(Minghui.org) For those who are not familiar with recent Chinese history, the Anti-Rightist Campaign was a political movement launched by Mao Zedong between 1957 and 1959, with hundreds of thousands of intellectuals targeted. But its consequence was far beyond the sheer number of victims – it marked the beginning of more tragedies later on, such as Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961) and Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and essentially broke intellectuals' courage – once and for all – to challenge totalitarian rule by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communism bloc, however, communism has gained traction in the United States.
The term of rightist as defined by the CCP was vague. It generally refers to those who oppose the left, those in favor of capitalism, and those against collectivization (also known as globalism in the current American version). Such debate would be unimaginable in the free world decades ago, but it has unfortunately become a reality.
On January 6, 2021, socialists secured their position in the White House. After four years' of efforts to attack Trump in attempts to remove him from office, the left-leaning media, politicians, and corporations have now gained a foothold ready to launch a post-election anti-Trump campaign. For a large group of people who care about their own interests, Trump and the traditional values he advocates are unacceptable. They waste no time trying to take apart what Trump has implemented and accomplished.
American society is out of balance. In many ways, what is happening in the U.S. right now resembles the painful lessons of the Anti-Rightist Campaign that occurred in China over 60 years ago.
Debut of the Anti-Rightist Movement: Revoking Degrees
The CCP was established in China one century ago in July 1921, as a branch of Communist International, a network controlled by the Soviet Union. Its key leaders came from top universities in Beijing who fervently embraced the communism ideology. Most of them did not survive the CCP’s brutality and internal struggles though: out of the 13 representatives to the first CCP National Congress, only two showed up at the ceremony when the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949 – almost all the rest had been declared by the Party as enemies for various reasons.
A similar situation has played out in the U.S., with a slower pace and in a non-violent way. Under the influence of the CCP, many elite American universities have become think tanks and strongholds of leftist socialism. Data shows that Harvard has become the first choice for top CCP officials to earn some titles to decorate themselves with. Its connection with the CCP has been so close that many refer to it as an overseas Central Party School.
Here is one example. After two renowned Chinese dissidents, Teng Biao and Chen Guangcheng, scheduled a talk at Harvard in early 2015 to discuss the CCP’s crimes in terms of human rights, they were told by the school to cancel the talk because the Harvard president had just returned from China after meeting top CCP leader Xi Jinping. This was reported in an April 2020 article from The Crimson titled “The End of Harvard Century.”
In merely 6 years, such an intimacy with communism and socialism has escalated to a new level. After barring officials in the Trump administration from giving speeches in 2020, some Harvard students started a petition in January 2021 requesting to revoke diplomas of three government officials who backed Trump, including former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, Senator Ted Cruz, and Representative Dan Crenshaw.
These students said Trump supporters refused to accept the election result and organized insurrections. Most major media did not bother to report the fact that a retired military officer had confirmed an analysis by facial recognition company XRVision, showing that two people who forced their way into the Senate were actually both Antifa members. One of them had tattoos advocating Stalinism. Furthermore, John Sullivan from BLM and Aaron Mostofsky from Antifa were among those responsible for the riots at the U.S. Capitol.
By ignoring these facts, the socialists have used the January 6 Capitol incident to attack Trump and his supporters. And it is not just Harvard. In January of this year, both Lehigh University and Wagner College rescinded the honorary degree they awarded to Trump. It remains unclear whether these decisions are legal, but they may not align with these institutions’ missions. For example, until the 1950s Wagner ’s motto had been “To God Alone on High Be Glory.”
Such defamatory tactics have been commonplace for the CCP regime. This includes soldiers disguised as civilians burning military vehicles during the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the staged Tianmen Self-Immolation Incident aimed to frame Falun Gong in 2001, and pro-CCP mobsters in Hong Kong breaking into Beijing’s liaison office.
Retaliation Against Trump Supporters
When suppressing intellectuals in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Mao refused to call it a secret plot. It was an “open conspiracy” (yang mo), he clarified. More specifically, Mao first welcomed different opinions (with the famous slogan of “Let a hundred flowers bloom, and a hundred schools of thought contend”) from intellectuals, followed by an open persecution of those who dared to speak their minds. This was explained in Open conspiracy : the complete story of Chinese Communist Party's Anti-rightist Campaign by Ding Shu.
Retaliation is more direct in this American edition. Because of pursuing a fair election, attorneys such as Sidney Powell and Lin Wood received death threats multiple times. Emily Murphy, chief of the General Service Administration (GSA), also received threats directed at herself, her family and even her pet for following legal procedure of transition.
These are not random events. Progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has explicitly proposed to blacklist Trump supporters. “Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future?” she wrote on January 8, “I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future.”
When the CCP took power in 1949, it claimed it'd highly promote democracy and freedom, which went in the opposite direction after the CCP solidified its power. A similar situation happened with socialists in the U.S., who started with freedom of speech. Way before January 20, 2021, however, Powell, Wood, and Trump were silenced by high tech corporations. The new wave of impeachment brought by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also shares similarities with communism’s ruthlessness.
The censorship did not stop there. Upon requests from Washington D.C. officials, the U.S. National Guard worked with the Secret Service and FBI to conduct a background check for all of the 25,000 service members ahead of the inauguration ceremony on January 20.
The National Guard ran additional background checks on its guardsmen ahead of the new president's inauguration, in an attempt to weed out potential extremists.
The move followed the January 6 incident at the Capitol Building in which a corporal in the Virginia National Guard, Jacob Fracker, was one of several members of law enforcement arrested in connection with the incident.
National Guard spokesperson Major Matt Murphy, USAF, told Insider the reserve branch was working with the Secret Service and the FBI to determine "which service members supporting the national special security event for the Inauguration require additional background screening. “Political censorship” and “power coming from the barrel of a gun,” terms once exclusively used by the communist regime found their place here.
Media and Business
Shortly after the inauguration, he replaced key positions in the news media including CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), chief and deputy chief of Voice of America (VOA), director of Radio Free Asia, and chief for the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. All of the officials removed were either Trump supporters or those who stood firm against the CCP. With a budget of over $200 million per year, VOA has gradually become a mouthpiece for the CCP in the past few years. It took Trump nearly four years to replace VOA senior management on behalf of the free world. The new president reversed that in two days. Robert Reilly, chief of the VOA, was forcibly taken out of his office by two security officers.
Similar to media and deep state officials, high tech corporations and businesses have also started the process of retaliation, or pushing people against Trump.
Numerous social media platforms have blocked Trump’s accounts including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Google, Apple, and Amazon have stopped service for Parler, an app used by Trump supporters. E-commerce company Shopify pulled Trump organization and campaign stores off its platform. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has announced to end all contracts the city has with Trump. Commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield cut ties with the Trump organization. The Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) of America has canceled its 2022 championship scheduled at Trump Nation in New Jersey.
Several banks have followed closely. Deutsche Bank, Signature Bank, Bank United, and Professional Bank have closed Trump’s account and ended business relationships with him. Multinational corporations such as JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, and AT&T have announced to stop political donations to U.S. Congress members who called for a fair election. One mainstream news media called for joint efforts in large corporations to ban employment of Trump team members and supporters.
History Repeats Itself
These series of events may look overwhelming, but they have all occurred in the Soviet Union and communist China before. In both communist regimes, as more political movements are launched, everyone would become victims of the totalitarian regime in the end.
Several months after the October Revolution in 1917, Czar Nicholas II and his family of 10 were executed by the Bolsheviks in July 1918. Their bodies were doused with sulfuric acid and burned with gasoline. Internal conflicts were also ruthless. When Vladimir Lenin was sick, Joseph Stalin, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev formed the top leadership team. Stalin removed Leon Trotsky from his position and targeted his supporters. After expelling Trotsky in 1929, he assassinated him with secret agents in 1940.
Such a heritage continued in China. Although the CCP claimed itself to be a strong democracy advocate, during the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries between 1950 and 1951, it killed about 5 million from the Kuomintang (KMT) government. Through the Great Leap Forward, Anti-Rightist Movement, Cultural Revolution, and Tiananmen Square Massacre, the CCP has suppressed people economically, ideologically, culturally, and politically.
By the time the persecution of Falun Gong began in 1999, the CCP’s tactics had reached an unprecedented level. Although Falun Gong is a peaceful mind-body practice based on the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance, former President Jiang Zemin instituted a policy to “defame Falun Gong practitioners' reputations, bankrupt them financially, and destroy them physically.”
With state-of-the-art surveillance and big data, the CCP has extended the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners to all aspects of their lives, including their work, life, shopping, and travel. Because of their faith, practitioners as well as their family members risk having their employment terminated and their children expelled from school. On top of that, a large number of practitioners have been detained and imprisoned for their belief, and they have suffered physical torture as well as mental and psychiatric abuse.
On May 1, 2015, the Chinese Supreme Court announced that it would “docket all cases and accept all litigations.” Based on that, over 200,000 practitioners submitted criminal complaints to the Supreme Procuratorate and Supreme Court against Jiang for launching the suppression of Falun Gong. However, officials illegally returned tens of thousands of cases to the local authorities, leading to many practitioners being arrested and harassed. Some of them were sentenced to jail or died due to torture.
White House Initiatives: Deviation from American and Traditional Values
Hours after taking office on January 20, the new president issued 17 executive orders and memorandums. One of them revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which could cost 70,000 American jobs.
Similar to other international organizations, the WHO has been heavily infiltrated by the CCP, as seen from its mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic last year. Although it is costing about $500 million of taxpayers’ money every year, it helped the CCP to cover up the disease, allowing it to quickly spread to the entire world. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the WHO. On January 20, however, the new president announced that the U.S. will rejoin the WHO and Anthony Fauci, his chief medical advisor, will be the head of the U.S. delegation to the WHO executive board.
Another executive order canceled Trump’s ban on foreign equipment that would impose national security threats through electricity. An earlier article from Wall Street Journal revealed that a national security evaluation showed China and Russia had the capability to temporarily halt the operation of U.S. public electricity and gas lines. Trump put that ban in place to prevent this from happening.
By January 21, the new U.S. Department of State website has removed topics on 5G security, threats from communist China, illegal immigration, threats from Iran, restoring democracy in Nicaragua, and the crisis in Venezuela.
Another executive order focuses on discrimination prevention on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Nancy Pelosi also proposed to remove terms such as he, she, father, mother, son, daughter, and so on in the upcoming 117th session of Congress.
It is likely that the new administration will come up with more measures to reverse Trump’s efforts in the past four years.
Darkest Moment Before Dawn
Within two days after the new president took office, the policy of America First maintained by Trump was revoked. Instead, the new administration and socialists advocated globalism, progressiveness, and egalitarianism. With regard to the CCP regime, the new administration reversed the tough position from the Trump era. It is similar to what CCP official Di Dongsheng had described, the conflicts between the U.S. government would be easily resolved due to the intimacy between the two countries. In other words, the spirit of freedom and democracy has been lost, and it is replaced with money, sexual freedom, racial supremacy, and terror.
Karl Marx referred to communism and socialism as science. But historians such as Paul Johnson and Arnold Toynbee found it childish and impractical. Unfortunately, this has been confirmed once again in the U.S. From the deep state-controlled U.S. Supreme Court, Capitol, White House, to Wall Street, high tech corporations, and news media, people have discarded faith, freedom, and morality. No matter how good an ideology may appear, without faith, freedom and morality, it would be eventually weeded out by history.
What happens in the U.S. today also gives everyone an opportunity to recognize the nature of the CCP, communism, and socialism. Exactly what do we want this world to be? As an individual, how can we contribute towards a better, more sustainable society? The process may be painful, but once we learn the lesson, tomorrow will be better.
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Category: News Commentary
