How'd They Get Away with This in Hollywood? Netflix's Hot New Show Highlights the Horrors of Communism
Netflix’s latest hit show does what few Hollywood projects before it have ever done — it highlights the horrors of Marxism.
The show, “3 Body Problem,” debuted on the streaming platform March 21 to rave reviews and generally positive critical reception.
Helmed by former “Game of Thrones” showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the series debuted to 81.7 million hours watched in its first four days on Netflix, according to What’s on Netflix.
The show also currently boasts 77 percent and 82 percent critics and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes.
In one particularly dark scene making the rounds on social media, a struggle session straight out of Maoist Communist China is depicted.
The scene is from the show’s opening, and shows how dissenters were treated in Mao Zedong’s infamous Cultural Revolution, which claimed the lives of a reported 40 to 80 million people.
In the scene, a physics professor is brutally beaten by Red Guards for his failure to conform to the government’s beliefs.
He’s effectively “cancelled” in front of a large crowd jeering at him (a common scene from the Communist movement).
Many of the onlookers are shown waving Mao’s “Little Red Book” (not-so-fun fact: the Little Red Book is cited as an inspiration by the founder of the Black Lives Matter movement).
Viewers of the show took to social media to express their surprise that a Hollywood production would actually take the time to highlight the historical evils of leftist regimes.
While every American knows about the crimes of Nazi Germany and Holocaust, few know about the much greater crimes committed by Communism including the murderous Chinese Cultural Revolution. Here is one of the reasons:
Popular movies about Nazi:
Sophie’s Choice (1982)
Europa… pic.twitter.com/ehf42qyHMY— Xi Van Fleet (@XVanFleet) March 26, 2024
“While every American knows about the crimes of Nazi Germany and Holocaust, few know about the much greater crimes committed by Communism including the murderous Chinese Cultural Revolution,” a self-described “survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution” wrote in an X post.
“Popular movies about Nazi: Sophie’s Choice (1982) Europa Europa (1990) Schindler’s List (1993) Life Is Beautiful (1997) The Pianist (2002) The Zone of Interest (2023) … Popular movies about the horrors of Communism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution: 0 Only the 5 minutes opening scene in a sci-fi TV series of 2024.”
“I don’t know if I expected to see such an agonisingly realistic recreation of a Cultural Revolution struggle session, on Netflix of all places,” another user added.
“It’s one thing to read historical accounts of the Cultural Revolution. To intellectualize it. It’s quite another to experience the visceral violation of your conscience from seeing it on a TV screen (@netflix’s 3 Body Problem),” Singaporeon journalist Melissa Chen wrote on X regarding the scene.
She added: “It turns out we have a powerful weapon against the psychology of totalitarianism and tyranny. All we need to do is just show people the raw, unvarnished truth of what the Cultural Revolution was like. That’s the role for today’s storytellers and filmmakers.
“Never again.”
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