It is my pleasure to be able to run an excerpt from Tania Branigan’s excellent new book “Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution”. Tania has also kindly recorded herself reading this chapter, so you can listen to it if you prefer. Tania writes editorials for the
Thank you for that fascinating insight into the cultural revolution. I think it was Marx who said that history repeats itself first as tragedy and second as farce. He might have added, and third as horror.
On reading the excerpt I was reminded of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes who argued for an absolute monarch as the only way to stop society - English civil society - descending into the terrors of a civil war. On one level you can appreciate those who long for peace and stability and an absolutist government to bring it about and thus end bloodshed, but absolutism has its own inbuilt horrors I am afraid.
An excerpt from Tania Branigan's Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution
Thank you for that fascinating insight into the cultural revolution. I think it was Marx who said that history repeats itself first as tragedy and second as farce. He might have added, and third as horror.
On reading the excerpt I was reminded of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes who argued for an absolute monarch as the only way to stop society - English civil society - descending into the terrors of a civil war. On one level you can appreciate those who long for peace and stability and an absolutist government to bring it about and thus end bloodshed, but absolutism has its own inbuilt horrors I am afraid.