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.

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.

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.”