Documents

On the role of Mao Zedong - In 1995 a foreign reporter interviewed me about Mao. She sought me out as someone who had met the man in person and openly admired him over the years. She asked, "What about all the people he killed? What about all those famine deaths? And what about all the suffering and destruction of people in the Cultural Revolution?" With these questions she lined herself up with the current media line on Mao, the line of conventional wisdom, which is to present him as a monster—Mao, the monster. The Mao-the-monster thesis depends on two major charges. The first makes him responsible for all the euphoria and excesses of the Great Leap Forward and the organization of people’s communes, which, so the charges go, led to a collapse of production and finally to famine in China. (Isn’t it indeed strange that this famine was not discovered at the time but only extrapolated backward from censuses taken 20 years later, then spinning the figures to put the worst interpretation on very dubious records.) I do not mean to say that there were no mistakes in policy, no crop failures, and no starvation at all, but the hardships of those years are advertised as the greatest famine in human history, a conclusion that I do not accept. The second charge blames Mao for the extremes of violence and all the personal tragedies that occurred during the Cultural Revolution. Must Mao take the blame for all these phenomena?

William Hinton on the Cultural Revolution

Writing "Fanshen" : a talk by William Hinton - On April 3, 1999, a one-day conference, “Understanding China’s Revolution: a Celebration of William Hinton’s Lifework” was held at Columbia University to celebrate his eightieth birthday. At the conclusion of the conference, organized by China Study Group and cosponsored by Monthly Review and Columbia’s East Asian Institute, Hinton gave an impromptu talk on the background to the writing of Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in A Chinese Village.

William H. Hinton (1919 –2004)

Why the cultural revolution was defeated - a 1979 paper. Nobody can deny that the coup d'etat of October 6, 1976 has resulted in a fundamental change in direction for China, and the dispute was between two fundamentally opposed political lines - whichever side you happen to agree with. Yet it was originally presented as merely the overthrow of four individuals who were described as Kuomintang agents etc., and their defeat was presented as a great victory for Mao Tsetung Thought and the Cultural Revolution. Quite clearly the Cultural Revolution and Mao Tsetung Thought has been defeated in China and this has had enormous repercussions for Marxist-Leninists, or "Maoists" around the world

'Wild Swans' is a Dead Duck

Hegel and the Pseudo-Left - Three postings discussing Hegel's 1886 statement "All that is real is rational; and all that is rational is real", in relation to current pseudo-left ideology.

Assad's Forgotten Man:interview with Syrian intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh

Unmitigated Galloway

Free to choose or compelled to lie? - the rights of voters after Langer v the Commonwealth

Syria-2003 Annual Report

Global Warming Debate in Australia

The Shia Turn in U.S. Policy

The Islamic Paradox: Shiite Clerics, Sunni Fundamentalists, and the Coming of Arab Democracy

Letter from Cairo