Twilight Struggles, Then and Now: A Review of The Party Line
The West’s confrontation with Islam is the great drama of our time. Yet both the theater world and the movie industry – sometimes out of outright fear, sometimes out of a misguided notion of sensitivity to Islam, and sometimes out of a toxic combination thereof – have conspicuously avoided making drama out of that drama.
There have been very few exceptions to this rule. Almost all have been craven, mendacious exercises in multicultural cringing and Western self-hatred. For anyone who recognizes how crucial a role compelling theater or film can play in helping us to understand our own era, in moving us with stories that communicate that era’s most urgent truths, and in giving us the strength to tackle its most formidable challenges, this well-nigh universal silence amounts to a shameful abdication of responsibility.
The Party Line, a two-act play by Sheryl Longin and Roger L. Simon that has just been published by Criterion Books but that has not yet been produced, is a brave and admirable effort to fill this disgraceful void. For that alone, it is deserving of great commendation.
But it is far more than that.
Before I say what The Party Line (available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble) is, however, let me first say what it is not. It is not a conventional narrative. Its settings range from New York to Amsterdam to Moscow to Florida; its time frame shifts constantly, mostly between the 1930s and 1990s (although one scene takes place as early as 1920 and another as late as 2003); and it contains a mix of fictional characters and real historical figures.
It is, in short, a highly ambitious concoction. And – unlike the future that Lincoln Steffens thought he had experienced on his 1919 visit to the Soviet Union – it works. It is, in fact, a wonderfully conceived and strangely moving creation that I am extremely eager to see performed on a stage.
At the play’s center are two colorful, remarkable, larger-than-life men who actually existed. One of them is Walter Duranty (1884-1957), the British-born journalist who served as the New York Times‘s Moscow correspondent from 1922 to 1936. In his heyday a much-heralded figure (he won the Times a Pulitzer), Duranty lived to see his star fall when it became increasingly clear that during his tenure in Moscow he’d been nothing but a lying Kremlin mouthpiece – one who was so utterly lacking in conscience that he strove to cover up the Ukrainian famine and to smear his worthier colleagues who strove to get out the truth. Like Quisling’s name, Duranty’s has entered the lexicon, becoming a byword for fraudulent journalism about totalitarian governments. Among current practitioners of his profession, Duranty is the very symbol of the kind of corruption they should consider themselves honor-bound to avoid.
The other real-life member of the play’s dramatis personae is Pim Fortuyn (1948-2002), the liberal Dutch sociologist-turned-politician who, over a brief period in the 1990s, rose to prominence and popularity in his country as an outspoken critic of its Islamization and who, at the time of his assassination by a radical environmentalist, was in all probability on the verge of becoming prime minister. Like Duranty, Fortuyn has become a symbol – in his case, of valor and nobility of spirit, and, alas, of what can seem, in today’s Europe, like a lost cause, namely the hope of rescuing European liberty from the onslaught of Islam.
To read text, click to enlarge.
It is around the figures of Duranty and Fortuyn that The Party Line pivots. There are superficial similarities between them: both were writers; both prized their creature comforts; both were hedonists, sexual adventurers (one straight, one gay) of whose private lives the play gives us a glimpse. But otherwise they were opposites. Duranty – who, in Stalinist Moscow, led a life of capitalist luxury – was, as much in his personal life as in his professional life, utterly indifferent to the fate of others; among other things, he was, as the play illustrates, quick to abandon the Russian woman he had lived with for years and the son she bore him. Fortuyn, by contrast, had a deep-seated sense of responsibility to others, both personally and in the larger world, and it was this that motivated him to risk life, limb, and love to preserve for all Dutchmen the freedom he so prized himself.
The life stories of Duranty and Fortuyn are both about party lines. Duranty chose to toe the Soviet line in exchange for a couple of decades of luxury, honor, and reward – and, as the play shows, a pathetic, disgraced senescence, and an afterlife of obloquy. Fortuyn emphatically rejected the multicultural line, for which he reaped in his lifetime the scorn of the Dutch and the international media (which demonized him, obscenely, as a fascist) and for which he ultimately gave his life – and won a glorious posthumous reputation among his countrymen, who in a poll taken two years after his death named him the greatest Dutchman of all time.
Among the other real-life people to whom The Party Line introduces us is Aleister Crowley, the British Satan-worshipper, “occultist,” and all-around creep and crackpot who, I had forgotten, was actually a friend of Duranty’s, and whose presence in the very first scene of this play helps to set in our minds the idea that, yes, there is such a thing in the world as evil. Another real person who figures in the drama is the loathsome Konstantin Oumansky, director of the Soviet Press Office, who vetted Duranty’s Times dispatches for orthodoxy.
But most of the playwrights’ other characters are inventions, several of whom serve to link Duranty to Fortuyn in one way or another. In real life, nothing is known of the fate of Duranty’s son by his long-suffering Russian common-law wife; that son, in this play, grows up to become Pim Fortuyn’s lover. Sid Brody, a correspondent for UPI, and his wife, Rose, leave New York for Moscow in 1928, true believers in Stalinism determined to do their part for the workers’ revolution. Diana Pierson is a well-meaning American heiress who, smitten by Communism in her youth, has her eyes opened by a tour of the Soviet Union in the 1930s and, six decades later, remembering the lessons she learned as a young woman about totalitarianism, cheers on Pim Fortuyn. Her son, Stockton Rhodes, is a CNN reporter who after Fortuyn’s murder must decide whether to face the threat Fortuyn warned about or remain loyal to mainstream-media orthodoxy – and thus keep his job.
The scenes in which these people meet, size up, and confront one another, in various times and places, are often clipped and, at first, enigmatic. In the beginning, indeed, the play feels almost like a four-dimensional mosaic – a series of snapshots whose relation to one another is not immediately apparent. Gradually, however, the pieces start falling into place, and the connections begin to be perceptible, as if to say, yes, it can take time to grasp the truth.
The playwrights’ point in linking Duranty and Fortuyn by means of so many different threads is clear. Today’s jihadist Islam, like Stalinism, is a form of totalitarianism. Now, as then, many people in the West vigorously deny this and cling to the party line – the views that count as received opinions among the bien pensant. Some do this because they’re true believers; others because they’re cynical careerists; still others because they’re just plain cowards. Then there are the few brave souls who, even though they know they’re courting personal and professional disaster, speak the truth, selflessly, in the name of liberty. Gareth Jones, who doesn’t figure in the play’s cast of characters but whose name figures prominently in the dialogue, was one such hero, reporting the truth about the Ukrainian famine while Duranty was lying about it. Another such hero, of course, was Fortuyn.
Although The Party Line deals with ideas, it’s not the kind of “drama of ideas” in which the characters are the authors’ mouthpieces or nuance-free symbols of good or evil. The men and women who populate this play are living, breathing individuals whose various reactions to totalitarian ideas are recognizable to anyone who has observed such things in real life. Jihadist Islam may not be exactly the same thing as Soviet Communism, but it brings out the same range of responses in free people who are confronted with it. Now, as then, there are media figures who are breathtakingly willing to hide the monstrous truth about despotism in order to keep the despot happy. Now, as then, there are those who see the enemy plain, and are breathtakingly willing to put their lives on the line for liberty.
“Those who cannot remember the past,” Santayana famously observed, “are condemned to repeat it.” Among the lessons of this remarkable play are that the threat of tyranny is eternal, that the ability to be taken in by forms of tyranny disguised as benign answers to all the world’s problems is eternal, and that the challenge to stand up for freedom in the face of such insidious threats is also eternal. Credulity, cowardice, courage – all recur from generation to generation. There will always be people who cherish the freedom to lead their own lives as they wish; there will always be those who desperately crave an ideal order to which they can subordinate themselves. Some treasure the truth, some can’t face it, and some profit by being pathological liars. The same drama repeats itself time and again, with the forces of darkness appearing in different forms and under different names, and the heroes and villains not always instantly recognizable.
No other dramatic work with which I am familiar, either on stage or on screen, has summed up the salient truths of our time as effectively as The Party Line does. It is nothing less than a profound statement about the lessons of the last century – and about the failure of so many people to learn them. Yet what makes it so powerful is that it does not come across as remotely preachy. On the contrary, it is a deeply human story that – one hopes – will speak to a wide range of audiences, opening their eyes to realities that are right in front of their noses, but from which they have been trained to look away.
Read another review of The Party Line at City Journal by Stefan Kanfer.
Sounds great to me and goes straight to my reading list. Nobody knows better than Roger the problems of getting a script into film production and a play is even tougher. It’s chances are much better if it has had a successful Broadway run, an even tougher obstacle. Itwill be interesting to observe the level of venom from the socialist media. The nastier it is, the better your chances.
The sooner we become a nation of reasoned Islamaphobes thebetterour hopes for survival. I continue to believe that we should stop referring to Socialist, of whatever semantic definition, by that term rather than as liberal or leftist. That they would Loudly protest makes it an even better reason.
I call them the Insane Left.
If I were to call them, it would be a bunch of short, sharp, Anglo-Saxon words…
This also goes straight to my reading list. Sounds terrific.
I came across a Hayek passage just before Thanksgiving that explained why media and education need to keep the masses weak and uninformed by anything that could weaken the government’s Overlordship. It becomes a dominant concern anytime government is seeking to ramp up control over the economy and individual behavior as the Stalinists, Fascists, Islamists, and, I would argue, the Ecosystem Industrial Policy Obama laid out in the Belmont Challenge also seeks to do.
I visualized Candy Crowley and the Second Debate when I read the line about ” Everything that might cause doubt about the wisdom of the government or create discontent will be kept from the public.”
Later remembering Duranty I decided that Candy Crowley Duranty would be an apt description. I had no idea his duplicity was being recognized again in what sounds like a prescient play.
Ah, left/libtards… they’ll always hate freedom, American sovereignty and any economic system that can’t provide limitless goods for everyone without cost.
Must be serendipity, but drudge has a link today to a 11-17-2012 PRAVDA article titled: “Obama’s Soviet Mistake”. (or google). Pravda compares Obama’s economic plans to the old USSR’s state-run economic system. Putin is compared to Ronald Reagan. And no, I am not making this up, and their arguments are interesting.
After reading the article, I thought, now I know how Alice felt after she fell down the rabbit hole.
Stalinists, Islamists, Nazis/fascists (sorry, lefties, they were also of the left), socialists, and Obamists are all about controlling people and nothing more. It does say something about the intelligence and judgment of the average person that there isn’t a near universal abhorrence of these people.
The Fairness Freaks in the dem party will do anything to get their hands on your money in order to bail out the troubled blue states and save the Blue State social model. In other words, all of the new taxes Washington plans to levy are about to go down the latest Obama rat hole.
We are living and breathing in 1984 and have been for some time. And those responsible for transforming Orwell’s depressing vision into our living reality –academics, journalists and politicians–are our best and our brightest and all have surely read George Orwell’s prophetic novel.
Now comes Roger Simon with a political play to make it all right. George Orwell’s brilliant writing was insufficient to keep us from polluting and perverting our language and our politics but Roger Simon still believes in the power of literature.
Good luck.
I don’t believe we are at the 1984 point, But Orwell did give us a couple masterpiece works as in 1984 and Animal Farm.
Animal Farm repleat with the message: Forward comrades! Long live the windmill! Long live Animal Farm. Yet somebody used the word prescient in a previous comment. So I believe this hits the mark quite well;
“The various Bureaux of Propaganda and the College of Emotional Engineering were housed in a single sixty-story building in Fleet Street. In the basement and on the low floors were the presses and offices of the three great London newspapers–The Hourly Radio, an upper-caste sheet, the pale green Gamma Gazette, and, on khaki paper and in words exclusively of one syllable, The Delta Mirror. Then came the Bureaux of Propaganda by Television, by Feeling Picture, and by Synthetic Voice and Music respectively–twenty-two floors of them. Above were the research laboratories and the padded rooms in which Sound-Track Writers and Synthetic Composers did the delicate work. The top eighteen floors were occupied the College of Emotional Engineering.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
What Huxley described was our government and the incestuous relationship between media, government, education and entertainment.
We just had an election to determine who would pay for the Malthusian belt.
Huxley and Orwell have been around for years. If those 2 couldn’t alert the masses, what chance does anybody else have? The masses are not interested.
Our best and our brightest are those who can still reason and see through the lies. I do believe that is more than 50% of Americans.
Sorry to disagree, but you can also draw very close parallels between gay rights and totalitarian Marxism. We have seen that recently with the case in New Jersey, where the government staged what essentially was a show trial against this student from India, who (illegally) photographed his roommate having sex with another man. (The student was charged with manslaughter, after the roommate committed suicide. Interestingly, the defense was not given access to the suicide notes, at least according to press reports.)
The decision by the California legislature to outlaw psychotherapy aimed at discouraging same sex desire also fits nicely into that paradigm. Basically, people providing this service (whatever its practicality) are being accused of a thought crime. Per the next paragraph, let me also mention the effort to drive the Catholic Church out of the adoption business.
The war against the normative notion that children deserve a mother and a father also smacks of Marxism. First, the historical hostility to the family. It may be in the German Ideology that Marx says the family will wither away. The propaganda by Stalin and Mao, whereby children were a preferred vehicle to denounce their parents for counter-revolutionary activity. The rejection of biology implicit in the war against gender evokes Lysenkoism and the war against genetics. The Left despises the family, because they want the state to raise children.
Additionally, HIV. AIDS activists forced public health officials to throw a century of epidemiology out the window, with monstrous consequences. Cuba, for example, which treated AIDS as a communicable disease, and not as some kind of badge of honor, basically stopped AIDS. Not here, which largely set global policy. Really, it’s a perfect analogy between the Ukraine. There was some higher idea, in this case sexual freedom and equality. And if millions needed to die, well it was the idea that had to triumph. Ditto, collectivization. Black women were basically our Kulaks.
This does not mean that Mr. Bawer is wrong about Islam. Clearly, it’s a communal religion, and intrinsically intolerant. But per above, the parallels between the gay, etc. agenda and Marxism are equally as clear, and I would argue, actually clearer. Certainly the body count is much more similar.
We all know gay people. Some believe, rightly or wrongly, that being pro-gay is actually being pro-family.
There are other people, not all of them gay, who are pro-gay because it is anti-family.
Sort that one out.
It’s pro-family if you separate the family and biology. And sure, there is a place for that. It’s called Christianity. Joseph was a good man, the Bible says.
In short, you have redefined the word “family.” Hello Orwell.
Clarify your thinking.
Okay, ninny, read what I said and clarify your own thinking.
Only a New Yorker (or a recent conservative who’s still burdened by the liberal thought process) would confuse an observation with advocacy. You’re looking for an argument and there aren’t any taters where you’re diggin’.
The reason why the U.S. has real trouble confronting Islamism, is that religious freedom has always been part of the American DNA. It’s enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
The U.S. has never had to deal before with a totalitarian ideology that is religious. (Yes, the U.S. and Britain did fight the Barbary Wars, but they fought the piracy, they didn’t confront Islam itself.)
It’s one thing for a U.S. President to (correctly) call the Soviet Union “an evil empire.” But if a U.S. President calls Islam evil, he can be charged with violating the Bill of Rights. The U.S. Government can no more fight Islam than it can fight any other religion. The Constitution expressly forbids it.
The U.S. Government can fight some of the manifestations of Islamism: Regimes that don’t respect human rights, terrorists, etc. But Islam itself is off-limits, according to the First Amendment.
Islam is not a religion, it is a political system, that should be fought by exposing what they do to children, both boys and girls, how they treat women, and infidels.
“Islam is not a religeon…”. That is a popular thing to say, as if it somehow solves a prolem. Islam is in fact a religeon that imposes itself on the state. To insist that it is not a religeon is an unfortunate distraction.
Islam is a religion like Marxism is a religion. Both have their articles of faith, both are blood-thirsty.
This is brilliant. And concise. Freedom of religion was designed for the problems that afflicted Europe. It’s not at all clear that it’s apposite in the case of Islam.
Freedom of speech is.
But per our videographer, Obama has traduced both.
Kinda off-topic (?) but you already saw what Pravda had to say about Obomber reelection???
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/19-11-2012/122849-obama_soviet_mistake-0/
I don’t know if they say this shining truth because in the long term we will learn from hard experiences or out of revenge… It’s the truth nonetheless. Who would tell! And… when Pravda tells the truth when our LameStreamMedia is lying, then we’re… effed up.
Over 1300 years of Islam attempting to establish a worldwide caliphate and the liberals still think we can assimilate into a peaceful coexistence. The only terms of coexistence Islamists have is that the rest of us convert, not convert but pay tribute, or be eliminated.
These were the guidelines set down by the followers of Mohammad in the 100 years after his death as their armies swept across North Africa, Spain, and drove to within 100 miles of Paris before being defeated. Eight hundred years later they swept through the Balkans and threatened Europe until they were repulsed at Vienna. Since then there has been a never ending push, in one area or another to impress Islam on another state. Anyone who believes that a society whose people have been indoctrinated with this philosophy of world domination and absolute hatred of the Jews in particular for a thousand years will suddenly decide to peacefully coexist with the rest the of us? Pure fantasy, that if followed, will lead to Islam’s ultimate victory. Islam has no timetable. They aren’t guided by a term in office or one idividual’s quest for fame. Islam is a quest to be followed to the death, if necessary. Liberals, if they think they can tame this beast, are also on a path to death, not physically perhaps, but surely politically.
NO, the reason the USA has problems confronting Isalm is they are in cahoots with the Left. Go over to Europe if you want to see where this is leading.
The Left wants to destroy our civilization. They have a good shot at it.
Okay, I’ll bite. This goes on the Christmas list.
About history. Whether we read it our not, whether it’s taught or not, whether it’s believed or not, it repeats endlessly. Like earthquakes, hurricanes, drought…there is absolutely nothing to stop its cycle. All we can do is put plywood over the windows and hope for the best.
If as my ancient relative said, “Hunger is the best pickle”, then experience is the best teacher.
There is no arguing with those committed to revealed truth no matter its nature or source. We will pay the ‘butcher’s bill’ but that is the only path to wisdom, if one person or a group keeps to their fantasies when reality calls.
Moritur et ridet….
Not being snarky but perhaps PBS will produce it. They broadcast Radio Pacifica’s Democracy Now propaganda ooops I mean News show, why should truthful or conservative presentation be denied, yea right.
The reason Obama was elected (beside the Santa Claus effect) is that a lot of people had a sense of hopelessness that they couldn’t affect the outcome with their one vote. Too many Americans today suffer from the Mongo syndrome, they think they are only pawns I the game of life.
Last line should have ended “….in the game of life.”
just read this play and was blown away. weird, funny and almost unreal, except that it actually happened. not even so much political as entertaining as hell.
All right, I’ll buy it and read it… but then I’ll also comment on it.
I sure hope it delivers, because we need an avalanche of push-back in the culture wars. And if it does well, it will also pave the way for others to follow. Nothing suceeds like sucess.
The Left have been using their virtual lock on Hollywood, American journalism and Academia to produce what Duranty won his Pulitzer for, the propaganda in which the West is currently awash. Those who recognize and have the courage to write or speak about the worldwide threat of Islam, are routinely demonized as Islamophobes, radical, misogynistic, racist, fascist, bigots, effectively marginalizing their warnings and imparting “innocent victim” status on Islamists who threaten and commit violence around the world on a daily basis, all in the name of Islam.
What is truly disturbing and revealing about the determination of the West to perpetually continue this dangerous charade is their treatment of Geert Wilders, who, like his fellow countryman, Pim Fortuyn, has been aggressively attacked by these pseudo intellectual, narcissistic, idealistic, politically correct, appeasers and deniers in the West. Among these would include such famous and popular, conservative media icons, Charles Krauthammer and Glenn Beck.
How to change the public mindset which these idealistic miscreants have created? This play is a small step in the right direction but it will not likely influence us “soap consumers” until produced in an “in your face” format as a motion picture and as main stream TV fare. This is, after all, why the current majority attitudes of ignorance and denial exist in the first place.
What, for example, is known about the impending utter failure of the idealistic but totally unrealistic policy of multi-culturalism in Europe? Here’s a modern, real life example occurring in another Northern European nation, Denmark, as reported in the Jewish Press on 11/25/2012. That’s yesterday.
http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/converting-denmark-into-a-muslim-country/2012/11/25/
Do any of our patriotic and equally idealistic friends in the aforementioned, clueless triumvirate believe this to be a one off, isolated incident? Are they even aware or care if it doesn’t fit their preferred narrative? There is precious little evidence of this.
“Now, as then, there are media figures who are breathtakingly willing to hide the monstrous truth about despotism in order to keep the despot happy.”
The elites in the MSM have long ago decided what the course this country should be – seems the Democrat party agree. We see glipses in the news daily what the lives of people under islamic rule brings them. I don’t understand it. The American people see for themselves the lives the average person in those islamic controlled countries yet they don’t really
‘see it’. There seems to be a disconnect – maybe the eyes glaze over? Are we so incapable of drawing a parallel from what is ‘over there’ can be imported here? Have the islamics not stated on multiple occasions their intent for the USA? And most likely will succeed if more Americans do not ‘get up in arms’.
As the ancient saying goes ‘there are none so blind as those who will not see’. Have we become that disengaged with life and the concept of liberty that we no longer ‘see’? 50 years ago the left would have had no problem identifying an external threat. What happened? Seems they are only focused now on internal (real or perceived) threats – and only if that threat is non-muslim.
Interesting that Pim Fortuyn is in this book (which looks like an interesting read). Fortuyn was in no way, shape, or form in line to become Prime Minister, but he was having a real effect on the electorate. Fortuyn was an ultra-liberal in many ways, bending the “left” so far around the spectrum that he became “right”. His opposition to Islam was based in Islam’s highly conservative views of women, homosexuals, and child rearing. The American Right cannot even remotely claim Fortuyn as one of their own except to the degree that he was anti-immigration. Fortuyn’s lasting legacy is only one of anti-immigration – the political party he founded continues to achieve some limited success in being the nationalistic alternative to main Dutch political parties.
“The American Right cannot even remotely claim Fortuyn as one of their own except to the degree that he was anti-immigration.”
You have no idea what American conservatives believe.
Educate yourself, and abandon the bigotry that informed your comment above.
Huh? Lots of American conservatives want to reduce immigration. You can debate the causes.
In the beginning of the 20th century there was a lot of opposition to immigration. I don’t think a balanced history has been written. Some of it was racism, Darwinism. Some of it was the cultural issues involving people, who had less constructive characteristics. Some of it was ideological, which probably is the straw that broke the camel’s back with the Palmer Raids, etc.
As a New Yorker, I like immigration. But it also has costs. As a Christian, I feel that Christmas is kinda fading. Which is sad.
Some good publishers will come out with some books about multi-cultural cities in the past, Constantinople, Alexandria, Baghdad, Beirut, perhaps some coastal cities in India.
Post 2012, I think that the main source of anti-immigration feeling will be that all non-non-Hispanic whites voted for Obama and serious people believe that will lead to bankruptcy, in California, for example.
Did Republicans agree to make Jesse Jackson a senator from Washington, D.C.? I don’t think so.
These things are complicated and are presumably moving too fast for comfort.
Oops. Non-whites who also are not hispanic, since huge numbers of “Hispanics” are white. The genius of the Obama campaign was to get Asians, who are discriminated against by affirmative action, to make common cause with those who discriminate against them.
To be a committed leftist, one must be in love with treason.
The more leftward, the deeper the love and the greater the treachery.
Treason, traitorism and treachery are the hallmarks of people who believe that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. There is not a liberty of yours they will not trample.
Unfortunately, they make great con artists. Hiding most often as “compassionate liberals” or even “centrists” at times, they are masters at disguising their intent and ultimate goals.
Thus, if you point at them or shake your fist in rage at their evil…they will alternately scoff at you as a “tinfoil hatter”, or beat their breasts with feigned sanctimony and plead absolute innocence. Better we should hang them all than debate them. With Republicans as our voice, one day we will be the ones left hanging. Permanently.
To be a committed leftist, one must be in love with death.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-20410424
Yang Jisheng: The man who discovered 36 million dead
The Untold Story of Mao’s Great Famine, published in the West this year to high acclaim.
Yang, aged 72, is neat, small, swaddled in two jumpers despite the shafts of winter sunlight that stream across his desk. He is rummaging through his shelves on the hunt for a book whose title is important: by a Western author whose name has slipped his mind.
“Something about slavery?” he says. I try the name Hayek and after a bit of transliteration it works. He had stumbled on Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in a library and chuckles with mild scepticism when I tell him it is probably the most influential book in Western economics:
“Before I read Hayek, I had only read works the party wanted me to. Hayek says that to use the state to promote a utopia is very dangerous. In China that’s exactly what they did. The utopia promoted by Marx, even though it is beautiful, it is very dangerous.”
Even now, 50 years on, Chinese official history insists the famine of 1958-61 was a natural disaster. Yang’s work demonstrates the famine’s massive scale and its direct, political causes.