I don’t know about you, but I love a bit of topical reading when I go abroad. That’s why, in my last week of travelling between lush, green, untouched Cambodian islands, I’ve been immersed in apposite books like Julia Lovell’s Maoism: a Global History, and Frank Dikotter’s The Cultural Revolution.
So far, I’ve been pleased with my choices. First, they are properly appropriate: one of the reasons Cambodia’s islands are so untainted by tourism, or even inhabitants, is because the ultra-Maoist, Chinese-funded Khmer Rouge evacuated all the occupants and forced them into deadly labour on the mainland. Also, the books are truly astonishing, perhaps in a consoling way. By which I mean this: our own Cultural Revolution – that of Wokeness – might be bad, but at least Anglo-American students aren’t forcing their professors to eat excrement, then beating them to death with planks. Yet.
It does rather feel that the boffins went looking for evidence of racism, and found, to their chagrin, that actually there was no racism
But then I caught a news story from London which did give me a faint but distinct hint of communist madness.
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