The Revolution Will Be Sanitized: When Extreme Radicals Become Pandemic Compliance Officers

 

The Revolution Will Be Sanitized: When Extreme Radicals Become Pandemic Compliance Officers

Humanity has always possessed a magnificent, theatrical talent for self-destruction. In the turbulent postwar decades, radical youth and students across Japan grew disillusioned with mainstream politics, deciding that peaceful protest was for the soft-hearted. They splintered off to launch violent revolutionary crusades against the state. Among them, the radical leftist group known as the Chukaku-ha (Nucleus Faction) became legendary. They despised the mainstream Japanese Communist Party, manufactured crude rockets and mortars in secret workshops, and launched attacks against international airports and even the Imperial Palace. For generations, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department kept them under constant surveillance, periodically sending riot squads to smash down their doors in dramatic raids.

Yet, history loves a good punchline, and the ultimate climax of this decades-long war between the radical state-haters and the riot police arrived not with an explosion, but with a thermometer.

In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, riot police arrived at the Chukaku-ha headquarters, known as Zenjinsha, armed with industrial cutting torches to breach the fortified doors. The metal gate swung open, expecting the usual chaotic brawl of batons and tear gas. Instead, the hardcore revolutionaries stood waiting—not with pipes or Molotov cocktails, but with digital forehead thermometers and hand sanitizer bottles.

Before the agents of the bourgeois state could smash the capitalist order, they had to submit to public health protocols. The heavily armored riot police dutifully formed a neat, orderly queue, stood still to have their temperatures checked, and obediently sanitized their hands before being allowed inside to conduct their search. The revolution, it turned out, had strict hygiene standards.

It is a delicious vignette of human nature. We love our grand ideologies, our violent divides, and our epic struggles against oppression. We will happily build rockets in basements to overthrow the government. But when a microscopic virus comes along, even the most violent, state-hating radicals instantly pivot to become bureaucratic compliance officers. Beneath all our revolutionary posturing, tribal warfare, and historical grievances, we remain fragile, terrified apes who desperately want to avoid getting sick. The state and its most violent enemies may disagree on who should hold the reins of power, but they can always agree on proper hand hygiene.