People who are scholars of European history, as I am not, point out parallels to 1930s rise of fascism there. I have spent more time learning about China. Which is why I keep thinking about parallels to Cultural Revolution nihilism. (Article Jeremy Mayer) thehill.com/opinion/tech... - ThreadSky

jfallows.bsky.social • 14 days ago

People who are scholars of European history, as I am not, point out parallels to 1930s rise of fascism there.

I have spent more time learning about China. Which is why I keep thinking about parallels to Cultural Revolution nihilism. (Article Jeremy Mayer)

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5132932-chairman-musk-and-his-young-acolytes-bring-cultural-revolution-to-america/

Comments

madoverpolitics.bsky.social•13 days ago

Agreed. Just matter of time before a Gang of Four rises under Madam Mao/Melania to rip down unpleasing cultural icons. She already had the balls to rip up Jackie’s roses so nothing stopping that monster now.

bakerblue.bsky.social•14 days ago

Good piece-terrible parallels considering the eventual consequences for the Chinese people and intelligenzia..

glarange.bsky.social•14 days ago

But did Mao have a cadre of oligarchs? Would he have allowed one to be a shadow president?

randomsurvivor.bsky.social•13 days ago

I'm German and I was telling everyone about that already last year. People just didn't want to hear it. But yes, there are many similarities between the raise of fascism in Germany and the US. What Trump is doing is the same what Hitler did, taking total control of the Government. Judicial is next.

jfallows.bsky.social•14 days ago

2/2 And, yes, the resonance with 'Year Zero' in Cambodia is unavoidable.

kipkantelo.bsky.social•14 days ago

And we have Pol Potpie

michaelwood8.bsky.social•14 days ago

Musk is leading Red Guards to ‘bombard the headquarters’. Meanwhile professors are being ousted and universities shut down. Will they be sending down ‘intellectuals’ to the countryside next?

joeinaustralia.bsky.social•13 days ago

They'll be sent to the server farms so they can learn to code.

individualangst.bsky.social•14 days ago

“Jahr Null” - We don’t even have to live the alternative history of The Man in the High Castle to get would be authoritarians to erase history and culture.

meabell58.bsky.social•13 days ago

Been thinking about that show a lot

beingsass.bsky.social•13 days ago

When they started defending NIH it immediately reminded me of Mao's purge. So much knowledge was lost, especially in chinese medicine.

jfallows.bsky.social•13 days ago

'Defunding' [vs 'defending'] — but, yes, agree.

beingsass.bsky.social•13 days ago

Lol, that was spellcheck, drives me nuts!

theplacemaster.bsky.social•13 days ago

“Leopoldstadt”

bradholler.bsky.social•13 days ago

There are echoes of this. One suspects few Trump electors knew anything about Project 2025. Are Musk and his cohorts the new red guards?

tom-effing-paine.bsky.social•13 days ago

Our rhetoric — "Jacobinical radicalism overthrowing the republic" — practically writes itself, but we won't use it.

carolannete.bsky.social•13 days ago

I used the word "Maoist" to describe the strangling of medical research as a way of attacking the universities. Apparently I was not wrong.

realbenisons.bsky.social•14 days ago

I am looking for opposition to the rightist/maga vandalism that picks up on at least some themes of mid-17th century English Levellers

Freedom and safety of the people
“The poorest he” (Putney debates)
Customary liberties (see Christopher Hill, Liberty against the Law)

realbenisons.bsky.social•14 days ago

Re chaos

Elected Ds should attack Trump for inflicting chaos and suffering

At same time be willing to cause disruptions to Senate routine
Precisely as partisans for harm mitigation in wider world
and explain why they are doing so

Loss aversion and superficial civility will only dishonor them

whatsarasaid.bsky.social•14 days ago

‘Youth brigades destroy the treasury by literally setting fire to all the money as educated experts are forced from their roles with harsh penalties for dissent’ maps onto the digital state version pretty well, which is why I’m not sleeping I guess

raf.eco•13 days ago

This is the parallel that has been most disconcerting to me.

boboinparadise.bsky.social•13 days ago

There's a lot to this, but I recall being taught that the CR was a putcsh by a new generation to take the jobs of their parents.
Today, these kids don't face a stagnant, stifling bureaucracy, regardless of their rhetoric, they have almost limitless opportunities in the private sector to get rich.

crparadis.bsky.social•14 days ago

Parallels can be made

wukailong.bsky.social•14 days ago

I think there are some similarities to Mao's China and fascist European nations, but also to the Redeemers in the 1870s.

policyg.bsky.social•13 days ago

I think there is a simpler term: barbarism.

freebird2024.bsky.social•13 days ago

Those who experienced and studied the #CulturalRevolution have long recognized that #Trump is a dictator who always wants to undermine the existing system—especially after he began his second term, the U.S. increasingly resembles the early phase of the Cultural Revolution.

joohnchoe.bsky.social•13 days ago

I concur, there's a LOT of non-obvious parallels to Maoism

"Self-criticism sessions" jumped out to me

heatheryoungsonoma.bsky.social•14 days ago

What a terrifying observation — if this parallel holds, we will all be imprisoned, starved, and executed.

lshape.bsky.social•14 days ago

Strongly recommend Red Memory (Tania Branigan) for the recounting of people who were caught up in the frenzy. https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324051954

jfallows.bsky.social•13 days ago

Yes, thanks, know the author and this book. It's excellent.

taracchage.bsky.social•14 days ago

C’mon. The CR bears little resemblance to the current American disaster.

wu-ming.bsky.social•14 days ago

It is interesting to think about the viability of a Cultural Revolution approach when the core of Trump's demographic base is well-past middle age, and the Red Guard–equivalent cohort is both relatively liberal and much smaller than their post-49 equivalents.

staledimsum.bsky.social•14 days ago

I was thinking that myself. They certainly have some of the kids fooled. Not enough to pull off what Mao did.

wu-ming.bsky.social•13 days ago

They have the numbers to sustain terrorism and thuggish street violence, but nothing remotely approaching a mass base for revolutionary action. It's not just the percentage of kids they've fooled, it's the relative size of the generation, compared to Nazi Germany/Soviet Russia/Maoist China.

wu-ming.bsky.social•13 days ago

The converse is also somewhat true for our side, demographically speaking. It is worth thinking about the difficulties of wielding mass protest in rapidly-aging or aged societies, although the recent successes in Ukraine, South Korea, and Taiwan show it's not in itself an insurmountable obstacle.

gh-kirsch.bsky.social•14 days ago

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6877445-there-is-no-calamity-greater-than-lavish-desires-there-is-no#:~:text=There%20is%20no%20calamity%20greater%20than%20lavish%20desires.,no%20greater%20disaster%20than%20greed.

rednecklefty.bsky.social•11 days ago

An irony being that many people deplored the "left wing wokism" of academia as the next Cultural Revolution.

bcfinucane.bsky.social•14 days ago

Been invoking the Red Guards analogy for the DOGE bros.

packman.me•14 days ago

keep thinking about how lower apparatchiks telling their superiors that everything's great whether it was true or not during the great leap forward lead to a lot of deaths.

aplewe.bsky.social•14 days ago

I'm gonna post some pages from my grandfather's journal a bit later. He was a missionary in Germany 1937-1939. He wrote an account of the Night of Broken Glass, among other things. He was kinda MAGA, thought it would blow over... One of his brothers died later during the liberation of France.

aplewe.bsky.social•14 days ago

...Fighting for the allied forces, I should add. Basically we will get there if this isn't stopped now.

trixie-jones.bsky.social•14 days ago

Yes, short window to put on the brakes. Enormous damage repair will be required even at this point.

archvillain.bsky.social•14 days ago

The media has been horribly complicit. Trump says something horribly racist or non-sensical, and the NYT, WASHPO, WSJ and LAT explain what he "really meant to say" and the translation makes the whole mad endeavor palatable or "not such a big deal."

swarthy-bastard.bsky.social•13 days ago

Great read on the topic, one of the best sources of discussion in my Revolutions course https://www.sup.org/books/asian-studies/rise-red-engineers

jackacid.bsky.social•14 days ago

Nobody needs to be a scholar to see what’s going on. They only have to open their eyes.

thomaskliemt.bsky.social•13 days ago

IMO the parallel to the Cultural Revolution is more fitting than, say, 30s Germany.
Big difference is the degree of consequence for the rest of the world. China was poor and insignificant. Trump is dismantling the UN. He can change the fate of countries and peoples around the world at a whim.

archvillain.bsky.social•14 days ago

The outlier sense of grievance felt by this cadre of privileged, pampered white men is the stuff of a horror movie about a deranged cult. There's no empirical data to corroborate their outlandish claims of being persecuted, but the accusations become ever more absurd. An almost insectoid hive mind.

archvillain.bsky.social•14 days ago

The first thing I thought of was Pol Pot's "Year Zero" -- and that didn't end well for anyone.

ckh60.bsky.social•14 days ago

I was thinking exactly that today

blobodelendaest.bsky.social•14 days ago

Yeah, nah. That was a massed action. This is a small group of elite ideologues intent on destroying the parts of government that help people they don’t like. The best analogy is a large-scale China Hands situation.

blobodelendaest.bsky.social•14 days ago

If you understand another country’s language, history, and culture, and know why authoritarian capitalism won’t work to improve the lives of the people who live there, then you’re a traitor, a Marxist, and DEI hire. Only white men who force neo-segregation via economics are patriots.

archvillain.bsky.social•14 days ago

Marxism is what "Communism" was to the most radical John Birch Society types.

blobodelendaest.bsky.social•14 days ago

They also called de-segregation and ‘race-mixing’ communism. John Birch was just the Klan to suburbanites and industrialists.

archvillain.bsky.social•14 days ago

If these folks are in power next year, they will criminalize mixed-race marriages and will stigmatize mixed-race children. "Racial purity" is part of both apartheid and Nazi agendas. Nothing elicits more contempt, disgust and scorn for them than dark skin.

blobodelendaest.bsky.social•14 days ago

Agreed 10000%. It’s already been floated a few times in the last decade. I seem to remember something was tabled in Virginia before COVID, but I could be misremembering everything. But either way, it’ll be coming. This is why I expect military uprisings in the end.

sharway.bsky.social•14 days ago

My hope is that we wake up fast as a country. Our advantage is that we have never lived under anything other than our US democracy. I’m hoping the majority will have no tolerance for cruelty and destruction of the Musk/Trump treason.

policyg.bsky.social•13 days ago

I hate being a pessimist but there are a large number of people that will revel in the cruelty to intellectuals and professionals. Unfortunately for them, in today’s modern world, things are going to fall apart unbelievably fast once they kill us.

dylwah.bsky.social•14 days ago

Fwiw. The last 18 months have reminded me more of Iran 79-80. Get the left to undermine the legitimacy of the establishment then fill the vacuum from the right

mmcney.bsky.social•13 days ago

THANK YOU! I've been thinking this for months and wondering why no one on the national stage was making the comparison. This longtime Atlantic subscriber now feels validated. 🙂

avielroshwald.bsky.social•14 days ago

I’ve been thinking of that analogy as well.

sallydavisnm.bsky.social•13 days ago

It turns out Americans aren’t exceptional.

jctenton.bsky.social•14 days ago

yeah there's features of both. nothing's ever a perfect copy of a previous event of course. mao's a good comparison. i see people getting stuck on the idea of comparing trump to communism but that's not really the point, it's the style of personalist authoritarianism that smells of mao

jctenton.bsky.social•14 days ago

lots of stuff also just ends up being common across authoritarian regimes like convergent evolution since the environment is similar

bokane.org•13 days ago

everything else aside, I'm gonna be so upset if our "The East Is Red" ends up being "YMCA"

leshij.bsky.social•13 days ago

Plenty of (understandable) talk about the Hitler parallels, but “Donald Trump is America’s Jiang Qing” was not a revelation I was prepared for today.

jctenton.bsky.social•13 days ago

Red Guard, there's no need to feel down, I said
Red Guard, burn the four olds to the ground, I said
Red Guard, spread dunce caps around town
There's no need to be unhappy
Red Guard, there's a teacher to kill, I said
Red Guard, when you're short on ammo you can
Raid armories and I'm sure you willfind

jenonymous.bsky.social•13 days ago

Oh no, worst of both worlds, so it will probably be this ^^

tryingtohelp.bsky.social•14 days ago

Nope MAGATS are not starving peasants selling their girl children to perverted overlords They are willing racist hateful beings- like Germans under Hitler

philipncohen.com•14 days ago

Red Guards (not even paid?) were much more ideological than DOGE mercenaries

crs1.bsky.social•14 days ago

Cultural revolution in spades

Any intellectual should be scared shitless but our elites think they can compromise with Mao

yuweiquan.bsky.social•14 days ago

I’ve been thinking abt MAGA hats as modern red arm bands, but I doubt the Cultural Revolution was unique in its red-guard zealotry. I think there a parallels & similarities, but I doubt Trump is following a Little Red Playbook.

Now if we see video of Trump swimming vigorously in the Mississippi…

forbestonow.bsky.social•14 days ago

I had a friend who was an SOE agent in France and we talked a lot about what had been misread in the lead up to '39. I have been watching Europe and America for the last decade in disbelief that things are repeating. Trump in isolation is worrying but with Europe as is, it's worse.

justvisiting74.bsky.social•14 days ago

Mao's China, Lenin's Russia, Hitler's Germany...

The list goes on.

It never ends well.

archvillain.bsky.social•14 days ago

I'm getting Cambodia/Pol Pot vibes. Some of these folks have that "calm" mass murderer vibe. Don't think pogroms can't happen again.

mykatzen.bsky.social•14 days ago

I mentioned this a couple of days ago and I am a historian. I lived in Thailand at the rise of Pol Pot. Similarities to our current situation are horrific.

hollysbirds.bsky.social•13 days ago

Vought’s Christian nationalists view this as a titanic clash between good and evil. It’s modern day Manichaeism, both Democrats and civil servants are on the side of evil because they’re standing in the way of the theocratic state, which they need to establish fast because young people are leaving

tzipshmil.bsky.social•14 days ago

There’s nothing original in what we see now, it’s in every history book.

trixie-jones.bsky.social•14 days ago

Universal playbook, in many ways. On steroids thanks to ungoverned tech.

tzipshmil.bsky.social•14 days ago

Yes, and takes advantage of what always been a much weaker democracy than people thought.

always4bangtan.bsky.social•14 days ago

I don't know if we've always been a much weaker democracy, but we certainly are now..

sanho.bsky.social•14 days ago

Elon’s KinderKoupKommando are the young Red Guards.

teabelly.bsky.social•14 days ago

Get to know @heathermarsh.bsky.social for the way out of this.

I've heard it said that "the right has read Curtis Yarvin and it shows and the left has NOT read Heather Marsh and it shows."

https://bsky.app/profile/teabelly.bsky.social/post/3lhmjz47dlk2v

sferrara.bsky.social•13 days ago

I too have thought about the Cultural Revolution that brought Mao to power. The stories about the destruction of books, the arts, and the vilification of those who were considered "learned" all seem to ring true right now. Thanks for posting this.

jimsdouglas.bsky.social•14 days ago

In more recent history, they’re explicitly following Orban's playbook to hollow out liberal democracy, leaving only a facade. They very intentionally are trying to speed run the U.S. to illiberal democracy.

caesar-stan.bsky.social•14 days ago

It's a good comparison. Another one would be like the Taliban taking over and wrecking everything.

The GOP saw Afghanistan and liked it: Assault weapons everywhere, no women's rights, Sharia Law, and decided that they wanted to emulate it here.

skybarney.bsky.social•14 days ago

tRump owns a copy of Mein Kampf.

olbermann.bsky.social•14 days ago

No, worse. He owns a copy of Hitler's selection of his "best" speeches

skybarney.bsky.social•14 days ago

Beer Hall Putsch - History does indeed repeat itself.

craigerflights.bsky.social•14 days ago

Anyone reading up on Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge?

inmontana.bsky.social•12 days ago

Lots of Stalinist maneuvering in there too. I can't help but feel if we'd compared Trump to Stalin or Mao instead of Hitler, we might have gotten somewhere in convincing people how dangerous he is, considering the unreasonable fear of communists infiltrating the system.

oldunreliable.bsky.social•14 days ago

Mass political insanity. It happened in Japan, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, China. Now it is America's turn.

oldunreliable.bsky.social•14 days ago

And it is not caused by social media.

archvillain.bsky.social•14 days ago

It amplifies it.

shepherdintraining.bsky.social•13 days ago

OK then. I'm looking for a modern-day Nuremberg Trial to begin.

brianlevy387.bsky.social•8 days ago

South Africa's struggle to sustain its democracy in the face of Jacob Zuma's agenda of state capture points to four lessons of direct relevance the current US moment. https://workingwiththegrain.com/2025/02/13/protecting-the-guardrails-of-americas-democracy-some-lessons-from-south-africa/

demandside.bsky.social•14 days ago

The rise of fascism in Germany is the most appropriate parallel. Shame from the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles created a movement of fuzzy thinking belligerent scapegoaters, i.e., the Nazi party. See Trumpism

makeadifference.bsky.social•14 days ago

We learn from all lenses for reviewing history. Each contributes energy to fuel thinking and learning...

majorpaincake.bsky.social•14 days ago

I prefer Roger Griffin's theory of true fascism to explain what's happening now -- social revolution (chaos) before the promised rebirth of the nation (Make America Great Again).

olbermann.bsky.social•14 days ago

Sadly it's both https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/02/08/trump-administration-job-candidates-loyalty-screening/

freebird2024.bsky.social•13 days ago

American version of the Cultural Revolution gets started?

ajoeofalltrades.dev•13 days ago

You know what's funny about nihilism? Nothing.

Nihilism is a joke, and the more seriously it's embraced as the truth the more dangerous our society gets.

Thanks for highlighting this parallel.

granitestate.bsky.social•13 days ago

Musk’s team of obnoxious young men running around intimidating older hypercompetent bureaucrats and destroying things is very “Cultural Revolution”. It’s also distressing to me, but maybe I’m wrong, how little young people seem to care about what’s happening to the country right now.

charleslustig.bsky.social•14 days ago

Just tonight, I commented that Trump’s unhinged attacks on the Department of Education were vaguely reminiscent of Pol Pot’s anti-intellectual purges. Gutting that dept would hurt many MAGA parents with disabled kids.

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