The Cultural Revolution and Youth

"Once the blindfold was there, it was very difficult to restore sight again." (36)
The book "Thirty Years in a Red House" could very well use this quote on the jacket for it often deals with the idea that political movements can be changed and usurped in meaning through the establishment of a cult of personality which has control over the educational and cultural means of a given society.
While I found this thread to be fascinating, what really set me to analysis was the use of youth by Mao. The man appears to have calculated the means of staying in power so successfully that it reminded of watching a skilled chess player. Where Stalin and Hitler used direct threat, murder and fear to obtain their goals, Mao seemed to have coopted the youth, particularly teens, to redistribute power and secure his position.
The idea that teens have more psychopathic tendencies (I know the defi nitions are in flux, but we can view this through the umbrella of the larger Antisocial Personality Disorder spectrum) is gaining some credence in many research circles and the idea that Mao could recognize this tendency, and exploit is so successfully, is chilling. He created a schism between parent and child at a time in development they tend to occur naturally and then replaced any parental authority with the idolization of himself. It harkens back to the children in Russia who learned to be "stukach" or informers for the Soviet apparatus. However, in China, these children were mobilized as gangs to commit public humiliations and tortures. He also took pains to limit education at this point (which, interestingly, was contrary to the needs of the Communist party when it first began the revolution) which enabled further radicalization and indoctrination of the young. The process also included stripping from children any exposure to contrary thought processes by eliminating the "Four Olds": old culture, old thoughts, old customs, and old habits. (37) Looking back to the beginning of class and Lifton, we can see the making of an atrocity-inducing situation.