The May 4th Movement was a Chinese anti-imperialist and nationalist movement that began on this day in 1919 when more than 4,000 unversity students took to the streets in protest of the Treaty of Versailles. These protests became a national and cultural movement that served as an inspiration for later left-wing movements.
On the afternoon of May 4th, over 4,000 students of Yenching University, Peking University, and other schools marched from many points to gather in front of Tiananmen. They shouted slogans as "struggle for the sovereignty externally, get rid of the national traitors at home", "do away with the Twenty-One Demands", and "don't sign the Versailles Treaty".
The next day, students in Beijing as a whole went on strike and in the larger cities across China. Students, merchants, and workers joined the protests. The demonstrators appealed to the newspapers and sent representatives to carry the word across the country. In Shanghai, a general strike of merchants and workers took place, negatively impacting the economy.
The May Fourth Movement served as an intellectual turning point in China; it was a seminal event that radicalized Chinese philosophical thought. Western-style liberal democracy had previously had a degree of traction amongst Chinese intellectuals. Still, after the Versailles Treaty (which was viewed as a betrayal of China's interests), it lost much of its attractiveness. Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, despite being rooted in moralism, were also seen as Western-centric and hypocritical.
Many in the Chinese intellectual communities believed that the U.S. government had done little to convince the other nations during the Versailles negotiations to adhere to the Fourteen Points and observed that the United States had declined to join the League of Nations. As a result, they turned away from the Western liberal democratic model. The victory of the Russian October Revolution in 1917 gave direction to the development goals of the Chinese working class. Marxism began to take hold in Chinese intellectual thought, particularly among those already on the Left. During this time, that communism was studied seriously by some Chinese intellectuals such as Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao.
In the years that followed, many Chinese political thinkers turned to leftist politics in the wake of the political upheaval of the May 4th Movement. In 1939, Mao Zedong claimed that the May Fourth Movement was a stage leading toward the fulfillment of his own communist revolution.
The May Fourth Movement twenty years ago marked a new stage in China's bourgeois-democratic revolution against imperialism and feudalism. The cultural reform movement which grew out of the May Fourth Movement was only one of the manifestations of this revolution. With the growth and development of new social forces in that period, a powerful camp made its appearance in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, a camp consisting of the working class, the student masses and the new national bourgeoisie. Around the time of the May Fourth Movement, hundreds of thousands of students courageously took their place in the van. In these respects the May Fourth Movement went a step beyond the Revolution of 1911
-- Mao Zedong
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You know...
The rightist obsession with "men not being manly anymore" and using conspicuous consumption and exhibitionism in a weak and lazy attempt to 'prove' their masculinity does, really, show that a section of men really aren't very manly (in the positive, useful, constructive sense)
It's like, if someone is constantly trying to convince you that they're fucking a bunch of hot girls, that doesn't speak to their coolness, it speaks to their low self-esteem and fragile ego; why not fuck hot girls and be satisfied? Why is it so important that I believe you? Couldn't you be fucking MORE hot girls instead of trying to convince me of your smoothness?
You've got these guys who lift and buy guns and grow out beards (all inherently good things) and act tough (not good; don't act tough like a coward, be tough in silence) not because that's who they are, it's just something they adopt out of fear of someone somewhere thinking they're a loser, and if you're basing your ENTIRE IDENTITY out of fear of someone else... you're not very tough or manly, are you?
These dumbasses wouldn't last a day in a hunter-gatherer band when they realize strength and discipline goes beyond an aesthetic for Twitter
Edit: to touch on a past post, the things we value in a man--honor, loyalty, strength, discipline, bravery, protectiveness--are not easy things. They are hard things, as history shows, which is why we have traditionally had rituals and cultural support systems. But then capitalism comes along and makes you a drone in a cubicle, cuts you off from the land, cuts you away from your culture, takes away your community, makes you see everyone around you as a competitor and enemy instead of a neighbor. Then capitalism says, I can sell you manliness. How the fuck do you compete with that? It's old timey snake oil, an elixir of penis enlargement, and all these dumbasses are shelling out their life savings for it. They blame feminism, they blame technology, they blame everything but the system itself and their own complicity.
It's fucked. They're fucked.
Not to mention a tremendous amount of cooperation and communication necessary to survive
That too.
The 'rugged individualist' fantasy is just that--a warping of the truth. Frontier life wasn't just sitting in a shack. It required information exchange and trading of goods and negotiation and diplomacy. While self-sufficiency is important, it's been fetished into this belief of "I can handle everything on my own, and NO ONE can tell me what to do!" Despite living in civilization, which provides you with food, water, electricity, gas, safety, a common currency, literacy, and everything else. Libertarians are the worst when it comes to this, obviously--they want the "freedom" to do whatever they want whenever they want, but want civilization to cater to their whims, no matter how irrational or overemotional.
It's ironic, really, how "personal responsibility" became a meaningless meme. A responsible adult is someone who is dependable and honest and contributing. It doesn't mean "I only care about what I do, as a solipsist jackass." Does a lone fish in the ocean have "personal responsibility?" No, because it's fucking living alone, it has no responsibilities, it only has base needs.
And that shit is baked in. What is Christianity about for most people? Getting to heaven--alone, and fuck the rest.
People who aren’t in a room with Scissor mongering idiots don’t know what’s going on inside the rooms where Scissor idiots are. Nobody gets to see into rooms where Scissor stupid people are talked about like they’re actual intelligent individuals.