MARK JUDGE: China’s Cultural Revolution: The horror Western elites want to forget.

In my view, Western elites want to forget the Cultural Revolution because the horror that happened in China 50 years ago is too similar to what liberalism is now attempting in the West.

The Cultural Revolution, which took place roughly from 1966 to 1976, was one of the bloodiest and most insane periods in the history of communism. It was an attempt to try and purge Communist China of all Western ideas, from Christianity to capitalism. An estimated 2 million were killed, and 30 million were hounded and punished.

The Left, of course, refuses to accept the similarity between China’s rejection of Western civilization and its own hatred of its ideals. Branigan herself, despite writing a book on the Cultural Revolution, claims that “to draw a line from left-wing students in the West to [Communist] Red Guards, as some have done — is not only silly but offensive.”

It’s actually spot-on accurate. After the failure of Mao’s economic Great Leap Forward, a program of collectivization that resulted in tens of millions of deaths, Mao saw the Cultural Revolution as a way to turn things around: “Our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road … so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.”

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