Communist Reach in the U.S: The Anti-Rightist Campaign Has Begun
Jan. 28, 2021 | By Qing Tai
(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 Joe Biden'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.
(to be continued on next post)
Jan. 28, 2021 | By Qing Tai
(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 Joe Biden'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.
(to be continued on next post)