[This issue of Peking Review is from massline.org. Massline.org has kindly given us permission to to place these documents on the MIA. We made only some formatting changes to make them congruent with our style sheets.]
[This article is reprinted from Peking Review, Vol. 9, #37, Sept. 9,
1966, pp. 20-21. Thanks are due to the WWW.WENGEWANG.ORG
web site for some of the work done for this posting.]
Revolution is rebellion, and rebellion is the soul of Mao Tse-tung’s thought. We hold that tremendous attention must be paid to the word “application,” that is, mainly to the word “rebellion.” Daring to think, to speak, to act, to break through, and to make revolution, in a word, daring to rebel, is the most fundamental and most precious quality of proletarian revolutionaries. This is the fundamental principle of the proletarian Party spirit! Not to rebel is revisionism, pure and simple!
Revisionism has been in control of the school for seventeen years. If we do not rise up in rebellion today, when are we going to?
Some bold people who were against rebellion have, today, suddenly turned coy and shy, hemming and hawing incessantly about us being too one-sided, too high and mighty, too rude and going too far.
All this is rank nonsense! If you are against us, then say so. Why be bashful about it?
Since we want rebellion, the matter has been taken out of your hands! We are going to make the air thick with the pungent smell of explosives. Toss them over, grenades and stick bombs together, and start a big fight. “Sympathy,” “all-sidedness,” out of the way!
You say we are too one-sided? What then is your all-sidedness? Your all-sidedness looks like “two combining into one,” eclecticism.
You say we are too high and mighty? We are “high and mighty.” Chairman Mao has said: “And those in high positions we counted no more than dust.” We are going to strike down not only the reactionaries in our school, but the reactionaries of the whole world too. Revolutionaries consider the transformation of the world is their task. How can we not be “high and mighty”?
You say we are too rude? We should be rude. How can we be soft and clinging towards revisionism or go in for moderation in a big way? To be moderate towards the enemy is to be cruel to the revolution!
You say we are going too far? To put it bluntly, your “avoid going too far” is reformism; it is “peaceful transition.” You are day-dreaming! We are going to strike you down to the dust and keep you there!
And there are some who are scared to death of revolution, scared to death of rebellion. Sticklers for convention, obsequious, curled up inside your revisionist shells, as soon as there is a whiff of rebellion in the air, you get nervous and afraid. Recently, heartless censures have every day been poured into your ears and, daily, your hearts beat with fear. Don’t you feel it insufferable? Hasn’t life become unbearable?
Revolutionaries are Monkey Kings, their golden rods are powerful, their supernatural powers far-reaching and their magic omnipotent, for they possess Mao Tse-tung’s great invincible thought. We wield our golden rods, display our supernatural powers and use our magic to turn the old world upside down, smash it to pieces, pulverize it, create chaos and make a tremendous mess, the bigger the better! We must do this to the present revisionist middle school attached to the Tsinghua University, make rebellion in a big way, rebel to the end! We are bent on creating a tremendous proletarian uproar, and hewing out a proletarian new world!
Long live the revolutionary rebel spirit of the proletariat!
Red Guards
Middle School Attached
to Tsinghua University
June 24, 1966
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