Marshall identifies two culprits behind the loss of generational reverence. The first is **iconoclasm** — "the destruction of religious icons and other images or monuments for religious or political motives." His central case is China's Cultural Revolution. On 1 June 1966 a *People's Daily* editorial called to "Sweep Away All Monsters and Demons" — a call to destroy the **Four Olds**: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, Old Ideas. In November 1966 the Cemetery of Confucius was attacked by Red Guards from Beijing Normal University led by Tan Houlan; the corpse of the 76th-generation Duke Yansheng "was removed from his grave and hung naked from a tree." Red Guards broke into homes and destroyed paintings, books, and furniture; "many families' long-kept genealogy books were burned to ashes" — the literal record of lineage, erased. Marshall generalizes the mechanism: this "is not unique to China," and "happens anywhere a new regime takes over and is not yet secure, aiming to bolster its power by sweeping the old order away." A new order, "ascendant in strength but still vulnerable, begins to destroy anything old — reverence to anything old must be discarded and destroyed," because reverence to the prior order threatens the new one. The Spanish guerrillas firing at the *Cerro de los Ángeles*, he notes, are "the same thing." Iconoclasm is not incidental vandalism; it is the deliberate severing of a people from its past. --- *Source: [[Book Inventory/Progression|Progression]] (Sebastian Marshall, 2016) — Uncommon Virtues #8 — Generational Focus*