Should NYU faculty and their dependent children receive full tuition remission?
Communist revolutionary Raymond Lotta may have a point — everything we've been told about communism is wrong.
Except Lotta and his cabal believe Marxist revolutions humanely emancipated the masses and can do so again in the U.S. with the "firm grip" of a new socialist revolutionary.
Such thinking is antithetical to actual history. Communism as a form of governance, despite whatever affinity liberal professors and students may have for this utopia of collectivism, is worse than anything conceived in our worst nightmares.
Allow me to debunk three of the many incorrect claims made by Lotta at his speech at the Cantor Film Center Monday evening.
1. "(Communism) is a liberating experience."
I suppose Lotta's definition of "liberating" includes no free press, merciless suppression of dissent, indefinite internment in gulags, forced collectivization of peasantry property, the starvation of millions induced from food rationing, and pogroms throughout Poland. This concept of communist liberation is a sick joke to victims of the Stalin and Mao regimes, under which approximately 20 million and 40 million perished, respectively.
2. "Communism made extraordinary strides in equality."
This is totally bogus. As soon as the Bolsheviks hijacked power, they were unapologetic and merciless in their use of terror, irrespective of one's position in society. Take, for example, the mass executions of Cossacks, an ethnic group that benefited from its favorable political status under the former tsarist government. Between 1919 and 1920, about half a million Cossacks were either killed or deported after the region's Bolshevik president called for an indiscriminate policy of mass extermination. This single episode is one of many mass murders executed under the guidance of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, who were together responsible for more deaths than Hitler.
3. "Religion is a great shackle and chain around the masses of people."
This lie is unsurprising; communism is inherently anti-religious. The three main monotheistic religions — Christianity, Judaism and Islam — teach worshipers that individual rights come from their Creator. This is a clear threat to communism's atheistic world view that humans are mere protoplasm, subject to the decrees of dictators and the caprices of commissars. Religion, in actuality, liberates humanity with the knowledge that individual sovereignty is a self-evident truth, which Thomas Jefferson kindly reminded us of when he said, "God who gave us life gave us liberty."
About two weeks from now the world will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. However uplifting the fall of the Berlin Wall may feel in our hearts, the fact our society still has to debate the merits of communism is discouraging.
For some reason, we either ignore or forget the sinister elements of communism — the gulags, mass executions and collectivization techniques — and focus instead on the false nobility of communist revolutionaries. They want to cure the natural inequities of capitalism, so we are told, to revolutionize and change the world and free societies of exploitation and poverty. They will deny themselves all earthly comforts to attain these desired ends, but they do so through the most sinister of means.
These utopian fantasies, in turn, make malleable minds desirous for revolutionary causes or at least neglectful of communism's very real horrors.
Jack
Oct 29, 2009
10 a.m.
Jefferson also said "Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity," and "It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it [the Apocalypse], and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams," amongst other things. Odd choice of citing someone who supports religion. Try Bush.
I agree with most everything you said, save that religion promotes individual liberty. On the whole, I believe that organized religion is up there with communism as a world view that has enslaved people and caused vast death and destruction. This a very personally held belief, mind you, and I don't seek to insult anyone, but I am just of said opinion.
rdrd
Oct 29, 2009
12 p.m.
Here is an example of shoddy journalism seeking to perpetuate the institutionalized and enforced ignorance about what communism actually is and has been (hand in hand with a defense of the status quo). In his talk Monday night, Raymond Lotta took apart several of these lies, wielding facts and citing sources. In an attempt to "debunk" Lotta's talk, Williams cites not one source or provides any backing for his claims. (And if Mr. Williams was in the audience Monday night, he could've posed any of these questions to Lotta where he would've answered them clearly.)
This deserves a serious platform and I won't attempt to take this article on in a web comment, but I would just quickly point readers to 1. this video from Lotta where he takes apart the lie that "Mao killed millions" repeated here by the writer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms99-3Nj81I) and 2. the answers - with citations - to the quiz that several hundred of you took AND FLUNKED with basic questions about communism (http://www.revcom.us/a/178/STRS_quiz-en.html)
Xinjiang
Oct 31, 2009
11:12 a.m.
To those revisionists who say that Mao didn't kill millions, there are more than a few survivors of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward that I know in Chinatown that you should meet.
Tina
Nov 01, 2009
9:06 p.m.
Saying that you know a "survivors" in Chinatown that say Mao killed millions is not even a scientific refutation of what actually happened in the Cultural Revolution.
There is actually going to be an entire symposium about the Cultural Revolution in Berkeley on November 6 where you will hear from people who lived it.... and loved it.
Hear from youth who went to the countryside to work and learn from the peasants....artists who set out to create revolutionary art....women who struggled against feudal tradition....people who look back at this period as some of the best years of their lives. And learn from scholars whose work brings to life a crucial and vital legacy of liberation.
For more info visit: http://www.revcom.us/a/181/Berkeley-en.html
definition of Revisionist: A tendency within the Communist movement to revise Marxist theory in such a way as to provide justification for a retreat from the revolutionary to the reformist position.
If you are looking for revisionism, you might want to look in the mirror....
Xinjiang
Nov 02, 2009
9:43 a.m.
Clearly the source you should look to is the communist party, since the body that wants to whitewash the butchery of millions in an effort to be something other than completely irrelevant is the source for you.
What about the destruction of thousands of years of Chinese history and art? The destruction of 6,000 Tibetan monasteries? The hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people killed? Their civil liberties maimed? Children sent to labor on collectivized, failed farms? The torture and killing perpetrated by Red Guards? Note that even the modern CCP views the cultural revolution as a massive failure.
Only an utter sociopath with Maoist blinders on would see what the Gang of Four did as "the best times of their lives."
Xinjiang
Nov 02, 2009
9:45 a.m.
That "symposium" includes exactly three sheltered Chinese academics and people who are so steadfastly Maoist that any sort of impartiality is utterly lost. I didn't know the bleatings of seven people could undo the murder of hundreds of thousands of people!
Jesse
Nov 03, 2009
3:49 a.m.
Here is your logic, you say you know people who lived through the cultural revolution and it was a horror, somebody refutes you by saying that there are people who lived through it that are going to talk about their experience and you say it is irrelevent. And actually, these people are not just sheltered academics who are Maoists. Sounds like you haven't even read any of their works. Mao said to party members once, " No investigation, no right to speak." I say the same to you.
First you say that Mao killed millions of people, then you say he killed hundreds of thousands. Which is it? You better get your slanders straight. You are spreading lies and you don't know what you are talking about. You should make up some new ones since these slanders were all scientifically refuted in the program.
P.S. You couldn't even muster one source for all your bs slanders!
Xinjiang
Nov 09, 2009
11:15 p.m.
Six people saying "it was totally cool" doesn't change the fact it was terrible for the vast majority of people. I have no idea why you're so obsessed with a figure that even the Chinese today are trying to distance themselves ideologically from or why you're so apologetic.
Mao killed millions of people over his reign but hundreds of thousands were killed during the Cultural Revolution.
This is what I said: "The hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people killed?" You might want to reread sentences before you claim ultimate victory.
Unless a six-person panel talking about how fine and dandy it was during the cultural revolution refutes the graves of hundreds of thousands of dead people, I'd hardly say science got involved. Or somehow restored religious and cultural artifacts from the dust they were reduced from.
"It is estimated that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, perished in the violence of the Cultural Revolution. When Mao was informed of such losses, particularly that people had been driven to suicide, he blithely commented: "People who try to commit suicide — don't attempt to save them! . . . China is such a populous nation, it is not as if we cannot do without a few people."
^ MacFarquhar, Roderick; Schoenhals, Michael (2006). Mao's Last Revolution. Harvard University Press. pp. 110. ISBN 0674023323.
Whoops!
Please construe the Red Guards as anything other than a massively organized mob whose job it was to terrorize people for thinking differently or practicing religion or hunting down peasants for being "bourgeois". Please. Cite a source that is completely biased.
You might also want to watch this documentary, too.
http://www.morningsun.org/
Or that the Gang of Four were anything other than dictators. Keep in mind the modern CCP does everything they can to NOT mention the Cultural Revolution and sweep everything under the rug, like they do with Tianamen/Uighurs/Tibetans/their own citizens in labor prisons. If it was so great and successful, why wouldn't they trumpet it?
I guess the only conclusion is that it was a hugely traumatic disaster for the entire country. Whoops!
Elizabeth
Nov 02, 2009
11:15 a.m.
You do know the different between Communism and the USSR, right? Do you?
anti-communist
Nov 07, 2009
5:10 p.m.
hey maoist - i have a different source for you
http://ninecommentaries.com/
leave a comment
Comments from unregistered users will appear once they are approved. Log in to have your comment show up immediately.