The Cultural Revolution & "Cancel Culture" (Contrapoints)

the most important definitive aspect of
canceled culture that contra points is complaining of is that nobody has anything to win its malice in the strictest sense it's people trying to harm someone and they won't benefit from harming them it's not the case that it's like you're trying to get someone fired so that you personally can be promoted and take over their job that's different that maybe greed rather than malice the phenomenon of canceled culture has to be understood as malice pure and simple with reference to the controversy raised by counterpoints my fellow youtuber Conger points one of the viewers of this channel wrote in to say that he was surprised that I didn't make a comparison between so-called canceled culture and history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution I said back well I can make a new video discussing that but the reason why I wouldn't make that comparison it's partly because I don't think about canceled culture in the way that you do or in the way that context does perhaps and it is also partly because I don't understand the history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the same way that you do in the same way that most Western English speakers possibly do I'm going to here quote my former professor will Guang I even have the date on which he said this the idealist version of the history of the Cultural Revolution the idea that the Cultural Revolution was a contest between competing ideals is fundamentally incompatible with the historical reality of it being a quote dirty fierce power struggle so the idea in the modern Western imagination is that what happened during the culture evolution is something like the witch trial that kadru points is described and the people are now examining a bemoaning our current canceled culture pattern of people having rumors and innuendos and these rumors get out of hand and overly shrill allegations escalate so on and so forth everyone competes to see who can be the victim and everyone competes to see who can make the most extreme allegations the sort of thing that is not this in no way comparable to the reality of what the Cultural Revolution was and there's a there's a kind of horse before the carriage problem here and how we think of the Cultural Revolution the Cultural Revolution was indeed not a contest of ideals it was not to see who had the right philosophy not at all and at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution the most important most powerful political leader in all of China was a man named neo Xiao Qi I'm not insulting my audience to say most likely if you speak English as your first language you have never heard of Leo Shoji today he was he was erased from the history of China to some extent but of course he was much more uh turley forgotten you know in the Western world but Leo Shoji was not he wasn't a political figure like Donald Trump who had arisen to power suddenly who don't know this is a guy with decades and decades of building as significance in Chinese communism in Chinese politics and so at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution he was by far the most powerful most important political leader in China and he didn't just lose his power or lose his fame he also ultimately lost his life in the Cultural Revolution now sorry it's an imperfect allegory to say a question of the cart before the horse of something many modern Western readers want to look at a scenario like this as if well the main point of what was going on was the sort of philosophical or ideological debate who had the best interpretation of the water Mergent the water margin is a literary classic in China I'd compare it to something like Shakespeare in that it's a work of classic literature but some of the people actually do read and they actually do watch on TV and in movies adapted in various ways I mean you know it's not obscure like Shakespeare most people grow up and they've seen a few plays by Shakespeare whether in a movie or reading it or what-have-you so the idea that well you know people were trying to have a really serious conversation about the interpretation of this literary masterpiece from Chinese antiquity and you know that that debate just got at hand that's completely ridiculous the debates about how to interpret a work of literature were 100% cynical and motivated by I'm sorry to use the same words as my as my professor use the same words as wrong a dirty fierce power struggle there never was any shred of legitimate discourse about that particular literature now if you really want to get into the full scope of the Cultural Revolution did that was not the only ridiculous debate going on about Chinese history and classical literature I mean these debates so to jump head to the very end you have the the criticism of Confucius correct it wasn't a sincere set of literary or philosophical reflections on the value of the work of Confucius the reflections on the career of Qin Shihuang the the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty let me make sure of getting his name right here Qin Shih Huang I think that's right yeah I did get it right you know it wasn't the case that you know just one day people in the Communist Party wanted to reevaluate to what extent Qin Shihuang might have actually been right or they wanted to reevaluate you know the philosophical legacy of Confucius one you know or they just decided to get out this opera about the relationship of a particular Emperor and a courtier and so on every single one of these was naked Li and obviously a power play to eliminate particular people in power so the the criticism of Confucius believe it or not was actually criticism directed towards Lin B ow and Lin BL that became even more obvious after his death so come back to my very basic summer of events there Leo Shao Qi was the most important political heir in China the Cultural Revolution eliminated him after he was eliminated the most important political leader in China was Lin be au the Cultural Revolution eliminated him too if the Cultural Revolution had kept going on and on then doubtless other political leaders would have stepped into the the you know a position of prominence and would have been eliminated in their turn everyone in China had already rehearsed this process of denouncing defaming and tearing down people in positions of authority above you and then scrambling for the opportunity to replace them this song and dance but it was already old and familiar by the time the Cultural Revolution happened so all parties launched into it with extreme cynicism including Mao Zedong's own wife who's considered the leader of the Gang of Four the Gang of Four is what they were called when they were denounced that was Mao Zedong's wife and her closest colleagues and associates who did form a kind of ideological clique within the Communist Party pushing for a certain direction so the whole business of denunciation and counter denunciation it really fundamentally has nothing in common with the culture we see now of people cancelling each other over their their moral failings the most important definitive aspect of cancel culture that contra points is complaining of is that nobody has anything to win it's malice in the strictest sense it's people trying to harm someone and they won't benefit from harming them it's not the case that it's like you're trying to get someone fired so that you personally can be promoted and take over their job that's different that maybe greed rather than malice the phenomenon of cancel culture has to be understood as malice pure and simple maybe there's some Envy maybe there's some sense of moral self justification that you ratify herself as a better person but this is in no way comparable to the game that was being played both are huge scale in China with the occult Revolution and on and on a sort of tiny scale now within this video I'm not going to get into all the evidence of this but suppose someone were to say back they've heard my perspective but they really think I'm wrong they really think sincerely if you examine the historical record the participants in the Cultural Revolution they argue sincerely we're trying to create a new and better system of education to give one example and they were sincerely trying to create a new and better system of local self-government the equivalent of the mayor's office but of course in a communist party system the actual nomenclature used for local government is rather complex and turgid oh well if someone did have that perspective sincerely as soon as you start examining the historical evidence what you find is instead just like kind of ridiculous debates about classical literature that resulted in eliminating low xiaochi eliminating Lin BL students did indeed eliminate their professors they tore down their professors with these criticisms those kind allegations denunciations show trials and so on and so forth they didn't have a new and better system of education to replace the old one with right you know some students manage to force their way into university while denouncing the system of examination so while writing exams as bourgeois so I don't have to do it again this is clearly self-serving they didn't have a new philosophy of education they didn't have a new way to organize a classroom or organize a university or even organize exams they were tearing things down and tearing people down and destroying people's lives in a manner that was very naked ly self-serving now for me the greatest farce is actually the replacement of local governments where you'll have a town again the names are very very similar but you'll have a particular town or city that's being governed by a communist party committee so again the name sir but it'll be something like okay the city of Shanghai is being ruled by the communist party committee to govern Shanghai near this huge amount of violence people get killed people get denounced people get put on trials and what have you people get denounced for being bourgeois and what have you being secretly capitalists rotors on these other things and the announced that the Communist Party government is abolished so now instead of the the Communist Party Council nail the city is ruled and governed by the Revolutionary Committee like it's not just that the names seem interchangeable and it's not any better in Chinese like okay so this is what you guys call for when you look at how the government actually functions what actually happens what they do it's very clear there was no philosophy there wasn't a new idea of what government should be for example they didn't have elections they didn't say okay we're getting rid of the old communist system and now we're gonna have a democratic system no they basically tore down one communist despotism to replace it with another identical communist despotism it was identical in every way except that the particular people in charge were different so this happened in universities this happened with the City Hall City Council of government this kind of thing this also happen with things like hospitals you know people denounced and tore down the medical authorities who were in charge of the hospital in this kind of thing all over China institutions big and small cities big and small there was this sort of challenge to authority from Red Guards and Revolutionary Committees what-have-you and then the the real halt to this kind of aimless self-serving power grab that happened across China with the early Cultural Revolution was generally the militarization of the situation so sooner or later the military would step in and say ok too many people are getting shot in the streets so the military would step in and begin directly administering things themselves and that is one of the reasons why this didn't result in mass starvation in the same way that the Great Leap Forward did so to be clear I'm not saying nobody starved during the Cultural Revolution but it wasn't the kind of scale of tens of millions of people starving to death that you had during the Great Leap Forward and other dislocations and again one of the reasons was everyone had been through this before everyone had rehearsed this before everyone knew the rules of the game they were playing including most of all the military and the Chinese People's Liberation Army they stepped in and stabilized the situation and ultimately they snuffed out the Red Guards they snuffed out the Cultural Revolution now so the way the question was posed to me reflects the challenge of forming some image of what the Cultural Revolution was and why it mattered in the Western imagination and I sympathized the guy who posed question to me had the idea that the Cultural Revolution is somehow similar to what counterpoints is complaining about with with canceled culture and I guess that is some that is one kind of moral you can put to the story I can see why you would want to think of the of the history that way the Cultural Revolution is a peculiar one because the the damage done was much smaller than the damage done by the Great Leap Forward and it's not going to produce the kind of best-selling hit books that the devastation of the Great Leap for produced the the nature of the violence was more decentralized and participatory then say the violence of Joseph Stalin when he carried out his purges you know that's that's a one centralized authority hunting down and killing people ultimately like a list drawn off by Joseph Stalin and so on for who's gonna be killed so it's unlikely to kind of endure long in the Western english-speaking imagination the way that maybe the atrocities of Stalin's history or even atrocities of other periods within communist China's history will endure and as I say nobody today in the West remembers the names Leo Shao Qi or Lin BL nobody is interested in what kind of moral might be put to the story from that perspective conversely nobody is making positive excuses for the Cultural Revolution anymore I grew up in a household with two adults two white Western adults who supported the culture evolution of China in my father's case he continued supporting it to his grave he went to his death never recanting and there was a very intentionally contrived short biographical film made about both of my parents and they chose to make a statement it's mmm as ever called kind of 3/4 of the way through the film it's not at the beginning it's not right at the very end but toward the end of that film they had this very carefully made statement that they always had supported the Chinese go through a flusche in that they always would and that what they saw what they aspired for the future of Canada was a cultural revolution for Canada similar to what revolution was in China now nobody would be more astonished to that than Chinese Communists themselves because even within China and even within the Chinese Communist Party it is universally agreed that the Cultural Revolution was a flop was a failure was terrible even if they sympathize with its goals that it failed to achieve those goals and of course in reality most of them do not sympathize with its goals and that's why China is a capitalist country today it's a capitalist country with no democracy under a communist dictatorship if less you could say that the the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution was that it destroyed the last idealism that existed in China it proved to everyone in China that these ideals were nothing more than a mask put on an assassins face and that the assassinations that proceeded under that mask under that cloak were exactly this kind of skullduggery of killing Leo Shao Qi or eliminating Lin B ow one after the other so that somebody else could try to take their seat could try to move up the ladder in the very strange social competition that defines a communist oligarchy communist despotism so even from a sincere pro-communist perspective it's regarded as a disaster and then if you have some kind of detached critical perspective it's even more of a disaster and if you wanted to take the ideological discussion seriously five minutes after the Cultural Revolution ends what happens to their system of education they go back to their traditional systems education that I had before and if anything they start getting interested in imitating the American system education is interesting to know but they completely abandon any supposedly socialist or communist ideals or even egalitarian ideals of an education all abandoned through a form of local government the mayor's office all completely abandoned everything goes back to the way it was before being ruled by a communist party committee or Communist Party council whatever what even happens with the philosophy of Confucius so you have this huge nationwide campaign the last at least three years denouncing Confucius right five minutes after it's over the Communist Party of China begins again kind of preaching Confucius as if it's a kind of philosophical glue that holds the Chinese people together that what they share is this common heritage of the closet views so it fails on every level and in every way unless you look at it as a dirty power struggle as if if you see the success of the Cultural Revolution being that people got out there and managed to eliminate their enemies so what we're discussing here the excuse for this set of reflections on what is the Cultural Revolution Kancil culture as it exists today in many ways what we're discussing with Kancil culture is more bleak and more depressing because you know if one man murders another because he needs to steal a loaf of bread to feed himself and his own family none of us approve of murder and none of us approve of his motivation but we can at least see the rationality behind that crime that there's a desperation there's a self-interested motive that drove this man to murder and what we see with council culture is much more comparable to someone who was sadistically and psychopathically carrying out murder when they have absolutely nothing to gain themselves when they can't benefit from it in any way and that's the side of human nature that the anonymity of the Internet has made more visible and more vicious than ever before and I don't think in comparison anyway to the tremendous risks people took in China in the Cultural Revolution non anonymously to stand up on a stage in front of a live audience and point the finger and denounce someone for having betrayed the revolution or adopted some borshu ideology this was this was what was done and then to have that debated you know front in front of the roar of the crowd and they'd have didn't only have some kind of soldier sitting there as a as a so-called judge and to risk one's own life and to imperil someone else's life people people did that with cold calculation having grown up with one cycle after another of this kind of internecine low-level civil ruler you know cyclically in China since the Congress revolution people staked their lives on it they staked their careers on it they knew this was their chance to get ahead and the only way to get ahead the only form of free market competition in that society in that system was by tearing somebody else down I doubt that in many cases it's even as sympathetic as someone committing murder for the sake of a loaf of bread but we can at least sympathize with the desperation involved when we look at the people who are denouncing Concha points or the people who've denounced me I have my own long history of being cancelled through our YouTube sadly it's we asked the question who benefits and how I think the answers we come to are even more depressing than the blood-soaked history of Chinese commies