Maoist polemicist Raymond Lotta issued a reply to Keith Jamieson’s recent essay, Everything You Know About Communism is Right, and had it passed out in front of the University’s Cobb Hall today.

The reply argues that the atrocities carried out in the last century by Communist revolutionary governments are part of the “learning curve” of the revolutionary project, and corrects the claim that Stalin killed millions of people to reflect the mere 700,000 or so death sentences carried out between 1937 and 1938. He asserts that regardless of the atrocities of communism, people have been lied to about it, and that the record needs to be corrected. His rebuttal also corrects some factual errors from his recent speech.

One of Lotta’s fellow Revolutionary Communist Party members and polemicists (who is curiously unnamed on the flier) will be on campus to informally “take on all comers” next Tuesday, Dec 1, 11am to 3pm in Hutchinson Commons at the University of Chicago.

Observing 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. Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the pampleteers and signature-gatherers on the University of Chicago campus, one type stands out in particular for its smoldering eyes and overall inscrutability. No, I don’t mean the anti-circumcision activist by the Hospital, I’m talking about the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Avakianist entity that dispatches a mix of balding, shabbily-dressed weirdos and weirdo-ettes to hand out socialist newspapers and try to persuade students that the Cultural Revolution was a net plus, and that Stalin wasn’t bad, really, honest, check out our website.