Everything You’ve Been Told About Raymond Lotta Is Sadly Accurate
Written by: Keith Jamieson Add commentsObserving the lecture delivered by Communist grand panjandrum Raymond Lotta, I couldn’t help but feel as though I should share my thoughts on his scintillating exegesis of two or three mid-1960s Mao Zedong speeches. Enjoy. Stay tuned for a blurb on this talk in next week’s issue.
7:13: Lotta begins with a parable about Christian fundamentalists seizing control of America and suppressing the theory of evolution. This is, according to Lotta, “an analogy for the situation that exists in intellectual discourse today with regard to Communism,” which is true insofar as Robert Conquest bases his entire opposition to Communist doctrine on a fervent belief in Jesus. Meaning it is not true.
7:15: Lotta can’t seem to find a comfortable distance from the microphone.
7:16: Lotta claims that the U.S. women’s movement was sparked by the Cultural Revolution. This explains that weird three-year period in which Betty Friedan was such a vocal supporter of the Red Guards.
7:18: Environmentalism is also Communist! Huzzah.
7:20: Lotta asserts that it is the capitalists who are living in the utopian Jesus Cloud Heaven Land, while the ultrarealistic governments of Laos and Cuba continue with their hard-nosed pen-pushing.
7:23: The greatest weapon in the capitalist arsenal appears to be PowerPoint, which Lotta still struggles to use.
7:24: “Socialism is a new form of political power in which the formerly oppressed and exploited, in alliance with the middle classes and professionals and great majority of society, rule over society with the leadership of a visionary, vanguard party.” Guess who thinks they’re in the vanguard party?
7:28: Lotta attempts to imitate the voice of a Japanese imperialist and winds up sounding like Mickey Mouse.
7:30: I can’t actually see Lotta from where I’m sitting, but his shadow appears to wobble a great deal.
7:36: Lotta nearly shouts when he gets excited.
7:37: Change that to “does shout.”
7:47: Lotta quotes Mao praising poverty: “The most outstanding thing about China’s 600 million people is that they are ‘poor and blank.’ This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing. Poverty gives rise to the desire for change, the desire for action and the desire for revolution.” This is somehow a riposte.
7:50: Lotta successfully legitimizes the Cultural Revolution by quibbling over two quotes in a semi-legitimate biography of Mao and Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine.
7:54: “The Cultural Revolution was the high point of socialist revolution in the 20th century.”
8:03: China has achieved universal health care! All objections to Communism are moot.
8:07: It is almost astonishing how devoid of actual facts this lecture is.
8:09: Reeeeeally looking forward to the Q&A.
8:12: “This brings me to the final part of my talk.” HOORAY!
8:23: Sorry, guys. Tuned out for about ten minutes. Lotta is still talking.
8:29: Q&A session begins with a massive exodus among the audience and a request for tithing by the sadly enthusiastic pseudorevolutionaries.
8:30: The Communists are planning a meeting soon at “Medici’s,” which they pronounce as though it were founded by Lorenzo the Magnificent. I find this somewhat ironic.
8:37: Surprisingly friendly Q&A thus far. A lot less ranting from devout Marxists or furious objections by the Ayn Rand contingent than I’d hoped for.
8:38: Lotta’s answers to the questions he’s asked are very long.
8:40: Very long.
8:42: Terrifyingly long.
8:45: The audience is evidently afraid of criticizing Lotta on the basis of ignoring massive democides and prefers to take him to task for slight misinterpretations of economics. U Chicago, U Chicago…
That was all I could take. I heard the Q&A session livened up somewhat after I left, but I’d really had enough of content-free defenses of violent social reconstruction systems. As I said, check out the even more histrionic blurb next week.
November 12th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
oh my god. this commentary is wonderful.
November 13th, 2009 at 2:18 am
Histrionic is the appropriate term for the above substance-less and obnoxious commentary. Histrionic, defined as “excessively dramatic, insincere, or artificial.” Certainly insincere and artificial fits. Now, here’s Lotta on Tibet during the Cultural Revolution: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE5YG-5jAvY
November 13th, 2009 at 2:26 am
Lotta revealed deep and shocking flaws and lies in some of the most regarded scholarship which alleges to “prove” that the history of communist revolutions in the 20th century were horrors. He articulated the significance of a new synthesis on communist revolution that has been infused with the real lessons of the previous experience by Bob Avakian. And he took questions from many angles, many rapid-fire and proved he had the facts and analysis to back up his claims.
This blog entry is extremely low level. Besides irrelevant criticisms (as if someone’s volume or slide-showing technique are the basis on which to evaluate the substance of their arguments), all this review does is the very thing that Lotta systematically and substantively refuted– that is, make unsubstantiated claims that rest on nothing but the conventional wisdom that “communism is bad.”
November 13th, 2009 at 11:23 am
In response to the above criticisms: the tone I decided to strike with my commentary tended toward the humorous (to say the least) because I didn’t think it was worth dignifying Lotta’s “arguments,” such as they were, with a thorough response. Insofar as I could tell, Lotta’s speech consisted first of arguing against the accuracy of two passages in Mao: The Told Story (after first claiming that it represents a pillar of Western scholarship about Mao, which we can see from even a cursory glance at Wikipedia it does not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao:_The_Untold_Story#Criticism) and then some tepid criticism of two other academic works before moving on to an incredibly lengthy, totally unsubstantiated elegy to the Cultural Revolution. Did Lotta cite even one source during his talk? I find this ironic for someone whose main criticism of Western scholarship on the matter is that their research is lousy.
I’m more than willing to concede to Mr. Lotta that Mao: The Unknown Story is a poorly-researched book. I’m even willing to grant that Western scholarship on the Cultural Revolution is quite possibly not all that it should be, probably because China remains a politically closed country and we don’t yet have access to government archives as we did in the case of the Soviet Union (I note that most neocommunist denial of the worst excesses of the Great Purges and the Five-Year Plans has ceased since those records came to light). What I can’t allow is the notion that, because Mao may not have explicitly uttered one or two quotes in an unscholarly biography, it’s acceptable to make light of the deaths of at least 40 million people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism#Estimated_number_of_victims ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Jisheng ; before you start complaining that I’m using as a reference a website that anyone can edit, the statistics I hope you’re reading are, unlike Mr. Lotta’s arguments, sourced to actual research).
I don’t think that “communism is bad” because of conventional wisdom or because it was what I’ve been told to believe. I think that communism is bad because, according to the vast, vast majority of unbiased scholarship (much of it undertaken by individuals who once thought the same as you), in the 20th century purportedly socialist regimes murdered millions upon millions of people. Those die-hard pseudo-Marxists who continue to deny this not only embarrass real progressives everywhere (and I count myself among those whom Mr. Lotta would condemn as a liberal enemy), you make a mockery of the “scientific” tag you so proudly claim. My blog post here is offensive because I found Mr. Lotta’s comments offensive; I can only fervently hope that those audience members who did not arrive to the talk with Mao’s Little Red Book in hand were less persuaded by his outrageous ignorance of historical truth.
November 13th, 2009 at 11:24 am
The title of the book is Mao: The Unknown Story. For some reason, I have it in my first usage as Mao: The Told Story. Sorry for any confusion.
November 13th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Excellent commentary, Keith!
November 13th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
You were clearly too busy prooftexting Lotta to hear the citations he mentioned throughout the talk (and in the Q&A). Including Dongping Han’s The Unknown Cultural Revolution, Mobo Gao’s Gaos Village and Some of Us: Women Growing Up in the Mao Era. Also, read Lotta’s open letter to Tony Judt where he cites one of the authors of the Black Book of Communism himself refuting much of that scholarship. (http://raymondlottatour.blogspot.com/2009/11/open-letter-to-tony-judt-from-raymond.html)
November 20th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
[...] Experimental Station, part of the annual worldwide Tellabration. Weekly writer Keith Jamieson, who liveblogged Raymond Lotta’s talk last week, explains what’s wrong with Communism. Lagniappe brings [...]
December 2nd, 2009 at 3:44 am
Ditto what Sandra said. Lotta had already mentioned in promotional materials for this tour that one of the editors (or writers of the intro, I can’t remember) of this supposedly authoritative “black book of communism” has since disassociated himself from the work. Jamieson could have at least known this before he wrote this ridiculous blog entry, but he’s so intent on proof-texting Lotta that his only rebuttal is to cite the black book of communism, as if it were somehow objective and impartial. While assuring us that the “vast, vast majority of unbiased scholarship” supports his view, all Jamieson can pull out is a wikipedia link to the black book. This indeed typifies the attitude of many progressives nowadays to communism, and it’s one that Lotta addressed with substance, including by speaking to a number of the claims made in the black book itself.
And yes, Lotta DID cite books including by Chinese scholars as Sandra corrected Jamieson on, but since these authors (and arguably the majority of the 60s generation alive in China today!) view the Mao era rather favorably, their insights don’t merit the dignity of a “through” response from Jamieson the “real progressive”, or indeed any response at all. I’m sure Mobo Gao, Bai Di, and Dongping Han would be perplexed to hear they’re not real scholars who do, as Jamieson thunders, “actual research.”
I recommend Jamieson undertake some holiday reading of any of these 3 authors. I would love to see a book review or blog entry about one of them sometime, if he can avoid the snide hysterics.