In Chinese President Xi Jinping 's recent visit to America, there was a giant hole in the press coverage. Nobody talked about the Cultural Revolution.

In her recent book, Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution , journalist Tania Branigan argues that “you cannot understand modern China without understanding the Cultural Revolution.”

In my view, Western elites want to forget the Cultural Revolution because the horror that happened in China 50 years ago is too similar to what liberalism is now attempting in the West.

The Cultural Revolution, which took place roughly from 1966 to 1976, was one of the bloodiest and most insane periods in the history of communism. It was an attempt to try and purge Communist China of all Western ideas, from Christianity to capitalism. An estimated 2 million were killed, and 30 million were hounded and punished.

The Left, of course, refuses to accept the similarity between China’s rejection of Western civilization and its own hatred of its ideals. Branigan herself, despite writing a book on the Cultural Revolution, claims that “to draw a line from left-wing students in the West to [Communist] Red Guards, as some have done — is not only silly but offensive.”

It’s actually spot-on accurate. After the failure of Mao’s economic Great Leap Forward, a program of collectivization that resulted in tens of millions of deaths, Mao saw the Cultural Revolution as a way to turn things around: “Our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road ... so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.”

Particularly enthusiastic in their extremism were university students, known as the Red Guard. In Red Memory, the Cultural Revolution is described as “an ideological crusade — a drive to reshape China’s hearts and souls. ... People were to be remade or removed.”

The 10 years of the revolution, Branigan writes, “were savage, unrelenting, and extraordinarily destructive. The violence and hatred terrorized the nation, annihilated much of its culture, and killed key leaders and thinkers.” No one was safe, as factions split into smaller factions and China’s government turned on anyone who wasn’t fully committed to a new society. Teachers, intellectuals, artists, the religious — all were humiliated, removed, and murdered. Education, once a way of acquiring status and respect, was suspect.

Branigan writes, “The campaign was bent upon spiritual purity, and the true realization of the perfect communist society, erasing the bourgeoise contamination which had tainted the Party — and the country it ruled — since taking power in 1949.”

In his book, The People’s Revolution: A Cultural History, China expert Frank Dikotter observes that Mao hoped his movement would make China the pinnacle of the socialist universe and have him become “the man who leads planet Earth into communism.” The result of this is evident in pictures from time: purges, torture, rallies, propaganda posters, and executions. “We were told that we needed to use violence to destroy a class, spiritually and physically,” one eyewitness account reveals. “That was justification enough for torturing someone. They weren’t considered human anymore.”

Red Guards destroyed Buddhist statues and burned down Catholic churches, claiming they represented a “black religion” and “old thinking.” The Peking Union Medical College Hospital, founded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1921, was renamed the “anti-Imperialist Hospital.” Wang Guangmei, the wife of President Liu Shaoqi, who was purged when he was insufficiently committed to Mao, was forced to wear a necklace of pingpong balls as a mockery of her pearls and formal wear. Women’s choirs were forced to sing Mao’s praises.

This is exactly the kind of censorship, statue-toppling, speech codes, and crusade for “spiritual purity” that today’s college students, journalists, and government elites are forcing on the public. No wonder none of them want to talk about it.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.