An essay by Justin E.H. Smith reminded me of a question I have puzzled over for several years. It is a terminological questions, how to refer to some groups. Smith’s essay is about that in part, although more focused on the substance of what ties the group(s) together. It is about people who want to, and quite often succeed, in imposing moralistic standards on figures in arts, history, politics, and generally in the public sphere. Smith talks in terms that look back to Stalin, in particular, and the recent history of Russia and eastern Europe. He makes comparisons between the present trends in attempts to silence and degrade people who do not meet certain current behavioral and thought standards. In other words, the cancel culture of left and right in the US (and elsewhere).
That experience of censorship and control was directed, more or less, from the center, the governmental center. Stalin and his colleagues heading the state issues directions and orders. The efforts to crush variety in thought and bind expression to a narrow range of approved methods and topics came from the center. Enthusiastically applied, no doubt. My understanding, which is not that of an expert, is that one can describe it as state action even if it is often quite hard to see it has a legal regime. There was law, or anyway, statutes and a constitution, but realistically they had little to do with the goings on. The various police, secret and otherwise, acted on directions from above. I think that is accurate enough for the moment.
I think Mao’s Red Guard and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is a better analogy. First, why, and then some reservations. The Cultural Revolution involved mass movements in battle with one another, each grouping imposing its standards on all within their reach. Murder, torture, beatings, indoctrination, humiliation, dispossession, and exile, etc., meted by groups which were more or less self-directed. Faction against faction, Red Guards against Army, etc.
Both sets of experiences are, in fact, distant from the issues in the US. That is a point Smith makes quite directly and eloquently. At its present worse, cancel culture is not murdering people, or dispossessing them of home and property, exiling them to remote regions to struggle for food, sending them to prisons to be worked to death. It is now here only a faint resemblance. One hopes that the faintness will fade, but even as it is it is not the state terror of the USSR or its client states or the terror of the Cultural Revolution. But they share some features -- a rejection of forgiveness or error, imposition of rigid moralistic standards whose violations, however remote, are unforgivable, and intense drive to create a monolithic cultural landscape, contempt for difference or dissent.
How to refer to them? An American Red Guard, a Stalinist tendency?
I wonder if my preference for analogy to the Red Guard is any better? I wonder if these comparisons are so overwrought as to be self-defeating. A point Smith makes, I think, is that whatever the terminology or descriptors, the current status if not in fact much like Stalinism or Cultural Revolution, there is not the blood, murder, not the risks, etc., and it is wrong to pretend or suggest otherwise. That is right. But how to describe or refer to these tendencies?
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