Godfree

Biden’s Zugzwang: Despair or Extinction? More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. Woody Allen. With only bad choices left, Washington has chosen total extinction. In a national version […]

When a book was bought, he and I would always read it together, mending the text, repairing the manuscript, and writing the captions. And when a painting or a bronze was delivered, we would together open it, play with it, study its merits, and criticize its defects. Every evening we studied together till our candle

After the last Great Famine’ article, I received an email from Professor Dongping Han who, as a skinny kid in a poor village, lived through the Great Famine. The last line of his story is the best ‘famine’ debunker I have read. Enjoy. From: Dongping Han <dhan@warren-wilson.edu> Re: starvation in China I studied the great

Part One of Mao’s Great Leap concluded with the words of economic historian Maurice Meisner, “Indeed, of all the industrial projects China would launch in the next fifteen years, two-thirds were founded during the Great Leap”. But a looming natural catastrophe would overshadow its achievements.   After the growing season in 1960, when villages reported

[In this first of a two-part series, we sketch the pressures leading to the Mao’s Great Leap Forward and its early successes. In Part Two we will examine its failures and Mao’s subsequent disgrace]. After the revolution China’s landlords, the world’s oldest hereditary caste, retained enough land to live on, but their class vanished from