My partner keeps trying to read it and they keep stopping and reading me passages and then looking up actual historical fact and going wtf, this book is nonsense? Does it get better?
I don’t know I haven’t read it. I told them I’d ask here. Does it get better? Is it anti communist propaganda or is the ridiculous anti communist screed that starts this book serious off just setup for something better?
Thanks for all the good answers I showed them the whole thread and they said a lot of what you all said is in line with their understanding. So basically the first bit is a caricature of the bad parts of early Chinese communism and then that gets better but it turns misogynist instead. Fun series. They’ll continue to read because we have a lot of family and friends who LOVE the book and they want to understand why but it’s helpful to have the lens on it
It’s standard high intelligentsia (We are super smart and the people are wrong and stupid mobs) stuff. Yes the Cultural Revolution sucked and his take is based on non-representative examples of some of the worst excesses (I don’t think anyone was beaten to death for einstein, though), but the critique is similar to that of upper class Soviet intellectuals bitching about how a mine worker earned as much as a doctor.
While still not wanting to work in the mines, btw. That’s the part that always kills me when I read these accounts, is the intelligentsia bitching about how they did so well in school, and these damn workers are taking up so many resources even though they didn’t do well in school. There is no one going ‘Then you go work in the mines if you think it is that easy.’
The good (bad) part of the Cultural Revolution was that that would forcibly happen. Professors who complained how easy the peasants had it were literally kidnapped by student organizations and dropped off in the country side to fend for themselves. The problem was that it was massively disorganized and a pretty easy system to abuse, which also gave the professors no incentive to actually grade anything. But there was a short-time, where if you said bullshit, you ate shit for it, and no one ever forgot about it.
i work in academia and i gotta say, there are a lot of people here who deserve to be deeply humiliated.
Yeah… about once a week when I am at school I hear something and find myself thinking ‘Maybe Mao was right.’ but that is generally an unhealthy thought. Especially since, as violent as the Chinese CR got, an American CR would likely be twice as bloody because we have basically no regard for our fellow citizens.
The best imaginable future for the Failed States of America is still an absolute fucking nightmare isn’t it