The late Susan Sontag managed to stir up quite a bit of anger among some of her fellow leftists in the 1980s when she said (correctly):
Imagine the preposterous case of somebody who read only the [rightwing] Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and somebody else who read only The [leftwing] Nation between 1950 and 1970. Who would be getting more truth about the nature of Communism? There’s no doubt it would have been the Reader’s Digest reader…
Now in light of the overwhelming evidence about the tens of millions of Chinese who died as a result of Mao Zedong’s catastrophic and murderous policies, let’s consider another case.
Who would be getting more truth about the nature of post-revolutionary China? Someone who only watched “The Simpsons”?
Or someone who only read the Socialist Unity blog (“[T]he Mao era was broadly successful in economic and social terms”, etc., etc.)?
