Here's what I understand about the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards: - The Cultural Revolution was organized by Chairman Mao, the leader of a single-part

Here's what I understand about the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards: - The Cultural Revolution was organized by Chairman Mao, the leader of a single-party state. The Red Guards were personally supported by him. Both were official government policy and could not be opposed. - The goal was to attack people in power who were perceived as reactionary / "revisionist" and remove them from power, by violence if necessary. - The Cultural Revolution had, as a goal, the destruction of remnants of pre-communist history. The Red Guards attacked historical artifacts and cultural sites so that there was no memory of them. - Hundreds of thousands if not millions of people were killed. Here's my understanding of this pull request: - It was not ordered by any government. The current leader and current ruling party of the government under which the people involved in this pull request live are not aware of it or even the larger movement of similar pull requests / discussions, and if they were made aware of it, they'd almost certainly object. - It was done by the ZFS contributors themselves, not by outsiders. Nobody tried to remove existing people in power from that power, certainly not violently. - No attempt is made to erase history. History is right there in "git log." The pull request accurately points out that a change is being made, what the change is, and why. Older versions of ZFS remain published with the old terminology. - Nobody is dying. Nobody involved has a weapon more dangerous than "git reset --hard," and they'll only hurt themselves with that one anyway. I agree with you that we should be wary of government-imposed revolutionary fervor that seeks to destroy political opposition. I think, however, that if people involved a project have made up their minds freely about some topic and want to make some change, the way we should to guard against the dangers of things like the Cultural Revolution would be to encourage people to take actions they've decided upon in the places where they already have power, to encourage them to think for themselves, and to not try to portray folks with some very meager but nonzero power (like village mayors or ZFS maintainers) as dangerous threats to all that is good in the world who must be stopped by outsiders.