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life would have deep meaning once again, and people would have faith. The Country would finally strike back, just as God once had his revenge on Babylon, and as a new generation of holy warriors is attempting to do today.
    Mao’s most immediate target was the “Westernized” city-dwelling bourgeoisie. In the autumn of 1951, he unleashed a succession of bloody campaigns against bourgeois capitalists and intellectuals. “Tiger-hunting teams” were sent out to gather likely suspects for public humiliation, torture, and, for several hundred thousand people, death. Intellectuals, Mao declared, had to be cleansed of bourgeois ideology, especially individualism and pro-Americanism. Small fry would be sent to hard labor camps, but the worst offenders were immediately shot. The assault on the urban middle class went on for more than a decade. A speech Mao gave to Party leaders in 1955 is couched in the brutal rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism, but it shares a common loathing with other revolutionaries who would bring the pillars of the City down:
    On this matter, we are quite heartless! On this matter, Marxism is indeed cruel and has little mercy, for it is determined to exterminate imperialism, feudalism, capitalism and small production to boot. . . . Some of our comrades are too kind, they are not tough enough, in other words, they are not so Marxist. It is a very good thing, and a significant one too, to exterminate the bourgeoisie and capitalism in China. . . . Our aim is to exterminate capitalism, obliterate it from the face of the earth and make it a thing of the past. 15
    For China, read Kabul, Phnom Penh, and all the other cities built by men that must be demolished or transformed into vast temples of sacrifice to ancient gods, or modern political messiahs. Mao’s revolution of Country over City would be taken to even greater extremes. Photographs of the ragtag Khmer Rouge army marching into Phnom Penh show village boys, stunted and wiry, staring in wild disbelief at the sights of the big city they are about to empty of its citizens. Phnom Penh had Western architecture, French restaurants, Chinese merchants, and a relatively modern urban economy. The Khmer Rouge soldiers came from the poorest areas of the country, remote places where modern life was unknown. Many of them were barely teenagers. Most could neither read nor write. And they had been told by their masters that educated city people, meaning anyone who had been to school, spoke French, or simply had soft hands and wore glasses, were enemies of the people. Vietnamese or Chinese, who had lived and traded in the cities for centuries, just as Jews had in Germany, had to be cut out of the new society like cancerous cells. Some of the Khmer Rouge leaders, including Pol Pot, had been students in Paris, where they picked up anti-Western, anticolonial, anti-imperialist ideas from such theorists as Frantz Fanon, who called cities the home of “traitors and knaves.” 16
    By the time the Khmer Rouge had done their work and left Phnom Penh a ghost town, its schools turned into torture chambers, more than two million people had been murdered or worked to death. This act of revenge took less than three years. Like the Al Qaeda raid on New York’s Twin Towers, it was an actual as well as a symbolic revenge. Phnom Penh, to the Khmer Rouge, was evil, inauthentic, capitalist, ethnically mixed, Westernized, degenerate, and compromised by colonialism. City people did not have to be treated with humanity, since they had already lost their souls. Through systematic mass murder, and by smashing the wicked city, the Khmer Rouge would restore purity and virtue to the ancient land.
    The Taliban worked just as quickly in Kabul, and almost as ruthlessly. After a brutal civil war, during which Kabul was devastated by constant shelling from the surrounding hills, the Taliban suddenly took the city one September evening in 1996. Their leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was the one-eyed son of a