Cowardice Before the Ravening Mob
Cowardice Before the Ravening Mob
In Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution, Ji-Li Jiang provides a window into a terrifying epoch. As a young schoolgirl in the 1960s, she was an eyewitness to, and participant in, the mob violence of Mao Tse-tung’s Red Guards, as they swept away the evil Four Olds (Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, Old Ideas) to make way for China’s new communist customs, culture, habits, and ideas. She recounts a number of harrowing incidents in which the newly indoctrinated communist zealots singled out an innocent shop owner, teacher, or fellow student for pitiless assault.
Their crimes? There weren’t any crimes; the victims were simply accused by one or more members of the mob of deviating from Communist Party thought, adhering to the Four Olds, or having family ties to the bourgeoisie class. The mob action typically involved surrounding the “criminal’s” shop or home, destroying and/or confiscating his property, and subjecting him to public humiliation, beatings, and torture. Everyone was required to join in the denunciation. A public confession of one’s crimes and sins might save one from further torture, prison, “re-education,” or execution. Or it might seal one’s doom.
Government use of organized mob denunciations and mob violence is not unique to Communist China, however. In fact, it has been a standard feature of Communist regimes everywhere: Russia, Cuba, Bulgaria, Hungary, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, etc.
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