TO PARAPHRASE a saying from the Second World War, when some citizens seemed blissfully ignorant: ‘there’s a revolution on, you know!’ Throughout my lifetime there has been no major war, but by stealth there has been a radical overturning of conventional society, along with its institutions and norms. This has now reached a woke crescendo, and in Orwellian style, everything good is bad, and everything bad is good.
How did we become immersed in this cultural destruction? A profoundly insightful guide to our malaise may be found in A Front Row Seat at the End of History, a compilation of short essays by the writing duo of Professors David Martin-Jones and MLR Smith. These men went against the academic grain on Brexit and in defending Enlightenment values of freedom of enquiry and expression.
The two authors first met in 1992, while working at the National University of Singapore, Martin-Jones in the political science department and Smith in history. Their conversations focused on the thesis of the ‘end of history’, as propounded by Francis Fukuyama after the Cold War. Both were sceptical of such a prevailing narrative, and they were also averse to authoritarianism – as they experienced when they spoke too many truths in rigidly disciplined Singapore. Taking positions in King’s College London, they emerged over a period of 25 years as sophisticated scribes on the West’s cultural decline.
Sadly, Martin-Jones died in 2024. I met him once, at the launch of the Free Speech Union in 2020. Introducing me was Smith, who I had met two years earlier at King’s, where I was keen to support his frustrated effort to instil a free speech society at the university. Indeed, such wrong-think provoked institutional backlash, leading to Smith leaving in 2022 for an academic position in Australia. His plight at the hands of university administrators was covered in the Daily Telegraph.
I am partly responsible for Smith’s travails, because I encouraged him to write for the Bruges Group website. His article on looming unrest after Brexit, which provoked his inquisitors, was written with David Betz, a King’s survivor currently in the limelight for warning that Britain is heading for civil war. Smith was an unofficial mentor to me, and I have learned much from his expertise in geopolitical and military strategy. In 2020, we wrote The Year of the Bat, a report for Civitas on the global theatre of Covid-19.
I have chosen one piece from the compilation by Jones and Smith. ‘The West’s Maoist moment’, published by CIEO website in 2020, was a taster for their forthcoming book The Strategy of Maoism in the West. There is no tentative or apologetic tip-toeing on sensitivities. At the time of their writing, the West (and particularly universities) were amidst the frenzy of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which the authors explain as a Maoist putsch.
BLM agitation, in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a common felon in Minneapolis, was facilitated by years of priming the younger generations to the ‘decolonisation’ agenda, the concept of ‘white privilege’ (with coerced guilt), and the broad brush of racial prejudice (in pervasive forms of ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘institutional racism’). In the hysteria, Waterstones and WH Smith promoted books imploring white people to hate themselves, while footballers ‘took the knee’ before matches in front of the mostly white crowds.
On slavery, BLM is right that systemic racism is a driving force, but wrong to blame this exclusively on white people:
‘Slavery is systematically embedded in world history. It is etched into the fabric of human experience. It has been this way since the dawn of civilisation. Slavery, moreover, has not always appeared wicked or evil. From ancient Babylon, Egypt and Rome to the Conquistadores in South America, the Ottoman Empire, Tsarist Russia and eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century North America, slavery was the basis of economic and political development. Slave labour is still prevalent today. In China, its laogai (prison camps) enable Chinese enterprises to undercut the prices of economic competitors, a facet of modernity that the designer-clothes-wearing, mobile-phone-carrying members of the BLM and Antifa crowds somewhat conveniently overlook.’
Heresy! Jones and Smith display scholarship and courage of candour in a hostile environment. They are not denying the Atlantic slave trade, or the riches brought to Britain from the sugar plantations, but they place slavery in its broader historical and cultural context – as learned professors should (but so few do nowadays). For most of their peers, certain facts are insensitive, hateful, and a reinforcement of white oppression.
Iconoclasm, the deliberate destruction of cherished symbols, is a manifestation of the Marxist revolution in Western society. Edward Colston, the Bristol philanthropist of two centuries ago who has been thoroughly excised by the shrill anti-racists of the modern city, had donated the grandest stained-glass window at Bristol Cathedral, but in 2017 the dean decided to remove it. Colston’s statue was dumped in the river by activists with apparent licence from the local authority and police. But a so-called philanthropist of today, Bill Gates, whose unethical vaccine trials in India killed dozens of girls, is immune. Indeed, the same Lefties who see racism everywhere failed to see how the Covid-19 regime enriched billionaires who feign benevolence.
The ‘neglected genealogy’ of BLM, as the authors explain, allows zealots to pretend a moral and rational response to events, when really BLM was itself an event in 2020, harnessing a multitude of ‘useful idiots’ to an orchestrated campaign. The manifesto expressed ideology far beyond fighting racism. As well as ‘a commitment to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people’, BLM railed against the nuclear family and promoted transgenderism. There was more to the agenda than appeared, but most ordinary people simply reacted to BLM as if it came from nowhere, a typical utterance being ‘this doesn’t make sense’.
The authors show how an uncompromising form of Marxism practised by Chairman Mao and his henchmen in the People’s Republic of China was exported successfully to the liberal West. In the Cultural Revolution, beginning in 1966, idealistic youth was deployed against the lingering traditions of a land steeped in Confucius and Buddhism. Mao targeted the ‘four olds’ (old ideas, old culture, old habits, old customs) which perpetuated a false consciousness. Mao sought to remould minds and implant ideology, fearing that even the keenest fighters might regress. His antithetical Little Red Book was held aloft fanatical Red Guards, and for Western students this was more exciting than the drudgery of Soviet Communism or impenetrable Marxist texts. To the soixante-huitards, China appealed as a mystical blank slate on which to build a Utopia.
While Jacques Derrida preached deconstruction in the West, in China, Mao was applying it brutally. But in the West, the lure of violent uprising faded in the 1970s. Instead, graduates of a growing and increasingly politicised university system embarked on careers in the professional bureaucracy, and strove to change society from within. German student activist Rudi Dutschke coined the phrase ‘long march through the institutions’, inferring Mao’s Long March to revolution. This brings us to the crucial contribution of Jones and Smith: strategy.
Mao kindled his popularity among Western radicals through the propagandist United Front for Cultural Work. He planted a seed that grew slowly but surely into the triffid-like monster that dominates Western life today. Mao died in 1976, but his legacy is remarkable. His Red Guards are our ‘woke’ warriors, whose activities are not as organic or spontaneous as they may seem to a bewildered public. Social tension and moral confusion caused by militant racial consciousness and gender-bending are part of a strategic destruction of the societal structures of faith, flag and family. Critical race theory, alongside other causes of identity politics, has replaced class conflict.
How relevant is Maoism today? Current social justice warriors may have limited grasp of history, but the similarities in method and fervour, as displayed in violence against professors on American university campuses, are telling. Radical demands are designed to appeal to the educated young, who tend to identify themselves as liberal. This again is Maoist practice, exploiting values, freedoms and rights while actually having no respect for these values, freedoms and rights. Mao said that ‘as far as unmistakeable counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs of the socialist cause are concerned, the matter is easy, we simply deprive them of their freedom of speech’.
Objective enquiry in academe has been abandoned in favour of ideological narrative (sometimes in pseudo-scientific form, as in climate change) and the elevation of feelings over fact. Such phenomenology is an epistemological dead end, for as the authors state in their book on Maoism, a statement that denies the existence of truth is itself a truth claim. Whether the course be travel and tourism or applied mathematics, critical race theory and gender politics are crowbarred into the syllabus.
Most educators are not ideologically driven, but are unwilling to challenge radical assertions, which soon become official policy. Fearful lecturers may tell themselves that BLM is a necessary leg up for disadvantaged persons of BAME background, but they should know better. After decades of peace, comfort and convenience, the intelligentsia lack backbone, keeping heads down as the revolutionary wrecking-ball swings.
As the revolution continues apace, clearly we are not advancing towards social harmony, but to division and hatred, escalated by activists who claim to be fighting division and hatred. The inversion seems absurd until you realise that Maoism is not a pursuit of principle but power. It strives to smash the structures of society, using rage rather than rational argument, because this gets most attention. Opponents are vilified, immediately forcing them on to the back foot. The target feels the need to deny the charge, thereby accepting the premises of debate set by the accuser, and losing the opportunity to make a positive point.
The insufficiently pious are attacked with Red Guard animus. For example, in a widely shared video at the peak of the BLM disturbances, a young woman in a restaurant in Washington DC was assailed by a baying mob insisting that she raise a fist in solidarity; on refusing she was surrounded and threatened. When footballers began ‘taking the knee’ before matches to display their support for BLM, the searchlight shone not on those engaging in this political act, but on any player who didn’t. Fans were ejected from grounds for booing this racially divisive gesture. Society is divided into racists and anti-racists: you cannot merely be not racist.
We are witnessing the moral decay of the West. Liberalism has destroyed itself by its unprincipled and selective tolerance for dangerous, illiberal radicalism. For Maoists, there can be no common ground, only a battlefield on which liberals may be temporary allies. The authors note the sacrificial compliance displayed for BLM:
‘To appease the rage, public and private sector PR departments uncritically accept the need to virtue signal their support for a movement that is, in theory, dedicated to their own destruction. Most egregiously, the senior management teams and vice-chancelleries of leading Russell Group universities unquestioningly accept the need to address their institutional racism and alter their curriculums along BLM-approved lines.’
As Jones and Smith describe, compliance culture is imposed on scholars who try to pursue truth and free enquiry: ‘The system nurtures the worst kinds of human conduct that incentivises the denunciation of people for wrongthink while rewarding those who demonstrate ideological conformity to official doctrines’.
Today’s smartphone-dependent youth carry a virtual Little Red Book, with Maoist strategy transmitted in contemporary woke imperatives. Totalitarianism always starts with the allure of changing society for the better.
This article appeared in Country Squire Magazine on May 7, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
