Half a century ago in China, gangs of violent youths called Red Guards, intent on enforcing the radical vision of Mao Tse-tung, destroyed statues, libraries, and other artifacts of the world's oldest and richest culture in an effort at utopian revolutionary transformation.  The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution intended to erase the past and take a billion people into a classless paradise.  

Today, violent gangs of American leftists delude themselves into thinking they will trigger a violent revolution that they will win, and ape the goal of destroying a past that is a reminder of an order they wish to eradicate.  The toppling of a Confederate statue by a communist mob in Durham, N.C. shows definite signs of Red Guard envy, as pathetic losers imagine themselves as heirs to fearsome radicals.

The Red Guards were called into action by Mao Tse-tung himself, in an effort to outflank his more practical opponents and impose radical change through physical force.  With that kind of backing, they achieved a level of power and cruelty that Antifa, Black Bloc, and Black Lives Matter can't even dream of.  I studied the Cultural Revolution as a graduate student at Harvard starting in 1969.  I will never forget interviewing, years later, a distinguished Chinese professor who had been dragged from his university into the street, paraded about in a dunce cap as he was beaten with sticks, imprisoned, and sent out to a commune to do manual labor of the most disgusting kind.  His crime was that he had received his Ph.D. at Indiana University.  He bore obvious scars of the ordeal on his body, in his gait, and in his demeanor.

Because they were so powerful, the Red Guards were able to damage China and help cause the famines that claimed tens of millions of lives there.  They set back higher education by a generation.  And the reaction to the mess they created helped lead China toward market reforms and the opening to the United States under Deng Xiao-ping and President Nixon.

Multiculturalism, aka the demeaning and destruction of the culture that created capitalism, has replaced Mao's Little Red Book as the theoretical basis of the new guards of the blue persuasion.  Blue Guard statue-topplers are in their own minds the vanguard of the Great Identitarian Cultural Revolution.  Of course, it is a masturbatory fantasy, one doomed to produce a reaction as counterproductive for their goals as Deng's freeing of parts of the Chinese economy to entrepreneurial enterprise was to the Red Guards.

They are doomed to swifter failure than the Red Guards, but that doesn't mean they won't create a mess.