Author uses Cultural Revolution as an allegory but that is such a hyper-exaggeration that you can't compare the two, Cultural Revolution was more a civil war of randomness and a descending into anarchy that went crazier than expected:
"As revolutionaries dismantled ruling government and party organizations all over the country, it was no longer clear who truly believed in Mao's revolutionary vision and who was opportunistically riding the waves of chaos for their own gain"
It might have started as purging in the 1960s but fast descended into infighting at all levels that stopped the economy and industry. People started with revolutionary purposes but then ended up fighting each other for random reasons.
Barnouin and Yu summarized the Cultural Revolution as "a political movement that produced unprecedented social divisions, mass mobilization, hysteria, upheavals, arbitrary cruelty, torture, killings, and even civil war"
A better allegory as hinted would have been the Islamic revolution in Iran because it started off non-violent but called for thought to be focussed around one idea.
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Author uses Cultural Revolution as an allegory but that is such a hyper-exaggeration that you can't compare the two, Cultural Revolution was more a civil war of randomness and a descending into anarchy that went crazier than expected:
"As revolutionaries dismantled ruling government and party organizations all over the country, it was no longer clear who truly believed in Mao's revolutionary vision and who was opportunistically riding the waves of chaos for their own gain"
It might have started as purging in the 1960s but fast descended into infighting at all levels that stopped the economy and industry. People started with revolutionary purposes but then ended up fighting each other for random reasons.
Barnouin and Yu summarized the Cultural Revolution as "a political movement that produced unprecedented social divisions, mass mobilization, hysteria, upheavals, arbitrary cruelty, torture, killings, and even civil war"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
A better allegory as hinted would have been the Islamic revolution in Iran because it started off non-violent but called for thought to be focussed around one idea.