Communist China wants to subjugate America’s traditional culture. The Juilliard School—regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious conservatories, deeply rooted in European music—has partnered with the People’s Republic of China.
Currently under construction is the Manhattan school’s satellite campus in the Chinese port city of Tianjin, just an hour from Beijing, the seat of the Communist Party’s totalitarian regime.
This is the same totalitarian regime responsible for the extermination and deaths of an underestimated 77 million (and counting) of its own people since officially grabbing the whip of power on the mainland on October 1, 1949.
This is the same totalitarian regime that promotes a pseudo-sociology that has incited class warfare and liquidated Chinese intellectuals, such as teachers, theologians, philosophers, writers, artists, and musicians—all for the nightmarish goal of restructuring its own society.
This is the same totalitarian regime that still imprisons, tortures, brainwashes, and enslaves ideological dissenters—thought criminals deemed worse than hardened, violent criminals.
What could possibly sway Juilliard to build a campus overseen by the Communist Party—a deadly branch in the bloody Socialist tree—one of the most savage in history?
Money.
Juilliard opened in 1905 as the New York Institute of Musical Art, founded by Frank Damrosch (1859-1937), who had wanted to promote in the New World the classical music of the Old World, with its cultivated, advanced structure and theory.
Fast forward to the 1990s.
From 1984 to 2018, during Joseph W. Polisi’s tenure as Juilliard’s president, the focus was on transforming the campus to one of social consciousness; meanwhile, school funds diminished, and Polisi had to go begging for cash.
Not surprisingly, the Communist Chinese were more than willing to accommodate. But Communists never do anything for altruistic reasons. It conflicts with their revolutionary nature. In short, the music wasn’t the motivation.
According to the school’s website, the graduate studies program of the Tianjin Juilliard School (notice which name takes precedence) is scheduled to open in 2020 and will offer a master of music degree, fully accredited within the United States, with majors in chamber music, collaborative piano, and orchestral studies.
Chamber music? Collaborative piano? Orchestral studies?
Such concentrations in the art of time are from the heart of Christendom, the ideological enemy of Chinese Communists, who have persecuted, tortured, executed and martyred Catholics since the 1920s, shortly after the founding of the Communist Party of China, in 1921.
It was none other than the Roman Catholic Church—a great patron of the arts, for the glory of God—that created the foundation of classical music with its four-line staff and that served in the development of melody, harmony, syncopation, and counterpoint.
Seemingly counterrevolutionary to revolutionary principles, how is it possible for a Socialist state ruled by the Communist Party to promote liturgical music of the Holy Mass, such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Requiem in D minor,” or Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s contemplative “Rosary Sonatas,” prayers to the Virgin Mary, the Holy Mother of Jesus Christ; or works of Johann Sebastian Bach, who dedicated his finished pieces to God with the initialism AMDG—Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, “To the Greater Glory of God”—an homage to God in an abbreviated prayer of thanksgiving.
How could a socialist state—one that glorifies atheism and dialectical materialism and demonizes metaphysics and scholasticism—appropriate and misappropriate the elevated music of Christians, by Christians, for Christians?
Be careful. When the Communist Chinese give with the right hand, they smash with the left.
Chronically anti-American and anti-individual freedom, Communist China—with a historical milieu of death and destruction—propagates beliefs contrary to that of America, a nation built on the Christian principle of individualism, the ideology that human rights are intrinsic to the human being, granted by God.
It was in the Christian world where the idea developed that the individual, as an individual, has sacred value, for a simple reason: All humans are created in the image of God, as the Catholic Church has taught through the ages.
Whereas, in socialist societies, collectivism is the oppressive, dominant ideology that denies individual rights and insists that rights are granted by the state, which is ruled by a great and glorious leader who speaks for the people. For collectivists, the group is greater than the individual, who must be crushed and sacrificed for the greater good of the greater number.
In such a society, individual life has no value except what it can offer the state, and if an individual has nothing to offer the state, then it has no value.
Why don’t the Communist Chinese open a school promoting their own culture?
Perhaps it’s because during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76) the Communists obliterated the centuries-old, rich and textured culture of Imperial China after ordering the eradication of the Four Olds standard of morality: old culture, old customs, old habits, and old ideology. Targets included Eastern and Western reactionary words, literature, texts, musical instruments, art, even the desecration of graveyards and corpses. Whatever shred of culture remained was ideologically subjugated and transformed to foster proletarian ideology to serve the state and its propaganda.
During the reign of terror, Red Guards—easily manipulated, vengeful, and malevolent students—attacked, tortured, and murdered teachers and intellectuals, deemed bourgeois, counterrevolutionary, or reactionary. Those who survived were often sent to laogai (reform through labor) or laojiao (reeducation through labor) prison slave-labor camps.
Academia perished after the regime canceled classes in primary, secondary, and tertiary schools, which remained closed to learning for years. When finally re-opened, schools were under complete control of the Ministry of Education.
Obsessed with the engineering and technological feats of the West, the Communists focused its country on industrialization. Science and its language, mathematics, were forced into prominence in the classrooms, with Western art and music completely banished.
Because artists and musicians produced nothing for the state, they were classified as bad elements, one of the “Nine Categories of Enemies”: landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, traitors, spies, capitalist roaders, and intellectuals, which was the Stinking Ninth.
It seems contradictory and hypocritical that the Communist regime’s dictatorship of the proletariat would welcome an institution of bad elements, such as the Juilliard School.
And with the regime’s supreme command over all aspects of the Tianjin school, how closely aligned will the Manhattan school be with the Communist Party (notorious for corruption in its ranks) and how approving will it be for the Party to push its ideology of Karl Marx, the Father of Communism, responsible for most of the 20th-century carnage?
Why would The Juilliard School partner with a Communist totalitarian government that has proven its hatred for the West, its culture, its Christian heritage?
Yes, money.
Be careful. When the Communist Chinese give with the right hand, they smash with the left.