Rufo is a leading conservative activist who is proud of his role in adding “critical race theory” to the long, long list of bogeymen that the right uses to convince people that their culture is dying and they are in an existential war for the survival of civilization. The most important thing to know about a book purporting to discuss the present-day “American Cultural Revolution,” then, is that the name is necessarily extreme and amounts to unwarranted hyperbole that minimizes the horrors of the original Cultural Revolution. His evidence for dangerous revolutionary changes in our society consists of things like the appearance of the term “institutionalized racism” in the newspaper. The “revolution,” in Rufo’s telling, is comprised of-wait for it-diversity programs at colleges, Black Studies departments, protests against police brutality, and corporations that tweeted pro-BLM platitudes in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing. If you pick up Christopher Rufo’s book America’s Cultural Revolution: How The Radical Left Conquered Everything, you might think that America, too, had descended into similar madness. Tan Hecheng, compiling records of the worst crimes, comments on how “an observer of the tragedy what people did to each other, individually and collectively, so horrific and irrational that it is almost beyond comprehension.” The stories of the brutality are stomach-churning: students cannibalizing their teachers the murder of children and the elderly. There were widespread mass killings, and the total death toll may run into the millions. The Chinese Cultural Revolution was one of history’s most terrible episodes. Tan Hecheng, The Killing Wind: A Chinese County’s Descent Into Madness During the Cultural Revolution (Oxford University Press) Some itched for the opportunity, while others lived in dread of that day. People quickly turned away at the sight of the corpses, because the weather was hot and the stench sickening, and because they had a faint inkling that the day might come when they themselves must kill or be killed. Although rumors were rampant and explanations varied, who these corpses were and what had happened to them soon became an open secret. After the sight became common, however, people took no more notice than of trees felled by a storm. When the corpses first began floating through Daojiang Town, crowds lined the riverbanks in wide-eyed astonishment, discussing among themselves. They’d been rendered unrecognizable by the gnawing of hungry fish, which left deep pits for eyes and a horrible, yawning cavity in place of the lips that had recited Chairman Mao’s quotes and begged for the revolutionary masses to punish them for their crimes, their joyous laughter and cries of grief having been eternally silenced. ![]() Most of the bodies were naked, or at most covered with only shreds of clothing, usually skeletal or dismembered, and often headless.
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