Republished from the Saker blog
For years I have talked about "White Trash Revolutions", and the emergence of the Yellow Vests proves that my finger is perfectly on the pulse of things: the only people publicly wearing "Yellow Vests" on the streets of Paris prior to November 17, 2018, were garbage men.
So, imagine me, with my love of Trash Revolutions of all hues (Iran's 1979 "Revolution of the Barefooted" amounts to the same idea), and then the French adopted the look of trash collectors as their uniform. I couldn't be happier!!!
But this idea is not new even in modern 24/7 politics. Genuine historical processes take years or decades to culminate. In 2016, following the election of Donald Trump in the United States, Slavov Zizek expressed the same idea offhandedly: "Sorry, White Trash is our only hope. We have to win them over."
I could not agree more. But we must go further than just "winning over Trash" we must let them win.
That is the essence of China's Cultural Revolution.
I penned this 8-part series because the Yellow Vests show us urgently, courageously, necessarily, violently just how relevant China's Cultural Revolution (CR) should be to Westerns in 2019.
If you have not read the previous 7 parts of this series (and know only anti-CR propaganda) then you may not realize that China's CR proved how good, productive, efficient and equal society can be democratically, economically, educationally and culturally when rural people are supported instead of insulted.
This entire series has not been designed to celebrate China or socialism; i t has been written to show what happens when the rural-urban divide is seriously addressed in modern politics, as it was in China during the CR in an unprecedented manner. Society has many seemingly irreconcilable poles of contention. The only one this series seriously addresses is the rural-urban divide.
The CR showed that solutions to this seemingly irreconcilable divide are possible if we accept that Trash is our only hope and not as the urban-based Mainstream Media insists the cause of our ills.
Not everyone in a small town is a farmer, but the exclusion of village values is obviously why France's rural traffic roundabouts have been blockaded for 5.5 months (the government started banning these rural protests on May 11).
More than anything, I think that studying and emulating the CR can end the urban West's hatred, fear and disgust of rural citizens in power. Islamophobia; every definition includes the fear of Islam as a political force is pretty bad, but Hillbillyophobia, fear of rural values, as a political force is truly at a modern apex. Thus this series.
The world has seen 2 Cultural Revolutions already; is the West finally ready for one?
This series used the CR to illustrate that France and the West are 50 years behind China because they are being wracked by a Yellow Vest movement which is essentially demanding a Cultural Revolution, which the Chinese already had. However, because the neoliberal empire known as the European Union has been undemocratically forced on Europe during the interim, the French have even more work to do than 1960s China, but the first step is to realize that the Yellow Vests are essentially demanding a Cultural Revolution.
That IS what this is all about. Every Saturday Yellow Vests want institutions to cease their terrible functioning, every major policy to come up for review (constitutional changes, staying in the EU, Eurozone and NATO, Franà §afrique, austerity spending policies, taxation policies, environmental policies, banking, education, housing, industrialisation, etc.) and new local, grassroots groups to implement them a Cultural Revolution.
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