---
title: "Review Of The Cultural Revolution, Dikötter 2016"
description: "The Cultural Revolution was one of the greatest disasters in human history, the result of a self-reinforcing cycle of ideology failing to match reality and unsolved social problems, and the deranged reaction of zealots triggering defection and civil warfare."
created: 2019-04-27
modified: 2021-05-14
status: finished
confidence: likely
importance: 5
css-extension: dropcaps-cheshire
...
> Dikötter's history of the Cultural Revolution ([[*[The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962--1976](https://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Revolution-Peoples-History-1962_1976/dp/1632864231/)*]{.book-review-title} [[Frank Dikötter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Dik%C3%B6tter)]{.book-review-author}[2016]{.book-review-date}[★★★★☆]{.book-review-rating}]{.book-review-meta}) offers a broad overview of the multiple failures and follies of Maoism, which culminated in some of the most destructive and disastrous events in human history: the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward/[Great Famine](!W), and the Third Front.
>
> The Cultural Revolution was not prompted by any extraordinary famine, or invasion, or genuine threat of invasion, or civil war, or disaster of any kind. How then could it have happened? The Cultural Revolution was sponsored by Mao as a way to purge the middle and upper ranks of the Communist Party of doubters, who might do to him what the Soviets had just done to Stalin: tear down his cult by revealing his monstrous crimes to the world. But Mao didn't realize the forces he unleashed. Maoism had benefited from taking credit for post-WWII recovery and the defeat of Japan, but the more its policies were implemented and it tightened its grip, the greater the gap between its utopian promises and the grim impoverished Chinese reality became. Because its theories were radically and systematically wrong, any honest attempt to implement them was doomed to fail, and anyone pragmatic would necessarily betray the system. Old systems and 'inequities' reasserted themselves, to the frustration of true believers.
>
> The only ideologically-permissible explanations were excuses like saboteurs and spies and corrupt officials. Usually kept in check, when given Mao's imprimatur and active egging on, mass social resentment and ideological frustration boiled over, leading to a frenzy of virtue-signaling, denunciations, preference falsification spirals, murders, cannibalism, and eventually outright civil war and pandemic. Finally, Mao decided enough purging had happened and his position was secure, and brought it to an end. As strange and awful as it was, the Cultural Revolution offers food for thought on how politics can go viciously wrong, and dangerous aspects of human psychology.
Narrative account of the [Cultural
Revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution). The
Cultural Revolution, along with the Great Leap Forward/Great Famine &
[Third Front](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Front_(China)), were
collectively one of the worst things in human history, and I am
embarrassed to be so ignorant of them. Dikötter offers a recent look at
the Cultural Revolution and particularly the unusual political tactics &
social [fad/cycle](/note/fashion "'Fashion Cycles', Gwern 2021") dynamics which made it so destructive despite not being a
(conventional) civil war or invasion.
As Dikötter explains it, the CR was a second revolution, or coup within
the Party, by an aging Mao, who intended to eliminate his enemies &
threats to his legacy.
Mao, that supreme narcissist, believed himself a greater Communist
leader than Stalin and was determined to avoid Stalin's 2 major
mistakes---having an industrial heartland near the enemy Nazi Germany,
and leaving behind a Communist Party with strong figures like heir
apparent [Lin Biao](!W) who would be able to denounce [his cult of
personality](https://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com/2012/10/ten-thousand-melodies-cannot-express.html "'Ten thousand melodies cannot express our boundless hot love for you': the Cult of Personality in Mao's China")
in a version of [Khrushchev's Secret
Speech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Cult_of_Personality_and_Its_Consequences)
& 'de-Stalinize' once he was gone.
Mao dealt with the first issue (the threat of American invasion (!)^[In reality, no such invasion was possible or contemplated, nor was there any spying of note. Like the USSR, Western HUMINT in Communist China was a colossal failure; hence the investment of so many billions into the most exotic [spy satellites](!W "KH-9 Hexagon") or [feats of cryptography](!W "Venona project").] was
to be remedied by sinking a staggering percentage of Chinese GDP down
the rat hole of the "Third Front" ie a vast industrial program to
build useless ill-designed shoddily-built factories hidden away in
mountains), and turned his attention to not just promulgating
["anti-revisionism"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-revisionism)
but 'reforming' the Community Party to ensure there would be no
de-Maoification, while avoiding direct action himself to escape blame
and exploit the [power of 'robust
action'/non-commitment](https://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com/2014/02/francisco-franco-robust-action-and.html "Francisco Franco, Robust Action, and the Power of Non-Commitment")
([Padgett and Ansell
1993](https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~snijders/PadgettAnsell1993.pdf "Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400–1434")).
How did it work?
The CR cycle starts with the promises of an ideology; because the
ideology is mistaken about human nature, economics, and reality (having,
among other things, transvalued moral values so that success is proof of
cupidity while failure is proof of worthiness), it does not and indeed
cannot live up to the promises. The mistakes lead to resources being
squandered on 'solutions', leaving people worse-off than they were
before. A regime can paper over this by drawing on growth that would
have happened anyway or faster under a better government (eg.
industrialization in Soviet Russia or Deng China), redistribution and temporary
expedients like eating its seed corn (Venezuela spending oil revenues on
welfare pork rather than oil R&D or maintenance), or looking good by mere stability (CCCP
vs the endless post-Qing [Chinese civil
war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War) instigated by the CCCP). But eventually,
promises are broken---'temporary' measures become permanent, the
(rare, dangerous) concrete forecasts pass with the goal yet distant, the
young grow up, and lack of progress becomes unmistakable. Per [Davies
1962](https://www.louischauvel.org/DAVIES2089714.pdf "Toward a [J-curve] theory of revolution"),
these disappointed expectations set the stage.
The disappointment generates dissonance: many people genuinely believed
that the solutions had been found and that the promises could be kept
and the goals were realistic, but somehow it came out all wrong. (["We
wanted the best, but it turned out like
always."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Chernomyrdin)) Why? It
can't be that the ideology is wrong, that is unthinkable; the ideology
has been *proven* correct. Nor is it the great leader's fault, of
course. Nor are there any enemies close at hand: they were all killed or
exiled. The cargo cult keeps implementing the revolution and waving the
flags, but the cargo of First World countries stubbornly refuses to
land.
The paranoid yet logical answer is that there must be *invisible*
enemies: saboteurs, counter-revolutionaries, and society [remaining
'structurally'](!W "The Tyranny of Structurelessness") anti-ideological despite destroying all enemy structures. No matter that victory was total, the
failure of their policies proves that the enemies are still everywhere.
(["One man's modus ponens..."](/modus "‘One Man’s 𝑀𝑜𝑑𝑢𝑠 𝑃𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑛𝑠’, Gwern 2012"))
It is not enough to merely execute enemies, one must be engaged in "pulling weeds out by the roots" by murdering all of their children and offspring---the child of a landlord is a landlord too, hereditarily tainted and evil.
(One wonders if the landlord trait is carried by genes or epigenetics?)
And the rot must go all the way to the
top. (But, of course, not to the *very* top, as the actually powerful
are too powerful to criticize; the emperor or beloved secretary is---[as
always](https://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-good-tsar-bias.html "The Good Tsar Bias")---innocent
& benevolent and a benediction unto his people, and merely misled or
betrayed by evil officials). In actuality, the middle's evil
incompetence and sabotage, in addition to the doubtless high levels of
corruption (which may be much less than that of the top and often
economically-efficient work-arounds), is merely a muddling through with
a mix of ideology, pragmatism, and incompetence, and there is nothing to
purge.
Monuments or public artwork, being so visible by design, are some of the first things to go; given the constant churn in ideology and who is in or out, there will always be some problem to be found as pretext.
Any disagreement is immediately punished, the more violently the more
uncomfortable: "kill the chicken to scare the monkey" (regional murder
quotas were set: typically 1 per 1000 humans, but often higher), and
soon, [preference falsification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification)
has set in and ["three men make a tiger"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_men_make_a_tiger).
Coordinated resistance is chilled away, as no one knows who might turn them in.
With no
free thought, all news is forced through an ideological lens where [cant replaces conversation](/doc/culture/1983-wolfe-thecitadeloftheautarch-thejustman "Loyal to the Group of Seventeen’s Story—The Just Man"),
and if flattering news cannot be ginned up, it will simply be faked (and
should it somehow be debunked anyway, it will go down the memory hole);
no one need *order* faking, it is simply a natural response to
incentives and the double-bind placed on the lower ranks who
simultaneously must satisfy their superiors but are also forced into
contact with reality. (Collectivization is a miserable failure and this
can't be denied by the regional committee who are unable to conjure
grain up out of thin air? Simply lie about the numbers to the higher-ups
and create ["the Miracle of Dazhai"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_from_Dazhai_in_agriculture),
analogous to [Lysenkoism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism)---such systemic corruption turning centralized planning into an engine of famine despite [plenty of food](/doc/economics/2015-meng.pdf "'The Institutional Causes of China's Great Famine, 1959–1961', Meng et al 2015")).
The famine killed countless people, but it went further: the agricultural debacle may have contributed to the [1975 Banqiao Dam failure](!W) when a dam burdened by extreme runoff (possibly caused by deforestation) failed to get floodgate-opening orders in time due to Chinese underdevelopment & equipment failure, likewise evacuation orders to the endangered regions, and the resulting (extremely censored) flood killed anywhere up to 230,000 people.^[It is worth noting in the context of the debate over the safety of renewable energy power sources like nuclear energy that the Banqiao Dam failure alone killed many more people than all deaths attributable to nuclear energy combined.]
Propaganda hoaxes of imaginary people (like Lei Feng, Wang Jie, Ouyang Hai, Mai Xiande, Wang
Jinsi, or Liu Yingjun) could extend from piously forged diaries to photographs of
them or even the person's uniform & personal possessions enshrined in a
museum.
(Individuals were also encouraged to recover their own memories of past sufferings in order to ["recall bitterness"](/doc/history/2014-wu.pdf "'Recalling Bitterness: Historiography, Memory, And Myth In Maoist China', Wu 2014") and better appreciate how wonderful was their life under Maoism.)
Since the victors turn out to have been corrupted by
counter-revolutionary forces, the existing party/organization cannot be
trusted to cleanse the hidden enemies. So what is the solution? To go to
war with the apparatus, to install new ideologically-loyal officials to hunt down possible traitors, confronting them with their sins in struggle sessions, to redeem their souls and serve as an example to educate the rest.
Simultaneously, the masses are propagandized and led by vanguards
of activists to seek out the invisible forces responsible for the
continued social evils, and when found, deliver the people's justice _en masse_ (regardless of what any---by definition corrupt and unjust---laws might say). Or to put it another way, the top uses the
bottom as a distributed decentralized army to attack the middle and
purge it, reimposing top-down control and driving [political shifts](https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020 "The Great Awokening: A hidden shift is revolutionizing American racial politics—and could transform the future of the Democratic Party.")
by narrowing an Overton window. The activism of the bottom spurs the top and vice-versa, reciprocally, a self-powering _gekokujō_.
The top can communicate directly with the bottom through the wonders of
modern telecommunications such as radio broadcasts, while messages can
be sent back and consensus emerge through mass discussion platforms such
as posters on walls (having 144 'big characters' or less).
This opens up brand new avenues for elite conflict: proles can be used
as cat's-paws, there is incentive to [create ever new ideological rationales](https://www.chinafile.com/library/nyrb-china-archive/chinese-shadows-bureaucracy-happiness-history)
to claim the moral high ground and strike first, while this same
instability means no one is safe because what was once goodthink
tomorrow becomes crimethink (["_la révolution dévore ses enfants_"](https://reason.com/2019/02/28/he-was-part-of-a-twitter-mob-that-attack/ "He Was Part of a Twitter Mob That Attacked Young Adult Novelists. Then It Turned on Him."))
& old materials like diaries (or yearbooks) are radioactive waste, the
cycle can be used as [subtle loyalty tests](https://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com/2011/03/simple-model-of-cults-of-personality.html)
to see who is the most subservient and eager to follow the latest
fashionable nonsense, any apparent loosening where regular people
genuinely speak their mind can [shock the brainwashed elite and provoke a backlash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign) of
intensified ideological policing, brief admissions of fault by those in
unassailable positions can be used to elicit admissions from others who
can then be immediately purged having been damned out of their own
mouths (a tactic also enabled by self-criticisms or attempts to pre-empt
purging).
In the absence of any direct offense, the built-up pressures and
anxieties and need to continuously virtue-signal may simply pick up [a rumor](https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-a-twitter-mob-destroyed-a-young-immigrant-female-authors-budding-career "How a Twitter Mob Derailed an Immigrant Female Author’s Budding Career")
and amplify it into undoubted truth, providing a [Schelling point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory))/[tipping point](https://www.thestranger.com/tech/2019/06/11/40452193/repent-resent-or-reinvent-how-to-survive-a-pile-on)
to coordinate on persecution.
Even those apparently apolitical, like famous Mao portrait painters,
would be beaten or imprisoned for years when works were suddenly
discovered to have 'deviated' in some respect.
Students, having no responsibilities, no experience, over-educated on
propaganda, full of ignorance and ideals, and desperate to earn status among
their peers (status which could become permanently entrenched as a
hereditary 'red class background' with which to defeat the more
academically-talented students of 'exploiting families' backgrounds,
they quickly realized), were the perfect activists for these 'top
against middle' tactics and could easily be over-awed by Mao or other
high-ranking officials, while police intervention is countermanded from
above such as by university presidents. "If in anger they beat someone
to death, then so be it."---what mattered was the truth of their
feelings & lived experiences.
In one clever instance, Mao eliminated a major Beijing figure and source
of stability, [Peng Zhen](!W), by suddenly discovering counter-revolutionary
propaganda in a historical play written by a Zhen subordinate, yielding
a dilemma: "If he shielded Wu Han---a friend, colleague and respected
intellectual---he could be accused of allowing the capital to harbor
revisionist elements at the highest level. If he turned against him, he
would be exposed for failing to spot the danger in the first place."
Zhen failed to realize Mao's hand behind this and, failing to take
sufficient indirect action, was ousted a month later. Another example
inaugurated the CR: a subordinate who'd lost in an earlier similar
purge decided, based on an editorial, to take revenge on Peking
University, and put up a poster denouncing it; this poster was taken to
Mao, who called it "more significant than the manifesto of the [Paris
Commune](!W)", immediately disseminated it through official propaganda
channels, and launchd a new series of purges/drills/propaganda
initiatives.
However clever these political maneuverings might be, by invoking mass
riots and purges across the largest nation on earth in order to remove
one rival official, they were like using a A-bomb to kill a fly. When
Beijing sniffled, the provinces died of pandemic, demonstrating flaws to
centralization and big governments. The bonfire of art, graveyards,
religious sites, books, and people was beyond calculation (some sign of
how thorough the destruction was can be seen in the desperation of
Chinese entities in
[buying](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/09/arts/design/chinese-antiques-london.html "In Search of the Real Thing: China’s Quest to Buy Back Its Lost Heritage")
or [stealing](https://www.gq.com/story/the-great-chinese-art-heist)
Chinese artifacts which survived by being overseas or---the virtue of
vice---sold corruptly). With them, of course, went all the stock (one
company had to dispose of 15,000m^2^ of politically-incorrect silk),
craftsmen and their livelihood, and the web of economic relationships
[supported by these bourgeoisie
vices](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fable_of_the_Bees), which in a
country as large as China meant equally large ruin (Dikötter notes of
20,000 people in Guangdong province alone, two-thirds were unemployed &
the re-employed direly impoverished).
Instead, resources were diverted to cult objects: 2--5 billion Mao
badges, for example, were manufactured, impeding industries like
airplanes which needed aluminum, and forcing Mao himself to quash it.
The 'cult of the mango' has been
[described](https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-mao-mango-cult-of-1968/ "The Mao Mango Cult of 1968 and the Rise of China's Working Class")
[elsewhere](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35461265 "China's curious cult of the mango").
Also burdensome were the cadres endlessly visiting Beijing for endless
mass rallies (farcically concluding "when even the giant square in
front of the Forbidden City could no longer contain them, he [Mao]
rode through the city in an open jeep, reaching 2 million students in
one fell swoop" to dispel the masses he'd conjured), increasing
population by ~50%, leading to infrastructure like political offices
covered in shit (with puddles of urine common sights at the mass rallies
themselves); cadres and Red Guards, given free travel for rallies, abused
it to travel the country and exploit the desperation of locals to curry
favor with free room and board and gifts, stressing a decayed economy
further and spreading plague (exacerbated by medical shortages down to
face-masks, leading to 90% liver infection rates in one hospitals'
workers), resulting in a meningitis pandemic killing 160,000 people.
Poverty escalated, and families would share single sets of clothes (the
rest going naked or in straw), with mud-eating, goitre, and other
diseases of malnutrition surging. Students at Peking University, the
elite, ate slop, chewing carefully to avoid breaking teeth on rocks. There were
shortages of buttons, matches, toothpaste, and in some areas
toothbrushes were a luxury adopted only years later; waiting lists for water thermoses
stretched to years long; in Turfan, there was allotted 1 bar of soap
per 3 people---per season. Sexual violence was universal and the chaos
served as a pretext for what Dikötter bluntly calls a genocide of
Mongols (a crackdown reflex that is manifesting even today while they concentrate on [the Uighurs](/newsletter/2020/07#uighurs "‘July 2020 News § Uighur Genocide’, Gwern 2019")). Schooling collapsed as propaganda replaced education, so
middle-school children often couldn't write their name or numbers or
add/subtract or locate Beijing, leading to escalating national
illiteracy rates (teachers being too terrified of students, leading to
grade inflation).
Meanwhile, further extravagances were indulged, like a nationwide civil
defense building program using ordinary people building tunnels by hand
(using materials ripped from existing productive buildings), reminiscent
of the equally wasteful [Albanian
bunkers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunkers_in_Albania), which,
constructed by those lacking any training, resulted in countless
casualties and their building soon abandoned. The nadir was The Third Front,
an attempt to build an industrial war base of 1800 factories in the
safest and hardest to reach (ie. worst possible) places in China, a program
that diverted "two-thirds of the state's industrial
investment...between 1964 and 1971...the Third Front cost the country
hundreds of billions in forgone output alone".
Such was the scale of the CR that I'd never heard of the Third Front,
or any pandemic being involved, and Dikötter gives these topics a few
paragraphs before he must move on, such as to the open warfare between
factions, with large-scale clashes like a Shanghai battle between 20,000
& 100,000 people.
While victory or defeat in these clashes meant being
purged and was a matter of life and death, as the losers might even be
[ritually cannibalized as subhuman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre)---"Cannibalism? It was the
landlord's flesh! The spy's flesh!"^[See also [_Scarlet Memorial_](!W), Zheng 1993/[Sutton 1995](/doc/sociology/1995-sutton.pdf "Consuming Counterrevolution: The Ritual and Culture of Cannibalism in Wuxuan, Guangxi, China, May to July 1968"); [_The Mouth that Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China_](https://www.amazon.com/Mouth-That-Begs-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822323419), Yue 1999.]---fortunately the Army lost
minimal heavy weaponry, only occasionally losing gunboats or anti-aircraft
guns, and remained capable of crushing most groups in a pitched battle.
(Attempts to instigate revolution in Hong Kong failed when Mao quashed them.
Capitalist Hong Kong was too useful.)
The Revolution ended as curiously as it began: Lin Biao panicked, and
fled amid a half-baked coup attempt, dying in a mysterious airplane
crash (macabre detail: his skull was boiled and preserved in the KGB
archives post-identification), while serendipitously, Nixon made
overtures for his famous visit to China, which was tailor-made for
domestic propaganda consumption as a complete victory of Mao and China
over the now-defeated Yankee imperialists (a use familiar from North
Korea), and provided a face-saving excuse to wind down the Third Front
as well now that America was 'defeated' and unable to invade China (not
that was a possibility to begin with).
Mao, in increasingly ill health and having achieved his objective,
ceased to stoke the flames of revolution, and an exhausted damaged
impoverished China began to recover; Mao finally died, and while he
succeeded in preventing de-Maofication, the CR and Mao died in time to
spare Deng Xiaoping, and we know what happened next.
What should we make of this? For me, it dramatizes the effects of
ideology on the real-world, especially as it disseminates out from the
elite and is amplified by unchecked followers.
Maoist cant and theory may seem abstract and amusingly detached from the
real world in activities like memorizing *The Little Red Book* and
discussing abstractions inflated to meaninglessness like 'class' or
'equality' and a misguided emphasis on equality of outcome &
historical injustices, but with a push from the regulators, that
ideology suddenly cashes out as a network of justifications for
collectivization and famine, pandemic, illiteracy, mass rape and suicide,
genocide, destruction of science and expertise (which deliver inconvenient
truths), and mobs beating opponents to death, powered by
self-reinforcing dynamics of loyalty tests, virtue signaling,
censorship, and preference falsification. Mao, of course, would never
have gotten his own hands dirty by cannibalizing someone accused of
being descended from a shopkeeper, but a phrase from Beijing ripples
out, correctly interpreted by the fringes as a dogwhistle.
This might seem extreme, but it all happened, and was one of the worst
things to ever happen.
# See Also
- [*Tombstone*](/review/book#tombstone-jisheng-2012){.backlink-not}
- ["The Art of Interpreting Nonexistent Inscriptions Written in Invisible Ink on a Blank Page"](https://www.chinafile.com/library/nyrb-china-archive/art-interpreting-nonexistent-inscriptions-written-invisible-ink-blank "1990-10-11"), [Simon Leys](!W)
- ["How Chinese Sci-Fi Conquered America"](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/magazine/ken-liu-three-body-problem-chinese-science-fiction.html)
- [the “Fengqiao experience for a new era”](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/25/world/asia/china-surveillance-xi.html "'Xi Jinping’s Recipe for Total Control: An Army of Eyes and Ears: Reviving a Mao-era surveillance campaign, the authorities are tracking residents, schoolchildren and businesses to forestall any potential unrest', Vivian Wang 2024-05-25")
- ["Thrones Wreathed in Shadow: Tacitus and the Psychology of Authoritarianism"](https://warontherocks.com/2020/07/thrones-wreathed-in-shadow-tacitus-and-the-psychology-of-authoritarianism/), Rehman 2020; ["Tyranny as Tragedy: On _King Lear_, Maoist China and the Unpredictable Nature of Power"](https://lithub.com/tyranny-as-tragedy-on-king-lear-maoist-china-and-the-unpredictable-nature-of-power/ "'Nan Z. Da Explores the Similarities Between Shakespeare’s Play and 20th-Century Totalitarian Reality', Nan Z. Da 2025-06-10")
- [*The Cleanest Race*](!W), Myers
- [Malcolm Muggeridge](!W) ([review](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-of-wasted-time/))
- ["The Metallic Laws"](/doc/sociology/1987-rossi "'The Iron Law Of Evaluation And Other Metallic Rules', Rossi 2012"){.backlink-not}; [iron law of oligarchy](!W)
- ["Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s"](https://nymag.com/article/tom-wolfe-radical-chic-that-party-at-lennys.html)/["Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers"](https://teageegeepea.tripod.com/maumau.html), [Tom Wolfe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wolfe) [1970](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Chic_%26_Mau-Mauing_the_Flak_Catchers)
- ["The Real Problem at Yale Is Not Free Speech"](https://www.palladiummag.com/2019/08/05/the-real-problem-at-yale-is-not-free-speech/); ["A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell"](https://www.compactmag.com/article/a-black-professor-trapped-in-anti-racist-hell/), Vincent Lloyd
- ["Russia’s House of Shadows"](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/16/russias-house-of-shadows "My apartment building was made to house the first generation of Soviet élite. Instead, it was where the revolution went to die.")
- ["What I Saw at the Revolution That Didn’t Happen: Memoirs of a Weatherman"](https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/what-i-saw-at-the-revolution-that-didnt-happen/), [Michael Kazin](!W) 2023
- ["Leninthink: On the practice behind the theory of Marxism-Leninism"](https://newcriterion.com/article/leninthink/)
- [_Abandoned Footnotes_](/doc/sociology/abandoned-footnotes/index){.backlink-not}
- [Cambodian genocide denial](!W)
- ["Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"](!W) ([fulltext](/doc/borges/1940-borges-tlonuqbarorbistertius.pdf "‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, Borges 1940"))