What Does a 2,000-Year-Old Chinese Dynasty Have to Do With Berkeley

As many American universities in the early twenty-first century witness episodes of violent chaos, it is worth recalling that much of what is happening now has happened before. I do not refer to the usual comparisons between the campus Brownshirts and the real ones. Instead, I suggest that we look to China for keys to understanding how we got to, say, April's Battle of Berkeley, and for glimpses of how it will all probably continue to get much worse before it gets any better.

There are broad and disturbing parallels between a ruthless court eunuch named Zhao Gao's aggressive hijacking of a Chinese dynasty more than 2000 years ago, and the New Left's reprisal of that theme in the 1960s in the United States. More than the violence of the counterculture (although there is still plenty of that to go around), what remains most salient are the techniques of herding, culling, and mental disorientation and debilitation—practices perfected in ancient China and now practiced by the academic left.

Zhao Gao was central to the rise and fall of the Qin Dynasty in China in the third century BC. An expert in criminal law, Zhao's advice on using brute force to corral a wary population under the iron authority of the first Qin emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, was instrumental to Qin Shi Huangdi's success in turning a bloody revolution into something resembling a dynasty.

But as Zhao and Qin pushed deeper into the maelstrom of recrimination, retribution, and paranoia, in an attempt to shore up political power, they found that they had to kill an increasing number of people in order to maintain what they called "order" among the court and the realm. When Qin Shi Huangdi died, Zhao forged documents commanding Zhao's potential rivals to commit ritual suicide. Zhao also used the emperor's death as an occasion to exact revenge upon his former tormentors, the Meng family. Zhao then arranged for Qin Er Shi, Zhao's protégé, to become Qin Shi Huangdi's successor, thus ensuring a pliant presence on the Son of Heaven's throne.

Soon, however, the inevitable rebellions against the Qin dynasty's monumental cruelties began to overtake the ability of the central government to suppress them. Zhao Gao, the real power behind the throne, rightly feared that he would be blamed for the breakdown of military discipline in the borderlands. So he preemptively had his protégé Qin Er Shi killed, too. The replacement whom Zhao selected was understandably wary of what Zhao intended to do to him, and so, finally, Zhao himself was assassinated by enemy forces inside the imperial court. Just as Zhao had done to his own victims, Zhao's family line was annihilated, root and branch, in order to erase both the danger and the memory of Zhao's dark influence over Chinese politics.

This hijacking of institutions did not end with the downfall of Zhao Gao. At the 1969 meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), for instance, Howard Zinn, a radical leftist historian, and John King Fairbank, an apolitical scholar of Ming history, famously wrestled over the use of a microphone. Zinn, along with fellow far-left activist historians Jesse Lemisch and Staughton Lynd, were attempting to drive through resolutions on overtly political issues such as the American bombing of North Vietnam. (Earlier proposals, which died in committee, also called for supporting the terrorist activities of the Black Panthers.)

Many other historians, Fairbank included, thought it would cheapen the profession to turn the annual meeting of scholars into a platform for political grandstanding. Even slavery historian Eugene Genovese, himself a Marxist-Socialist who had caused trouble in the past for publicly supporting North Vietnam, warned against the politicization of a body of scholars holding diverse views. When Zinn became impatient with parliamentary rules, he simply grabbed the meeting's microphone from Fairbank's hands and attempted to browbeat the committee through sheer volume of voice.

Fairbank won the battle but lost the war. Zinn's forces were defeated, and the apolitical candidate, historian (ironically) of the French Revolution Robert Palmer, was elected president, but the avalanche of politics continued to pour into both the AHA and the wider historical profession as a whole. Even before the contentious AHA meeting in 1969, for example, the 1968 meeting of the Association for Asian Studies witnessed its own civil war and bitter secession, as a radical contingent of younger scholars broke away from the AAS due to that organization's failure to "take a stand" against the war in Vietnam. The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars—the flagship vessel of the radicals—was only the beginning of the tidal wave of politics that finally swept over the bulwarks of scholarship and swamped the academy in its current quagmire of self-righteousness.

This hostile takeover of the academy, while less spectacularly violent than Zhao Gao's "long knives"-style takeover of the Qin court, was effected through similar methods of intimidation and score-settling. One method in particular shared by Zhao and the New Left stands out: the use of obvious absurdities and highly contentious positions as a means of gauging who among the intellectuals is pliable enough to be easily controlled. For Zinn, pinning the academy down on the questions dearest to the New Left's political program was essential to mapping out the academic takeover. In Zhao's case, he once famously led a deer into a hall of officials engaged an imperial audience and insisted that the deer was really a horse. Everyone who pointed out the obvious to Zhao—that the quadruped was cervine and not equine—was later targeted for assassination.

Zhao preferred to work with the easily duped, and had no spare time for critical thinkers. Those who were willing to commit intellectual suicide in order to maintain their positions were precisely the kinds of people whom Zhao Gao knew he could manipulate into doing his bidding.

This method of introducing an offensive proposition in order to identify and eliminate potential resistance to one's hostile takeover of an institution hardly ended with the downfall of Zhao Gao. Time and again, beginning with the politicization efforts of Howard Zinn and the New Left, waves of de facto purges have swept through American academe, each purge more violently transformative than the last. After tiring of the direct confrontations that rocked campuses in the late 60s and early 70s, the left adopted Zhao Gao's tactic of pressing shibboleths—usually the sacred cows of identity politics—on faculties in order to mark for elimination any who seemed willing to fight.

For example, over the past few years, scholars at U.S. institutions have increasingly been faced with a Zhaoian dilemma. On the one hand, it is certainly possible to acquiesce in the insistence by administrators, gender and women's studies departments, and other members of the faculty, that human beings can become anything they wish simply by willing it to be so. Men are women, women are men—or anything else one might imagine, the Zhaoian proposition goes. One visiting scholar at the University of Arizona who publicly identifies as a hippopotamus (yes, the giant pinkish-gray creature which enjoys floating around in lazy rivers) was warmly welcomed by his colleagues as such. (No word on whether he received an extra stipend for bushels of watercress.)

On the other hand, some foolhardy scholars may run the gamut and point out that these kinds of assertions fly in the face of reality. The price for doing so, however, is steep. Usually, such protestations are rewarded with Star Chamber Title IX trials, public pillorying by a thoroughly Zhaoist press, and immediate dismissal from one's place of employment. Those who manage to survive the initial wave of political correctness are left to face years of ostracism and shunning, until, inevitably, they are denied tenure and sent quietly on their way. Everyone else quickly learns that it is far, far easier just to call a deer a horse.