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Xi Van Fleet @XVanFlee - Communism’s Cycle of Violence
Song Binbin, a Red Guard leader at Beijing’s most prestigious girls’ high school, represented the movement when she placed an armband on Mao Zedong. Mao suggested she change her name from Binbin (“gentle”) to Yaowu (“violent”). Just days earlier, she and her teenage followers had beaten to death their principal, Bian Zhongyun—a mother of four—denounced as a “Reactionary Intellectual Authority.” After Mao’s public blessing, violence was justified and soon spread across China; by the end of the Cultural Revolution, up to 20 million lives had been lost.
But the story was more complicated. Bian herself had once served on CCP “work teams” in the early 1950s, mobilizing villagers to attack and kill landlords during land reform. She could never have imagined that she would one day be murdered by students she helped indoctrinate.
As for Song, her fame was short-lived. When her high-ranking father was purged, she too became a target of the Red Guards, exiled with her family to remote areas.
After the Cultural Revolution, her father regained power, and so did she. The very Red Guards who had carried out Mao’s orders were now persecuted, while Song came to America in the late 1970s, earned a Ph.D. at MIT, and worked for the MA state govt until her death.
Bian’s widowed husband spent the rest of his life seeking justice for his wife, but his pleas were ignored.
https://x.com/XVanFleet/status/1968315988069306805
zerohedge @zerohedge - Initial Claims 231K, Exp. 240K, Last 264K
https://x.com/zerohedge/status/1968653834688860443
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