It was an ultraleft deviation to be sure, but it also destroyed all sorts of such horrific, backward cultural institutions as foot binding. It was a social movement emerging from the particular contradictions of revolutionary China - which was recognised as going too far, and was ultimately reined in by other communists within the same society. And if your bar is low enough to call it "evil" then you must run out of adjectives to describe literally anything the US has ever done.
Why? I'm genuinely lost on this point. My main POV into the cultural revolution was the documentary How Yukong Moved the Mountains and it seemed like a lot of good had been done. I have since come across the perspective that it had excesses, but calling it evil seems like such a pendulum swing for me, I don't know how to understand it at all.
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It was an ultraleft deviation to be sure, but it also destroyed all sorts of such horrific, backward cultural institutions as foot binding. It was a social movement emerging from the particular contradictions of revolutionary China - which was recognised as going too far, and was ultimately reined in by other communists within the same society. And if your bar is low enough to call it "evil" then you must run out of adjectives to describe literally anything the US has ever done.
Why? I'm genuinely lost on this point. My main POV into the cultural revolution was the documentary How Yukong Moved the Mountains and it seemed like a lot of good had been done. I have since come across the perspective that it had excesses, but calling it evil seems like such a pendulum swing for me, I don't know how to understand it at all.