MCLC: Guns, Fairytales, and Red Guards

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Guns, Fairytales, and Red Guards
[To add a short commentary (originally posted on Parlio.com) to the collective remembering of the Cultural Revolution -- Haiyan Lee]
Guns, Fairytales, and Red Guards
Your first reaction at seeing the title is probably “huh?” If you have seen the NYT reports, you’ll still wonder what’s the NRA’s retelling of fairytales got to do with Mao’s Red Guards. Well, quite a bit and let me explain why.
First, in case you haven’t heard, the NRA is looking to cultivate a new generation of gun enthusiasts with retooled fairytales with titles such as “Hansel and Gretel (Have Guns)” and “Little Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun).” In these new versions, the heroes and heroines are packing heat and the Witch and Big Bad Wolf get nowhere with their evil designs and it all ends happily ever after, “locked and loaded.”
The NRA has long touted guns as the ultimate guarantee of freedom—its website calls itself “freedom’s safest place.” The best rejoinder to NRA propaganda I have ever read is by Professor Firmin Debrabander in his NYT Stone piece called “The Freedom of an Armed Society,” published soon after the Sandy Hook shootings. He unpacks the NRA slogan that “An armed society is a polite society” and shows that on the contrary an armed society is the very antithesis of a civil society. This is because guns and the threat of gun violence chasten speech and abrogate our First Amendment rights. He writes: “guns liberally interspersed throughout society would cause us all to walk gingerly — not make any sudden, unexpected moves — and watch what we say, how we act, whom we might offend.”
This dystopic scenario is eerily reminiscent of how things were during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76), which has been on my mind as this year is the 50th anniversary of its launching. Mao urged youngsters to rebel against the authorities but counseled (via his wife) “attack with words and defend with force” (wengong wuwei 文攻武卫). The Red Guards began their offensives with the so-called “big character posters” and mass debates. But all too quickly, these verbal battles degenerated into violent skirmishes, sometimes with weapons pilfered from militia organizations and even the military. Why did these ardent apostles of Mao so readily ignore his dictum? Because once you make yourself invulnerable with conviction and force, it’s hard to put up with disagreements and criticisms. And you don’t have to either—you can simply compel agreement, compliance, or acquiescence through force. And in the process you also get a kick out of the subjugation of another will and the attendant exultation of mastery.
Violence is mute, warned Hannah Arendt. Guns induce the fantasy of invulnerability and disincline us to conversation, persuasion, and negotiation—the basic building blocks of democracy. An armed society is thus the opposite of a civil society. Guns don’t protect us against the powers that be; rather, as Debrabander puts it, “their pervasive, open presence would sow apprehension, suspicion, mistrust and fear, all emotions that are corrosive of community and civic cooperation. To that extent, then, guns give license to autocratic government.” This is also an apt description of Mao’s China. The political campaigns that armed individual Chinese citizens with “the spiritual atom bomb of Mao Zedong Thought” and the license to violence only ended up rendering everyone vulnerable, breaking up families and communities by sowing apprehension, suspicion, mistrust and fear. As atomization took hold, institutions crumbled, society disintegrated, and the powers that be (Mao and his co-instigators of the Cultural Revolution) grew more autocratic. The same can also happen here, what with ever larger segments of the American population feeling disempowered, resentful, and fearful.
John Updike once said that “children give us access to the tragic.” We tell fairytales to children to teach them moral and prudential lessons in a Sisyphean endeavor to keep the tragic at bay, not to encourage the fantasy that they can be their own police and military. In an age of terrorism, anxious parents are likely to grasp at anything that promises to steel their children against life’s “blind impress” (Philip Larkin). If, however, they turned to the NRA for help, they might not necessarily bring up a generation of little Red Guards, but they might initiate their children into a cult of invulnerability and a culture of extreme individualism.
As for the claim that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” I refer you to Professor Elaine Scarry’s brilliant little book Who Defended the Country? When scaled up to national security, the arming-the-good-guy mentality translates into the idea that military buildup is our only recourse to combat terrorism. Rather, she argues, a strong civil society in which we trust and act in concert with one another is our best defense. She invites us to consider the September 11th, 2001 attacks in which the only successful defense was mounted by unarmed civilians, that is, the passengers on United Flight 93 after a vote.
Haiyan Lee <haiyan at stanford.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on May 13, 2016
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