Maga and the alarming parallels with China’s Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution was one of the most turbulent and radical periods in modern Chinese history. Its goal was to reassert Mao Zedong’s control and preserve communist ideology by purging “capitalist” and “traditional” elements from Chinese society. US President Donald Trump is in the early stages of unleashing his own cultural revolution in his attempt to “Make America Great Again”.

In China, academics, teachers, scientists and artists were publicly humiliated, imprisoned, tortured or killed. The more you knew, the more reactionary you were – that summed up the anti-intellectual fervour of the time. In the United States, Trump is publicly humiliating these groups. He has not (yet) gone to the extreme of imprisoning, torturing or killing them – laws exist that prevent extreme persecution in the US. But then the rule of law does not mean much to him. If he could, many Americans believe, he would.