How To Counter the Cultural Revolution (Part 2) - Top Comments
The best reader stories about family traditions of fighting for freedom
Comrades: I am blessed to have the best readers on the internet.
Today, I am turning the spotlight onto readers who shared their family stories about fighting for freedom in the comments of last week’s piece (above). I hope they give you strength and courage to continue countering the cultural revolution. Feel free to add your histories in the comments.
Reader J:
Good read! I was very naive about Red China's Cultural Revolution. I thought it was a "back to the land" movement like the counter-culture movement here, in the late 1960s and 1970s. I grew up on a steady diet of "Mother Earth News" and "The Whole Earth Catalog". But, then, while in college and having a very quiet Chinese national exchange student for a housemate during the Students' Revolution and Tiananmen Square, I learned the truth.
Min Wan's brother disappeared during the protest and his parents (both college professors) went into hiding deep in the country. I asked Min Wan about his life in China and he opened up. He told me that the Cultural Revolution was a horrible time of mass starvation. He and his family were sent to a communal farm where they grew vegetables, pigs, and chickens, but couldn't eat anything they harvested. It all went to the Party to be distributed to Party members. All the workers had to eat was a daily ration of rice and cabbage. He and a friend were caught stealing a chicken from the neighboring farm and were almost executed. He would have been 8 or 9 years old at the time. After award of his PhD in Physics, Min Wan went onto the Univ. of British Columbia for post-grad work and I lost touch with him. He would occasionally send a postcard and said that his parents were able to emigrate to Canada and join him in Vancouver.
When the Floyd riots broke out and BLM burned its way through the nation, I likened it to a Maoist Revolution. When the statues started coming down and the new history started replacing the old history, it had indeed turned into a cultural revolution. Even before Floyd, when Kaepernick took his knee, I started seeing a movement build which, in parallel to the burgeoning cancel culture came into full fruit during the COVID/BLM summer: "Bend the knee, raise the fist, and repeat the words or there will be consequences." -- Straight out of Mao's Cultural Revolution.
I think maybe we've reached Peak Woke and have attained a breaking point on a number of thresholds. One of them was when Mayor Adams ordered the conversion of a public school into a dormitory for illegals being transported to NYC. No parent wants that. The kids were re-distributed and bussed to other schools, crowding them there. Considering the ongoing catastrophe at the border, this will only grow and spread to other blue, sanctuary cities. That's a tipping point that local communities will reject.
The most ludicrous example of this being what happened when two busloads of migrants were dropped off in Martha's Vineyard. In a resort community with over 10,000 empty beds in the post-tourist season, the residents there could not tolerate a single one of these migrants to remain for more than 48 hours before pleading with their governor to herd them back onto buses and whisked off to a secure military facility. Not so "sanctuary" after all, eh? I believe communities like Martha's Vineyard should be redesignated as "Sanctimony" cities.
Reader R:
"All viewpoints should be debated in good faith to better understand what is right instead of who is right, avoiding the use of labels, slurs, -isms, and -phobias to shut down conversation. Discussion of a problem is not more problematic than the problem itself, otherwise viable solutions are impossible." Thank you, Yuri, for yet another incredible post. So much could be commented upon, but I'll just quote the above and say that your words above, IMHO, perfectly encapsulate the dilemma in my family and where I think we are in the world's extended communities today.
In my family, I can trace the slow demise of truthful, impactful, and open conversations about any topic to the amplifications of all things political beginning in 2004, which moved into destructive territory in '08 and complete toxicity by 2016. Family members, for instance my parents, consumed only news and media that sometimes subtly & other times overtly, but always continually, labeled those "on the other side of the aisle" as unintelligent rubes. This undermined tolerance, implanted self-righteousness, and celebrated the diminishing of a person's credibility simply because a different politician or political beliefs were supported. At Christmas 2013 I was labeled "one of those people," to my face I should add, for questioning Obamacare and how it would be paid for by our society, asking what impacts it would actually have on healthcare, rural hospitals, independent physicians and offices. (I worked in healthcare education, and so travelled all over California to community colleges, hospitals, and medical centers, and already saw financial disparity of care/education before socialized healthcare was fully introduced.)
So when the Plandemic began in earnest in 2020, it did not matter that my parents *knew* me for 49 years. It didn't matter the numbers crunched, data & research presented, and the positive messages I sent via email or that were spoken over the phone that we could all get through this, that we didn't need to live in fear. Nope. After 16 years of covert and overt indoctrination, to not believe "people like me," to not value listening to someone's opposing ideas, my parents were left wide open to the intoxication of incredulity: any word uttered by anyone else, who had already been labeled as an -ist, who were considered a -phobic, or a person deemed to display an -ism for simply having opposing ideas/values, were to be shut down, ignored, and/or dismissed as unlearned, ridiculous, and/or just plain stupid and wrong.
Exit civility and viable solutions, enter the firehose of drinking in only what their preferred media talking-heads, news sources, and politicians told them to swallow. And they swallowed it whole, hook, line, and sinker.
Reader B:
Fucking awesome post.
I'll try to make my story as short as possible. My grandparents immigrated here before WW2 and then had my mother later. The rest of that part of the family (that survived) immigrated to the US afterwards. Those that lived in Europe during the war did not qualify for being sent to concentration camps based on the usual reasons (being Jewish or homosexual, for example). But they definitely would have qualified based on their resistance behaviors. No one did anything especially heroic or newsworthy. That part of the family simply recognized when evil or wrongdoing was happening, and they resisted as best they could with what they had. When they got to the US, they were instantly yuge patriots. So, I was raised in that atmosphere of speaking up when something was unjust and I understood that it was my right to do that as an American (hmmmm...that sounds like a social justice warrior, doesn't it? Well, the old-school version of SJW, at least...)
I think that I was born a fighter. And I am allergic to outside control. Though I know that many challenging events of my childhood made me a much tougher fighter; I simply don't have it in me to shy-away from a confrontation in the name of what is right and whatever promotes freedom.
I moved my family away from the nasty bluecity that I lived in, in the Socialist Utopia of New Jersey in 2021. I did that for a few reasons including: I got tired of the endless fighting during the lockdowns with the evil Karens of my neighborhood. I was screamed at from windows as I strolled the neighborhood maskless, had the cops called on me (right in front of my kids in the playground) because we were maskless, and was regularly harassed by the librarians in the children's section of the library (when they reopened) because - you guessed it - we wouldn't wear masks. Though I do enjoy a good fight, I got to the point where I wanted more for my kids. And then when the wonderfully magical Defund the Police times started, I knew that it was time to take my kids to a better place in Free America.
How to summon the courage to "fight the good fight"? First recognize that the socialist train only has one stop: gulag. Second, ask yourself if you want to end up there - or if you want your kids to end up there. Third, ask yourself what is getting in the way of resisting. Not all resistance means that you have to lose your job or be driven from your neighborhood. Ordinary people can do small things that influence others.
Keep doing what you're doing, Yuri.
Reader W:
Yuri - this is a wonderful post about your family. It's interesting to see how those of us with dissident or refugee grandparents/parents who came to America have endless gratitude and appreciation for the opportunity, while those who feel entitled to completely upend its legacy are so embittered and resentful.
My grandparents were orphaned by the Young Turks in Eastern Anatolia. They came to this country and raised children who flourished; who also raised children who flourished (and then there's me).
"Although my ancestors’ experiences are radically different than mine, we share the same values and traditions. We are devoted to family, education, pragmatism, reason, and self-improvement. To us, a day without learning and laughter is a day wasted. I was taught to show kindness and judge people for their content of their character and not their identity." How could it be said better? Well done.
Reader A:
Thank you for this beautiful piece. I have many relatives who were interned in California and Arizona during WW2, and my parents grew up dirt poor. My dad was a blue collar worker who toiled long, brutal hours. And yet my siblings and I had so many incredible opportunities growing up with parents who loved us without reservation (except maybe when I was a teenager and made them rue the day I was born). One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the way people from poor backgrounds go through a sophistication process at college and grad school. I started out at a two-year college, and a teacher who I went back to visit at the two-year college commented on how I and another girl who went off to university returned to visit him looking like different people — we had better haircuts and more fashionable clothes, and we held ourselves differently. I was thinking the other day about how over the past few years of insanity, I’ve felt much closer to my friends I made before this sophistication process than I do to friends I made after it. It has nothing to do with race or level of education or religion or geography or money. It has to do with the ability to engage in real talk and with the way you accept each other without so many conditions.
The other day one of these old friends brought up a moment that she brings up regularly. We were kids, walking down the street to go to the hospital to visit her mother, who was dying of cancer. We were enveloped in a black cloud — it was a cloud of sadness as much as of pressure, the pressure of not knowing what comes next. Her father was out of the picture. A lot of the kids used to press the coin-return lever down whenever we passed a pay phone, in the hopes of getting a little change. So as we walked past a pay phone, she pressed down the lever, and coins POURED OUT — ding ding ding ding ding. It’s hard to explain to someone who grew up with money what a magical moment that was. It felt like the clouds opening up. It felt like hope. Her mother died not long afterwards, and my friend got through some dark days and got adopted by a foster family who loved her, and then she grew up and got married and had two kids. We all went through a lot together, and I’m finding that means more to me than just about anything else. Like I said, it’s magical.
What I saw during the last few years is that my friends I made after the sophistication process have a view of friendship that is conditional on you aligning with them in multiple areas. I am hoping in the future to recalibrate what has meaning and value, which is definitely not the way we got this or that job; we purchased this or that; we believe exactly this; and in some subtle way we’re now “better than.” These newer friends are not better than my dad. They are not better than my mom. They are not better than the kids I grew up with, and their houses are not better than the little house my dad was able to finally buy us. They are not better than me just because I may disagree with them on certain points. Almost everybody in America used to know these kinds of things; now, many people don’t.
My goal now is to die someday having done what I could to make sure my son and all young people have the kind of magical life that in so many ways I was able to have. Nothing else matters.
Reader B:
Hello Yuri, thanks for the article. I'm a new subscriber and haven't gone through most of your posts, but they are much appreciated. I've been trying to find Asian-American Substackers in the online right. I'm Chinese-American too, a GenZ with older parents who experienced what your parents did. I have this question -- what is your view on where Asian-Americans stand, or should stand, in America as the facade of order collapses before our eyes? What do you think their political allegiances will look like going forward -- will there be a divide within the community? If you have written about these topics already, I would love to find or be pointed to those posts. I'm sorry this isn't too related to your article, but I was eager to ask.
The Asian-Americans I know are quite reliant on the 'regime,' I suppose -- prizing elite university attendance and corporate employment. Broadly speaking, like GenZ overall, my female peers are liberal, the males ambivalent or conservative if they despise the "woke." I know Christian Asian Americans who lean conservative due to religion. But they still mostly aspire to academic and career success through the institutions. Overall, Asian-Americans, at least East Asian-Americans, don't seem as politically involved as other races.
I've been lurking in the online right/dissident right space. With projects such as the building of parallel institutions and societies -- these should be quite religiously and ethnically unified. The descendants of America's founders want to reclaim the country their ancestors built. I've also seen Muslim-American commentators in the dissident right space, expressing visions and thoughts pertaining to that community. I've not seen too many East Asian Americans.
The East Asian-American community I am familiar with doesn't seem to have a strong cultural or religious ethos. They intermarry at decent rates, and even if they don't, their offspring don't really know the native language, in my experience. Perhaps the South Asian community is different, I'm not too sure. Muslim Americans seem to have a unified political interest due to shared religion especially now with Palestine. Anyhow, sorry for the scattered thoughts. I don't see clearly what space Asian-Americans should occupy in America as time progresses.
It seems the main focal point of most of these stories is the continued tyranny of governments everywhere. Most government is a parasitic culture that is anti-human. No wonder people have to fight to survive.
Thank you for spotlighting these stories, Yuri. Steve Bannon often emphasizes the connections and commonalities between patriotic Americans and Laobaixing, that the real enemy is illegitimate CCP rule, like the elitist/globalists who run our regime.