
Dedicated to the memory of Bob Black's sanity and humor.



STAIRWAY TO HELL:  Free Love, said a Reader's Digest article of the
fifties, was Red China's secret weapon. Young people were flocking to the
Peoples Liberation Army because of sexual freedom in the ranks. (That
unlike the rightist KMT the PLA was free of corruption and was attacking
landlords who were to blame for periodic famines wasn't mentioned.) But
if U.S. conservatives found Communist Free Love disturbing, their fears
were short lived. When State power was consolidated all but heterosexual
monogamy was stringently outlawed.

   Instead of blaming British agents, critics of this trend spoke of a
peasant morality -- never minding how much it in fact resembled 19th
Century English Victorianism or Prussian militaristic culture. Explaining
events with the aid of conspiracy theories was bad form.

   Page 35 of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung is usually cited
among Maoists to justify neo-puritanism. All it says is to remember that a
great many people are involved in the revolutionary process. To the
cosmopolitan mind such a reminder would seem to call for tolerance of
cultural diversity. Yet in practice page 35 is interpreted as if the whole
world were simply and uniformly Prussian. Conclusion?

   As page 35 is actually applied in both China and among U. S. Maoists in
amounds to a demand for conformity to the most imperialist of all cultural
values.

   Had Mao simply scrawled in flawless calligraphy PIGSHIT across a page of
rice paper and had that appeared as page 35 of his quotrations the results
could not possibly have been any more divisive of the radical left.

   Page 35, as it is officially interpreted, is pigshit.



BULLETIN #7                     1986                             HO CHI ZEN



"For the finest victories of socialism to be sent down the drain all that
remains to be done is to reestablish religion there - why not? - and
private property." - Andre Breton (speaking about the "ultra-conformist
wretchedness" of Stalinist Russia in 1935)



                                            KULTCHA

c 1986 Kerry W. Thornley
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