My Bangkok public library card never got me much in the way of English literature.
The branch, not much bigger than a log cabin, that I frequented back in the day, located in Lumpini Park, had but one lonely shelf with English-language books, the rest being all Thai.
The English collection contained the entire Hunger Games series, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and a nonfiction historical account of the Maoist Cultural Revolution, the title of which I can’t remember.
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In a way, I was glad of the dearth of choices because it forced me to read these books that I would otherwise have taken a hard pass on. Pride and Prejudice was actually much more enjoyable than I would have guessed, even as a non-homosexual male. So was the Hunger Games series.
Anyway, the TL;DR synopsis of the Cultural Revolution one was that, for about a ten-year period from 1966 to 1976, while the hippies on the other side of the world dropped acid and sang folk songs about peace and love and global communion, the entire Chinese society, in the name of more or less the same ideology, was forced aboard the crazytrain at gunpoint.
Destination: dystopian hell.
Mao himself — God incarnate, for all intents and purposes — conducted, having orchestrated the whole controlled demolition in order to retain the power and authority that he felt slipping away as a result of his disastrous Great Leap Forward project, which was intended to industrialize China but which failed miserably and ended in, according to some estimates, the deaths of over 40 million people.
Again, this book was so captivating in its detail and narrative — written in English by a Chinese academic in exile from the mainland — that I wish I could remember the title.
After having absorbed the material, one can’t help but constantly spot corollaries to the madness in the modern West.
One such apropos corollary is the Red Guard, the radicalized youth brigades of party fanatics, unleashed as the foot soldiers of the Cultural Revolution with makeshift weapons and Mao’s Little Red Book as their North Star, to beat and humiliate not just Mao’s actual enemies inside and outside the Party but anyone they might fancy beating and humiliating — just for fun, just to keep the population in a perpetual state of terror of running afoul of the adolescent street militia.
Mao’s preference for youth to get the job done is obvious if you think about it for just a little while.Teenagers are highly susceptible to influence; they are wild and able-bodied; they seek identity where they only seem to find confusion and self-doubt; they have much less attachment to old social/cultural structures and, as such, are more willing to burn it all down; they have much less to lose than adults with families, careers, and mortgages.
Perhaps most importantly, they have energy.
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The anti-ICE Karens performing sad 1960s-style peacenik sit-in protest re-enactments in Target are never going to supply the kind of muscle you need to really throw a wrench into the gears of society.
They aren’t going to cut to the chase and burn the store down.
But BLM-style, modern Red Guard youths will.
What you need to take this whole Color Revolution to the next level are mobs of lobotomized public school youths, let out of the classroom where they aren’t learning much anyway, handed a bunch of signs they didn’t write and don’t understand, and given blanket permission to flood the streets and cause whatever chaos they like in the name of Social Justice™.And unleash the Kraken they have — from Atlanta to Albuquerque and everywhere in between.
Why are children "protesting" Trump instead of being at school? Where are the parents? pic.twitter.com/BSm329AOg5
— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) January 31, 2026
🚨 WTF?! HUNDREDS of Asheville, North Carolina kids just sprinted out of school with professionally-made signs to "protest" ICE
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) January 30, 2026
Who is funding this and why are the FACULTY allowing it?!
Schools in blue jurisdictions are indoctrination camps.pic.twitter.com/t0xKzg65Co
🚨 BREAKING: Total anarchy at Langston Hughes High School outside Atlanta during "ICE walkout" – kids hurling taxpayer-funded laptops, smashing property! 😡
— Reverend Jordan Wells (@WellsJorda89710) January 31, 2026
Math proficiency? Under 15%. We're paying for THIS?!
Time to defund these failing "schools." @GaRepublicans – where's the… pic.twitter.com/z6BmFNKDxo
