RED GUARDISM

The original Red Guards were Chinese students who were active between 1966 and 1968.  They were the invention of the Cultural Revolution Group of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.  In August, 1968 the CRG directed the Red Guards to attack the Four Olds - old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas.  The Red Guards spent the rest of the year destroying old books and art, vandalizing temples, shrines, and other heritage sites, ransacking museums and otherwise assaulting treasures of Chinese history.

The Red Guards were not content with destroying their country’s history.  Soon they were attacking “bourgeois elements” and “capitalist roaders”.  University professors were a particular target. They were ousted from their teaching positions and instead given menial tasks such as sweeping courtyards, building walls and cleaning toilets.  

The Red Guards were the original post-constructionists.  All “knowledge” was said to be a social construct of the bourgeoisie.  Exams were merely a forced recitation of this bourgeois knowledge.  Professors and school administrators were forced to make numerous public self-criticisms about "transgressions" against the only sanctioned orthodoxy.  They were told that "A complete confession is the only road to survival. Anything less will lead to death!"  In actual fact frequently assaults on particular professors was simply a cover for a students or another professor’s old grievance.

A current version of Red Guards are found on North American and English campuses except now they go under labels like Social Justice Warriors.  Privileged white males substitute for  bourgeoisie elements and capitalist roaders.  Negative labels are attached to the conduct of persons who are perceived to be ideological opponents; they are accused of cultural appropriation or micro-aggresions or masculine toxicity or a host of other evils. 

The mentality of the SJW’s is much the same as China’s Red Guards.  There are ever convenient victims - the universally identified victims are so-called racialized groups but there are others - in particular various minority sexual orientations.  

The new Red Guards want to silence dissent and eliminate free speech, every bit as much as their predecessors.  They are intolerant of speakers at campuses who might espouse a different perspective.  Like Mao's Red Guards, some American college students and their supporters are shouting down anyone who dares to disagree with them.  Like the Red Guards some of them believe that shouting has become insufficient and some "muscle" is needed.  

These modern Red Guards use a “demand” that the college campus be an inclusive and safe place, in order to make unwelcome any viewpoint that does not fit within their orthodoxy.  College professors and administrators across Canada and the U.S. have routinely caved to these students demands.  Those individuals, who are the subject of attacks, often end up giving craven apologies but this is often still not sufficient to keep their jobs. 

The targets of the SJW’s often as not are people who would historically be considered liberals or who self identify as liberals.  Variation, even mild variation, from officially accepted dogma is not permitted.  This angry intolerance is very similar to the mentality of China’s Red Guards.  Thus there is the sad case of Erika Christakis at Yale university.  She was relentlessly attacked by the Red Guard mob (and ultimately resigned her teaching position) merely because she questioned a “Intercultural Affairs Council” email that called on students to be sensitive about the cultural implications of their Halloween costumes.  She suggested that students should be able to dress in any costumes they liked, offensive or not.  She wrote. "Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious ... a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?"

There is a distinct anti-science element in the actions and thinking of the SJW’s and their academic allies.  Like their Puritan counterparts they are fundamentally against enlightenment notions such as humanism and rationalism.  In this respect they again parallel the Red Guards who labelled science as bourgeois and imperialistic.  According to Jane Flax, a self-proclaimed defender of postmodern feminism, postmodern discourses are deconstructive in that "they seek to distance us from and make us sceptical about beliefs concerning truth, knowledge, power, the self, and language that are often taken for granted within and serve as legitimation for contemporary Western culture." Postmodern feminism challenges the idea that reason is a universal and transcendental entity found in nature and that reason in the form of the scientific method can provide an objective and universal foundation for knowledge about the natural and the human world.   Postmodern feminism rejects the fundamental principle of the enlightenment; namely, that knowledge should strive to be impartial, objective and interchangeable.”

The contemporary version of the Red Guards are rampant in Canada.  The director of Ryerson University’s School of Social Work in Toronto stepped down after having been accused of committing “a violent act of anti-Blackness, misogyny and misogynoir (a newish term for misogyny directed at black women)”.  What did he do that was violent - he left an anti-racism meeting.  There is no indication whether he left the meeting as a protest or because he had something else to do.

In true Red Guard fashion a letter from a so-called activist accused Parada of being unable “to contain your anti-Black rage” and of “a public display of toxic masculinity” and demanded he “immediately step down” as social work director, publicly apologize “and publicly release how you will genuinely address anti-Black racism.”

Steve Ladurantaye, was until recently the managing editor at CBC’s The National.  He was removed from his position because in a tweet he expressed his opinion that it was unjust that Hal Niedzviecki, the editor of Write, the publication of the Writers’ Union of Canada, had to resign for defending “cultural appropriation.”   The Maoists at CBC required Ladurantaye to undergo re-education or as they put it in Orwellian language “training as to unconscious bias” and to “reach out to indigenous and other communities as part of his learning process”.   

The government of Ontario recently introduced mandatory anti -racism and cultural competency training for all civil servants.  Canadian columnist, Margaret Wente, has pointed out that white privilege is now a part of the Ontario school curriculum.  It is taught in teacher training, and is a routine part of anti-bias education.  Wente is correct in observing that anti-racism training has more than a whiff of a Maoist re-education camp.  This training “teaches” notions like white privilege and the male hegemony as uncontestable facts.  Participants quickly learn that you do not take issue with these “truths”.  If you do, you are an (uncured) racist.

Margaret Wente suggests that the label of white privilege is almost akin to original sin.  In fact being a white person is the current equivalent of having bourgeois tendencies in Maoist China. For many contemporary left-situated activists, there is no greater sin than having been born an able-bodied, straight, white male who identifies as a man but isn't deeply sorry for this utterly unintentional state of affairs.

University administrators and academics are easily intimidated by the SJW’s.  They fear, if not yet for their lives as was the case at the height of Red Guardism in China, their well paid jobs and their large prospective pensions.  This was amply demonstrated at the pseudo-Liberal Evergreen State in Washington.  There was an annual Day of Departure when so-called students of colour gathered off-campus.  For the 2016 Day of Departure these students decided to demand that all white faculty, staff, and students leave the campus instead, with white professors and students urged not to go to their classes.  Those who didn’t comply with this forcible segregation were demonized.  Biology professor Bret Weinstein wrote an email refusing to leave campus at the “request” of students of color on Evergreen’s “Day of Departure.”  For this he was quickly labeled a racist and ostracized by his colleagues.

Disturbingly 55 of the Evergreen State College faculty  (that’s more than a quarter of the faculty) and 23 College Staff signed a “statement of solidarity” with the student protestors.  Their cringe-worthy confession of “guilt” would have been an appropriate “confession” during the Chinese Cultural or going further back during the Stalinist purges of the 1930's.  They wrote  “We acknowledge that all of us who have power within the institution share responsibility for the racist actions of others. Furthermore, those of us who are white bear a particularly large share of that.”   This led to their Maoist-like call for  re-education; namely, “participating actively and self-critically in the annual mandatory trainings specified in the Memorandum of Understanding recently signed by the UFE and management bargaining teams.”