Pattern recognition as former Red Guard writes in her Mao's America:
"Americans are now told to accept a new reality where the police have become villains
and criminals have become victims who are allowed to roam freely in our
cities and communities, terrorizing the citizens.
Hardworking, tax-paying Americans have found themselves strangers in
their own country. What is happening? Why? For what purpose?
But wait… I have seen all of this before.
Like most Americans, I also felt like I was hit by a storm. Unlike most
Americans, this storm hit me once before, more than fifty years ago, when I
was only seven years old, just starting school in China.
The storm was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution launched by
Mao Zedong, the Communist dictator who ruled over China from 1949 to
1976. And it lasted ten years, covering most of my school years.
In my memory, it also appeared to happen overnight, just like it did here
in America in 2020!
Overnight, we were told the country we lived in was rotten to the core
and needed to be dismantled. Instead of looking for racists, we were
ordered to look for “counterrevolutionaries.” Just like the term racist now
has an ever-changing, fluid definition, such was the term."
“counterrevolutionary.” The term was applied to anyone Mao did not like,
anyone we thought Mao would not like, anyone who dared to question, and
anyone who was not enthusiastically participating in the Cultural
Revolution. Everyone frantically joined the ranks of the revolutionaries. To
be left out meant ending up an enemy of Mao."