The Red Guard Wars

Imagine a group of 14 year old girls entered your house, and demanded they search all of it for improper things. If you say no, you go to a workers camp and have all of your rights taken away from you. If these teenagers find anything they consider improper, you will be sent to a workers camp. These girls are policing the people against improper things, and will do it with the zeal few will ever know.

This is not some dystopian tale of a far off future, but a real thing that happened in China during the 60’s and 70’s. It was also not the worst thing that happened. It does involve the teenage girls though.

We need to discuss extreme Nationalism, and how dangerous it can get. What happens when those who were considered other, are normalized? The war that happens can nearly destroy an entire nation. This is the story of how bad it can get.

If you ever hear that religion kills the most, please chuckle and point them to Nationalism. In fact, nationalism is so intense, that the biggest deaths of last century make Hitler -who was all about nationalism- seem small. That’s not a joke. In China alone, the Green Revolution and Red Guard wars killed tens of millions of people each. Ho Chi Minh, the Khmer Rouge, and many others used nationalism to fit their own ideals, and killed anyone they thought were in the way.

Even the stories we use to proclaim religion as dangerous tends more towards the nationalism with religion mentioned recipe. Syria is bombing its own people, of whom are willing to kill others all in the name of a proper state.

This is not an easy subject to talk about. The same techniques President Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan, and even our own modern presidents used to get people involved with ideas were used to destroy. The entire Civil War was based on nationalistic ideas. Take it all in for a moment, heck go for a long walk.

As said before, nationalism is just a thing. We use it because it works. How we use it shows what we are. Like a stick that becomes all sorts of things to a child, nationalism can become whatever you want, both magic wand and deadly sword.

To give you an example, I will use the Red Guard wars. This isn’t the right term for it, because no one knows what to call it. Imagine those 14 year old girls with machine guns killing other girls of similar age over who is truly communist. By the way, you imagined it wrong if you pictures a handful of people. These were wars in the hundreds of thousands.

The Red Guard was something like the Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts of Communist China. They were created by Mao Zhe Dong himself. It was during the “Cultural Revolution” that Mao called the youth to participate and help bring the country forward. He called on them to find “Rightist thinking” and stop “Evil Capitalist Bourgeois” from controlling the country.

It was supposed to be used as a way to get the youth involved with the political structure. They had been taught their entire lives to think properly, and work to make the world the proper communist utopia. If someone mentioned problems, it was uncommunist, and bourgeois.

Mao was seen as a god. That isn’t artistic license either, he was viewed in the same way a God would. He was the emperor, the always correct, and true example of perfect Communist ideals. The posters of him were in the same way a religion would place their own deity.

In other words, if Mao told them to root out the evil and improper ways, they would do it. The problem was they went too far. Raids of houses would happen, and anyone found with a radio, or improper items would be sent to camps. Things included in this could be traditional puppets, old clothing, poems that were considered improper, pictures of people that had fallen out of favor, and all sorts of other things. The Red Guards would go in to bother people, and never relent. They believed themselves to be purifying the world for the great leader.

There was one specific group that had been called bourgeois for decades. These were former land owners, or anyone that held slightly more power than others. Their children would be punished, as would their grandchildren. At least once a week the school would have an activity about stopping the horrible capitalists. The children who were considered part of the former bourgeois would be beaten, mocked, and torn down. They did not have the same rights as other children, and were publicly mocked constantly.

This otherfication destroyed families, and everyone worked hard to not be grouped with them. Parents made sure to tear down what was done, and children were raised to think of these families as evil. They would always be the opposite of true communists.

When the Red Guards, and others entered into homes, they had the power to turn any person into those horrible others. It wasn’t just the worker camps, it was the treatment received for the rest of their lives that broke people.

Keep in mind, the people entering homes, and declaring whole families as improper were in school. Not just high school, many were in grade school.  They were being taught by their teachers to treat anyone with improper ideas, or items as some horrible others.

Then the communist government let some of the old bourgeois families into the communist party, and pardoned the rest. Imagine being told that the worst monsters in the world would now be free to be your equal, or even rule over you.

What happened next is perhaps one of the most messed up things you can imagine. The former groups did not accept each other, and began to rally against the different ideas being presented. Within a few months, all out war had been declared. Kids were taking weapons from local military bases, and fighting. Schools were used as staging grounds for attacks, or poster parades.

In cities, hundreds of thousands of students would fight each other, or cover the entire area with posters about how the other was evil. The military had to be used so these zealous students would not get their hands on nuclear weapons. It was stopped by harsh government and military crackdowns, and nearly destroyed whole cities. After Mao passed, art on the subject was called Scar art, and displayed so people would know how horrible it had gotten.

This is not an easy subject to talk about. I hope you are taking a moment to think about your life, and how lucky you are. Also, I hope you start looking at how you treat someone else. It’s hard to imagine this world, yet we do it in much smaller ways. Someone disagrees with your political opinions, have you noticed how both sides of the argument turn the other into some improper thing? In the Ferguson protests, both groups feel the other is dangerous, and should be suppressed somehow. In the GamerGate debate, we see people lashing out at each other for even thinking the wrong thoughts, or even following people who do. With every police response, every dox, and every political speech you hear people trying to make the other side into something not quite human.

It’s hard to describe some of the terrible things that nationalism has done. In fact, it is even harder to describe when the ‘other’ is placed on equal grounds. This history of the Red Guard wars is not an easy one at all. It is also needed to face our much smaller disagreements, and how we use them.

There are some real horror stories that can be told about nationalism. Not just the ones you know either. In fact, it can get quite depressing when reading about how one group decided the other was now worthy of death. We have to ask questions, like how does one side find so much power over the other. Why build up such imaginary walls? Hopefully this can be explained as we also discuss much more fun subjects about videogames.

This particular article is not answering the questions from last week. I hope to have that article up soon. The thought of the Red Guard caught my attention so much I decided to write about it first. In the book, this will be a transition point to the next subject, which is how groups take over other groups.