"All ideas contrary to Mao's Thinking and the objects that represented them, HAD to be destroyed - not just Confucianism and Budhism, but even more so Foreign Faiths, like Christianity.
Throughout the country, Churches were closed, clergy unfrocked, religious symbols smashed - the statue of The Virgin Mary was replaced by a portrait of Mao.
One form of Worship gave way to another.
The physcial destruction wrought by The Red Guards was unparalelled even in China's long history.
Monatstries as far away as distant Tibet were ransacked and razed to The Ground,
The most important sites, like The Forbidden City, were protected on the orders of Cho En Lai, but elsewhere, Mao's stormtroops had free reign.
Cho En Lai's implicit distinction between smashing Bourgouis IDEAS and smashing Bourgouis INDIVIDUALS was quickly forgotten.
Over the next few weeks, tens of thousands of people in Beijing and surrounding regions were harranged and severely beaten - hundreds died.
The highest-ranking victims, brought out for Public Humiliation before Mass Meetings in a Football Stadium - they wore placards around their necks, with their names crossed-out like common criminals, awaiting execution."
“Hence a man’s reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be ‘debunked’; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers.
These are the men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut :
whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach – men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch.
Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it.
Where men are forbidden to honour a King, they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters.
For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.
And that is why this whole question is of practical importance.”
— C.S. Lewis
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