America’s Red Guards
22nd August 2023
In August 1966, communist leader Mao Zedong commenced “Red August,” a campaign amidst the wider Cultural Revolution to wipe away the “Four Olds” of Chinese society: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. He infamously used university students, and other younger children, as foot soldiers to carry out mass beatings and destroy important cultural and historical institutions.
The outsized rule of juveniles and young adults in the subsequent massacres perpetrated by the Red Guards was not at all unique. In Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, children were also enlisted as foot soldiers, prison guards, and executors of public shaming of non-compliant adults. The weaponization of children and adolescents is a marked feature of left-wing movements across the globe.
The American Left has ensured that children occupy an increasingly active role in our country’s political and culture wars. Childhood no longer exists outside the realm of conflicts between adults. If anything, children are now being told that they must take center stage as the voice of moral righteousness on the most controversial issues of the day. Look no further than Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan remarking that “when our children tell us who they are, it is our job as grown-ups to listen and to believe them.” In Flanagan’s reality, the immature should lead adults in determining cures to societal ills.