On X, Handre reminds us that we didn’t run out of useful idiots after the original batch of the 1930s faded … there were still plenty of them in 1968:
In 1968, teenage Red Guards were beating their professors to death with clubs in Beijing courtyards.
Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Sartre sat in Paris calling Mao’s Cultural Revolution a model of revolutionary democracy. The most celebrated intellectual in France looked at a country burning its own libraries and saw liberation. He sold the Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple on French street corners himself, holding it aloft like a sacrament.
Between 1966 and 1976, the Cultural Revolution killed between 500,000 and two million people. Schools shut down across the entire country. Students dragged teachers onto stages, hung placards around their necks, forced them to kneel on broken glass, then murdered them. The historian Bian Zhongyun, vice-principal of a girls’ school in Beijing, died on August 5, 1966, beaten by her own students with nail-studded clubs.
Sartre swooned at this, calling it the people governing themselves. Why did a man this intelligent get it this wrong? Sartre believed knowledge served power, that truth was whatever the revolution required, that the individual existed to be dissolved into the collective will.
So when Mao abolished the distinction between teacher and student, between expert and mob, Sartre cheered. He had spent decades arguing that bourgeois reason was a class weapon. Here was a regime taking him at his word and clubbing the reasoners to death. This is what economic illiteracy gets you.
Mises had already explained the calculation problem in 1920. Hayek explained dispersed knowledge in 1945. Sartre had access to both and chose the dunce cap of the collective instead, then handed out its propaganda on the Rue de Rennes.
He died in 1980, mourned by 50,000 followers, never having retracted a word about Mao. The professors of Beijing got no such funeral, only a philosopher in Paris explaining that their murder was freedom.
