There are analysts who have surmised that the current social unrest in America harkens back to the late 1960 or other race-based riots in our nation’s past.

And while there are similarities, the Marxist aspect of the riots, combined with the active help of the Red Chinese (according to the FBI), point to a different influence on these events.

What we are experiencing is a repeat of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

On August 19, 1966, students launched a fight for “social justice” in China. Rioting violent students cried out for “revolution and change.”

The effort was led from the top by Jiang Qing, the wife of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong and herself a former actress.

Mao saw it as a letting off of steam. His wife saw it as so much more.

Students and their allies put a red band around their arms to stand in solidarity with the “oppressed” in the villages and called for a change of old ideas that they termed the “Four Olds: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas.”

The movement was supported by the Chinese media. Many party officials, including some who came to renewed prominence after Mao’s death and the turn to capitalism, were paraded through the streets, spat upon, and worse.

Many citizens and party types had to undergo mass criticism sessions where they were stood before a crowd and insulted. Any verbal self-defense would result in instant punishment, if not in arrest or death. It recalls the recent prostration of guilty white liberals in front of black radicals.

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Mass marches, rioting, looting, and arson by the students ensued. Statues were torn down. Chinese architecture was destroyed. Historical monuments defaced. Classical literature and Chinese paintings were torn apart and burned.

Temples were desecrated. The Cemetery of Confucius was attacked. The corpse of the 76th-generation Duke Yansheng was removed from its grave and hung naked from a tree. Homes were attacked and destroyed. Many families’ long-kept genealogy books were burned to ashes.

Three days after it started, in a precursor to the “defund the police” movement,” a central directive from Beijing was issued to stop police intervention. The police were disbanded in the cities and the students formed a “community police” called the Red Guard.

Red Guard units punished anyone who did not conform to their ideas, radical notions even for the Red Chinese. People who supported the movement, but had “bad thoughts” as informed on by their neighbors, would be punished.

The average age of a member of the Red Guard was 17 years old. Mao suggested an end to the madness in 1969, though it took another two years to bring it under control.

By the time the Cultural Revolution burned itself out the toll on China was devastating.

It took decades for Chinese society to completely recover. More ominously, more people were murdered during the Cultural Revolution than in most wars, genocides, famines, or natural disasters in the history of mankind. It is estimated 20 million died.

The parallels to what is happening on American streets right now is obvious. We as a nation, in the political, social, and cultural senses, may take decades to recover as well. That is, if America can recover from what is essentially an incipient Marxist coup.