We stand, now, today, at a critical moment in history. The Democrat Party, here in the United States, has been co-opted by the far left, including the so-called "Democratic Socialists," who even have their own organization within and without the Democrat Party — the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. Young people here in the United States are seeing socialism in a more favorable light than they have in decades past, and this 2026 midterm election and the 2028 election to come, where we will choose the next president, will set the course for American politics for a generation or more.
The left will keep pushing for socialism. Socialism has, however, borne bitter fruit throughout history, everywhere it has been attempted. The results are all too similar: Mass arrests, work camps, "re-education," mass executions, starvation, and economic collapse. On the other hand, capitalism, while it isn't perfect — no system created by humans is — has lifted more people out of poverty and into prosperity, has created more wealth, and has resulted in more technological advance than any other system of economics and government.
In this series, we'll take a look at some of the more notorious events to rise out of socialist and communist systems, as a warning for this election season: It could happen here. It very well could happen here. In this installment, we'll have a look again at China, and the horribly misnamed Cultural Revolution, which may have resulted in the deaths of as many as 20 million people.
China had fallen to communist rule under Mao Zedong in 1949, and the Chinese people had already suffered through the so-called Great Leap Forward, in which Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attempted to industrialize mostly agrarian China by force. That didn't work out well, leading to the deaths of millions from 1958 to 1962 - but Mao and the CCP weren't done yet. They had another forced reboot of China in mind, and in a typically communist display of misnomer, they called it the Cultural Revolution.
In May of 1966, the CCP's Politburo, the ruling body of China, issued what became known as the "16 May Notification." This notification was loaded with Marxist cant, but the alarming part of it was the language that led to the great purges to follow. The notification, in effect, split the Chinese government in half. That notification stated in part (translated from Chinese):
Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture are a bunch of counter-revolutionary revisionists. Once conditions are ripe, they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Some of them we have already seen through; others we have not. Some are still trusted by us and are being trained as our successors, persons like Khrushchev for example, who are still nestling beside us.
This was Mao's justification for what was to follow.
From May to June of 1966, there were mass rallies throughout China, mostly conducted by young people, "students," egged on by Mao's government. In August, quotations from Mao's "Little Red Book" swept through the Red Guards, the Politburo's muscle in China. This led to the issue of another proclamation, after the CCP had passed the "Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" or, simply, the "Sixteen Points." From August through November, mass rallies were held, mostly organized by the Red Guards, with as many as 12 million in attendance; at these rallies, representatives of the Politburo called for the destruction of the "Four Olds": Old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas.
With this, the Politburo and the Red Guards intended to wipe away thousands of years of Chinese history at a stroke. It didn't work; and so, in 1968, the purges intensified.
The purges, completing the task of wiping away old China, mostly took place in 1968. Millions were sent to labor camps and "re-education" camps. Millions died; good records are difficult to come by, but the estimates start at the low end of 1.1 million, and top out at 2 million, although the actual numbers may well be much higher; there are estimates that the actual numbers may be as high as 20 million. Mao even began to reverse some of the goals of the Great Leap Forward, ordering young people from China's cities to the countryside, to experience manual labor and farm life.
This so-called "Cultural Revolution" may well be one of the greatest humanitarian and government disasters in human history, and again, every action taken, by Mao, by the Politburo, by the Red Guards, was all in concordance with Marx's teachings and Mao's Little Red Book.
These are the fruits of socialism and communism. This is the precipice we may be on the edge of. This is history. And this is what we must, at all cost, vote to prevent happening here. We go to the polls in just a few more days. Vote! Vote for liberty, for property, for free trade, for free people, for honest elections, for prosperity — all of which we would lose, under socialism. Vote!
See also the previous installments in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
