The Limits of Iconoclasm?

Though little known in the West, the bloodiest civil war in history was actually the Taiping Rebellion, occurring between 1850-1864 and resulting between 20 to 30 million deaths, a figure that would have crippled most other nations for centuries. The rebellion illustrates one of the biggest, long-term advantages China has, the sheer number of Chinese. The Chinese population in 1800 was actually comparable to the current population of the United States. The Taiping Rebellion pitted the Qing dynasty, led by ethnic Manchus, against the Heavenly Kingdom, based mostly in southern China and composed of ethnic Han, far and away the biggest ethnic group in China as well as the foundation by which most of Chinese civilization rests. The details of the Heavenly Kingdom are when things get strange. The rebellion was led by Hong Xiuquan, a failed applicant to the Chinese bureaucracy and who created a syncretic blend of Christianity and traditional Chinese ideology, proclaiming himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ and set about to create a theocracy based upon his new religion. Where the Heavenly Kingdom ruled, the old symbols of Confucian China were targeted for destruction. Seizing upon this, the ruling Qing dynasty, though ethnically Manchu (and thus barbarians in the mind of the Chinese), labeled the Taiping rebels the enemies of traditional China. The Taiping Rebellion was then a battle for the soul of old China.

Remember, China has an utterly bizarre history in how little it has changed; it has more or less kept the same civilization for thousands of years, led by a succession of dynasties that would rise and fall until a new dynasty emerged and united much of the same territory. This pattern would hold all the way until 1912, when the Chinese Nationalists would finally end the Qing dynasty. Interestingly, this pattern would recur when non-Han Chinese would rule China. The Manchu-lead Qing dynasty would become Chinese, just as the Mongol-lead Yuan dynasty did earlier. Even when a dynasty would be overthrown by a peasant uprising, the same pattern would remerge. Reviewing this bit of history, it is easy to see why the actions of the Taiping rebels held such significance – it promised to be a rebellion like none other and, if successful, it pledged to end a civilization that had managed to maintain coherence over a significant period of history.

For their part, the Heavenly Kingdom claimed that they did not hate traditional China or the Confucianism that underlined it. Rather, their issue was with the idolization of Confucius. The Heavenly Kingdom maintained that it was this idolization that had fossilized Chinese thought, making China weak in the face of an innovative West. This is a charge not without merit, as one of the most unique features of Chinese history is their tendency to create potentially world changing inventions but never doing much with them. They invented gunpowder and made fireworks. The invented the compass but never tried to create an overseas empire. They invented the printing press but just printed more copies of the Confucian classics – all because the Chinese bureaucracy feared other applications of these inventions. The true wonders of these inventions were only realized by Whites. In the mind of the Heavenly Kingdom, at least according to their propaganda, they were leading an ethnic Han uprising against the ruling Manchu.

We will, of course, never know what would have happened to the Heavenly Kingdom had they been successful. However, their claims to not be the enemy of old China, but rather certain excesses and acting as a national liberation force, illustrates that there are limits to how far a country will go in repudiating its own past. This same impulse can be seen in China today. Mao may have vowed to radically transform China by destroying the “Four Olds” and encouraged the Chinese youth to destroy those symbols (and people) during the Cultural Revolution, but today China is making propaganda films lionizing China’s imperial past. This was observable in the Soviet Union, too. By the 1940s, Stalin was commissioning Sergei Eisenstein to make a film praising Ivan the Terrible, just one generation after this same government was encouraging wanton destruction of Russia’s Tsarist past. We can also see this in how the European Church fathers incorporated Greek philosophy. All this points to one truth – there are limits to how far a nation can go in rejecting its own past.

All of this does raise a question: does this mean that eventually the current drive to destroy Heritage America will recede? The answer, I fear, is just a maybe. Even if it does, it may not matter very much. Could there be a future where the attacks on the Founders have ceased because they have been incorporated into Globohomo? Yes, it can but who wants to see that? I do not want a future where Thomas Jefferson is an early champion of gay marriage or James Madison supported transsexualism. Plus, it would not moderate the tyranny of Globohomo. The current Chinese push to champion its imperial past has not made the Chicoms one iota less tyrannical and has even gotten worse in recent years (their social credit system, for example).

However, there is a chance that there is no limit to the iconoclasm for the United States. One roadblock to the destruction of Chinese history, be it under the Heavenly Kingdom or under Communist China, is that China was still made of up ethnic Han. Therefore, there were limits to the extent they would tolerate their own destruction. The same can be said of the Soviet Union – it was still made up of Russians and other historical ethnicities under their purview. This is not the case with the United States in 2021, and the reason is simply immigration. Current Year “American” immigrants do not share a love for the Founders. As such, they will be far more tolerant of American iconoclasm. Destroying Confucian or Tsarist symbols was deeply personal to the Chinese and Russians. The same cannot be said for most of the post-1965 immigrants.

Guilt, I think, is the other issue. The Taiping Rebellion occurred during the “Century of Humiliation” – a long era of foreign rule in China. This cumulated in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, which saw two foreign nations fighting over Manchuria, the ancestral home of China’s ruling dynasty. Though Russia was an empire, there was a very prevalent strain in Russian thought, even on the Far Left, that considered Slavs as being oppressed by Western Europe. Thus, Russia was not plagued by “oppressor” guilt. But this is not the case for the American anti-White Left (particularly, White leftists) – they are, by the virtue of their Whiteness, an oppressor and the great White men of the past are oppressors, too. Therefore, White leftists are out to purge their own “guilt” and are far more capable of accepting (and engaging in) the destruction of Heritage America and its history. In this paradigm, it becomes clear that Dixie is especially targeted, and also why Southern leftists tend to be exceptionally rabid.  

History shows that there are limits to how far a nation will go in destroying itself. But, Heritage America and the South, painted as evil oppressors and paired with foreign immigration and suicidal leftwing guilt, will likely create a new breed of iconoclasts that will break this pattern and aim for the wholesale ruin of our past.