The Chinese Communist Party is playing dangerous games with history ipolitics.ca - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from ipolitics.ca Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The World Turned Upside Down a critical review (Part 1)
This may be the most difficult book review to write. I have decided to break it into two parts. Writing it is difficult because one has to have huge admiration for Yang Jisheng, a former journalist, now a historian, who has amassed an incredible amount of information about the political maneuvering, personal relations, events and, most importantly, victims of the Cultural Revolution and presented all of this in his new book “
The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Cultural Revolution” (published in English only two months ago). Yang reminds me of those few courageous authors, indignant by the inequities of communism who, beginning with Djilas, then the Medvedev brothers and even Solzhenitsyn himself, or Volkogonov in his biographies of Lenin and Stalin, have written valuable testimonials about the system.
Dutertismo: The myth of political will thestar.com.my - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thestar.com.my Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
After I finished reading Yang Jisheng’s book,
Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962, an extensive analysis on the worst man-made calamity in human history, I couldn’t help but wonder: If Yang’s book were required reading for American college students, would so many young people embrace socialism so enthusiastically?
Yang opens the book with his father’s death in 1959. It was April, and Yang was a high school student. Since his school was far from the village where his father lived, Yang rarely saw his father during the school year. One day, a villager brought Yang the dreadful message his father was dying of starvation. Yang rushed home. He found utter destitution.
As Americans Turn Left, We Should Remember Socialism Killed 36 Million Chinese freerepublic.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from freerepublic.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.