the collective utopia. Mao understood that it is not as simple as military rule, it instead must be organically rooted out from the bottom up. His strategy? Infiltrate the schools by instituting mass-propaganda campaigns with the goal of making students believe that all of society’s troubles are a result of the western ideas of individuality and free markets. The ideological indoctrination campaign was successful and resulted in students carrying out his revolutionary acts in order to usher in the new society.

Red Guard

The Red Guard was the name of a mass student-led social movement that acted as community henchmen with the goal of ridding the culture of the four olds. In August of 1966, a period referred to as “Red August,” students organized and ransacked communities. The first act was to rename the streets and buildings, removing the names of historical and cultural figures of the past. The next step was to destroy statues, temples, shrines, art, literature, musical instruments, and anything that was deemed a product of “Oppressive Western Burgoise Capitalism.” Next was to locate “Evil and greedy” landlords, business owners, and property owners. Once located, the revolutionaries dragged the capitalists out of their homes and made them wear uniforms that said, “Criminal Capitalist” prior to eventually torturing and murdering them in the middle of the streets. Artifacts, historical records, and the sacred Confucious Cemetary were all destroyed to rid the society of its history and culture. Free speech was stifled as intellectuals, academics, and writers that did not adhere to the state-approved ideology were imprisoned or worse if they dared to speak out against the revolution. Colorful and gender-specific clothing was eliminated and replaced with gender-neutral drab attire and in all movies and magazines, women were portrayed with short hair and highly masculinized in order to rid the culture of femininity. The city of Beijing was renamed “East Red City” as the statues were torn down and replaced with statues of Mao Zedong. 

The Red Guard, like that of the Soviet Bolsheviks and the Nazis of Germany, were not inherently evil people, instead, they were brainwashed and became captured by groupthink. Because the young students were not exposed to their history and were instead presented with radical ideology, that ideology was the reality of their world. They saw themselves as a liberation movement, heroes of Chinese culture who were going to usher in the age of utopia. What they did not realize was that they were political pawns, serving the interest of the powerful elite by destroying any remnant of the past. The idea instituted by Mao was to destroy the idea of the individual that is reinforced by capitalism that promotes individual prosperity and replace it with the idea of collective communism, the religion of government, and the worship of the state.

The result was inevitable and the same as every other attempt to institute collectivism, mass starvation, and death. Over 60 million people died during the “Great Leap Forward” because the ideology denies the existence of human nature. Psychologically we know that the only way to effectively change human behavior is through incentives. When you remove the motive of profit and prosperity, there is no motivation for people to work hard and produce. Soviet communists had an expression, “They pretended to pay us and we pretended to work.” The Chinese prosperity of recent decades is only a result of their hybrid approach to culture and economics which is a mixture of capitalism and political communism. Free markets and the imperfect system of capitalism is the best method known to man for creating the most widespread prosperity.

Campus

It’s been said that the birthplace of free speech is the college campus, specifically the campus of U.C. Berkeley in the 1960s. The 60s revolution was different than that of the Red Guard revolution in that in a culturally-conservative era the movement promoted individual freedoms and de-centralization as opposed to centralization. Freedom of speech was a major point of emphasis, having the ability to speak out and defy authority or in other words, true liberalism.

Closed Discourse

What we’re now seeing on college campuses is the complete inverse of this idea. In recent years we keep seeing growing incidents of protests turning destructive and violent on college campuses when speakers who do not adhere to the approved social orthodoxy arrive. A recent 2021 survey found that 66% of college students believe it is okay to shout-down speakers as to silence them. Another survey conducted by the Heterodox Academy found that 63.5% of college students believe the political and social climate on their campus prevents people from freely expressing themselves. When you have an environment of self-censorship then you do not have an environment of inquiry. According to academia.org, “The spiral of silence theory contends that people possess a “quasi-statistical sense” that allows them to conclude whether their opinion on a given issue is in the majority or minority. People are also motivated to avoid ridicule, isolation, and ostracism from their immediate community. As a result, minority or deviant opinions are expressed with increasingly less frequency as people look to avoid reprisal for offending others. Asking students to predict whether they would feel comfortable expressing a viewpoint on a specific topic provides insight into this chilling effect in a way that asking about past experiences does not.” In a survey conducted in 2020 by Fire.org and the Heterodox Academy found that, “Compared to 2019, a greater percentage of students reported that they were reluctant to discuss gender (24% vs. 20%), politics (41% vs. 32%), race (25% vs. 24%), religion (31% vs. 24%) or sexual orientation (28% vs. 21%).  The percentage of students who said they would be reluctant to discuss a non-controversial topic also increased, from 8% to 15%. Overall, 60% of the total sample was reluctant to discuss at least one of the five core controversial topics.” The problem is worse when you consider that only 23% of the students surveyed that identify as democrat-leaning said they were reluctant to discuss politics in the university setting. When well over the majority of students are reluctant to share an opinion, the university setting is no longer a place of free and open discourse, how did we arrive at this point?

Exposure

A lot of the rhetoric coming from the universities, particularly from the humanities departments, conflates speech that we disagree with as “Violence.” The implication is that since speakers are acting “Violently,” it justifies forceful removal, silencing, or retaliatory violence in return. Words such as “Harm, violence, trauma, unsafe, and phobic” have become incredibly subjective terms used to justify the silencing of the perpetrator. In education, there is an attempt to emotionally coddle students by not exposing them to ideas that challenge their own, to do so would bring about “Emotional harm.” An expression put forth by conservative pundits, “Facts don’t care about your feelings” revolves around the idea that there are truths that may be inconvenient and uncomfortable, but they are truths nonetheless. By simply not speaking truths, does not make the reality of them go away. If a doctor has to relay the results of a cancer diagnosis to a patient, by simply not talking about it does not make the disease go away. If there is bacteria growth, it does not go away simply by leaving it in the dark, it goes away by exposing it to sunlight. 

Exclusion

In a time where the popular terms of the day are “Diversity and “Inclusion” college campuses have become anything but diverse and inclusive. The only diversity and inclusion welcomed in the ultra-liberal university setting are in appearance, not in thought. If you notice, should a black or gay person share conservative ideas, they are no longer considered black or part of the LGBT community, their minority status is stricken from them. If we establish that the color of one’s skin or sexual preference does not matter, what is diversity outside of adherence to the liberal orthodoxy? There was a recent study conducted by three University of Cincinnati professors that highlighted the lack of thought diversity in today’s universities. When looking at ratios between self-identifying democrats and republicans in various departments they found that the ratio is 44:1 in sociology departments, 26.8:1 in English departments, 42.2:1 in anthropology, and 16:1 in ethnic studies. There is such a stark contrast that in the social sciences that 18% of professors self-identify as Marxists while only 5% as conservative. According to a study conducted by the free speech organization, FIRE, “Of the 66 top-rated liberal arts colleges, 39% had not a single registered republican professor on staff.” This wide margin is not some “Liberal Conspiracy” it’s far simpler than that. Academics become administrators and conduct the hiring of new professors, in this process, they are far more likely to hire applicants of the same perspective as themselves. Repeat this process over the course of decades and you have an ever-widening gap that continues to polarize more and more. Due to this, students are not being exposed to differing ideas and finding out which is the best, they are instead being presented with one-sided perspectives that often run contrary to our values and systems that have been proven to work over our history. They’re being presented with far-left ideology as objective fact. Perspectives that admittedly sound perfect on paper and in theory but the tragedy of our existence is that we live in an imperfect world and we are an imperfect species, therefor the often posited theories prove disastrous in real-world application This is the issue with career academics who never left the academic setting instead of professors with private-sector experience who are experts in the field that they teach. Students are not being taught “how to think,” they’re being taught “what to think.”

Heterodox

College campuses should be a place of personal growth, a place where students are challenged and made uncomfortable. Leaving one’s comfort zone and being exposed to new ideas is how we grow. College campuses should the places of heterodoxy, with different ideas battling it out to determine which is the best. But that’s not what they have become. They have instead become the epi-center of monolithic thought, anti-free speech, and the most exclusionary institutions in the country.

Revolutionaries

I am not writing this as if to say, “Libs bad, conservatives and libertarians gooooood.” The point of writing this is to highlight the ideological capture and opposition to free speech that is starting in the universities and leaking out into greater society. I would not support an environment where roles were reversed and conservatives dominate higher education the way the left does. That is the point, ideas and theory require combatting thought, the same way a scientist runs experiments to prove or disprove an initial hypothesis. By their nature, on average, conservative-minded people lack creativity and lack the skill of being able to identify new strategies and alternatives, conservatives need the check and balances of liberal-minded people. I am also not saying that college students are on the verge of turning into the red guard. I am, however, saying that the highly politicized activist students in the university environment are motivated by the same collectivist ideology and have authoritarian behavior patterns. If you notice in recent years the demanding of statues being torn down, the replacing of actual history with ideological “Critical Theory” in an attempt to re-write the past, the forceful silencing of speakers with opinions against an all-controlling government, the demand to censor online speech, the fierce opposition to capitalism and individuality. A term loosely thrown around by campus activists is “Fascist.” Actual fascism is top-down governmental control of all institutions including the media, silencing dissident expression. The activists are completely unaware that in these scenarios where the university is an extension of the Democratic Party, they are the authoritarians silencing speech that strays from the governmental and media-driven narrative. They are the revolutionaries that are too young to know the extent of their own ignorance, watered-down ideological education only further exacerbates this problem.

Subversion

I speak not from the perspective of a conservative media talking point but from one of personal experience. I left the university as a self-identifying progressive as I studied in the schools of education and political science. I look back at the lessons and instruction that I was presented with and realize I fell under the false illusion of, “Well I was introduced to this concept in higher education, so it must be true.’ I allowed my questioning nature to be subverted by slogans and talking points instead of inquiry and critical thinking. I’ve learned more from books and independent inquiry within the last year than I ever learned in the universities that I paid tens of thousands in loans to attend. Adults used to be under the impression that students would leave the ultra-left institutions, live in the real world, and figure it out. They were wrong, instead, the students leave the institutions and entered the media, human resource departments, schools, and greater society without ever having been exposed to ideas that reside outside of their echo chambers and in turn influence successive generations with ideology, not the skill of critical thinking. 

Coddle

I came across a quote the other day, “Political correctness is authoritarianism masquerading as compassion” and I believe it to be true. This is not to say that we shouldn’t be conscious of other people’s feelings, of course, we should. This is to say, however, that the corruption of words such as, “Hate Speech” and “Violence” creates an environment where it is socially acceptable to silence opposing opinions. Political correctness has gone from an idea of being conscious of others to becoming weaponized against opposition to liberal orthodoxy. While in education we continue to institute more and more social-emotional learning, we’ve gotten carried away and have insulated students from learning discipline and being challenged so when something actually challenging does arise, young people, are not mentally equipped to handle adversity, develop character, and grow. This is an idea best exemplified in the referenced, “Coddling of the American Mind,” where psychologist Johnathan Haidt points to emotional coddling and social media as driving factors in the skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression amongst Gen Z. We are not helping our young people by protecting them, shielding them from being uncomfortable, we are coddling them to the point that they are ill-equipped to accept the realities of the real world.