Oy vey. The list could debate your main point about Goldner but, Loren 'sez this about Pol Pot>...We "Eurocentrists" snapped up the writings of Simon Leys, {his books are excellent esp. , "Chinese Shadows, " Dissent ran alot of his pieces in the 70's, M.P.) the French Sinologist, documenting the crushing of the Shanghai proletariat by the People's Liberation Army in the course of the 'Cultural Revolution", the latter lasting from 1966 to 1976. Elbaum and his friends were at the same time presenting this battle between two wings of the most elephantine bureaucracy of modern times, as a brilliant success in "putting politics in command" against the capitalist restorationists, technocrats and intellectuals, and burning Beethoven for good measure. All of these writhings of Chinese Stalinism struck us more as the second-time farce to the first time tragedy of the world-wide ravages of Soviet Stalinism from the 1920's onward. Elbaum and his friends cheered on Pol Pot's rustification campaign in Cambodia, in which one million people died; no sooner had they digested the post-1976 developments in China after Mao's death (the arrest and vilification of the Gang of Four, the completion of the turn to the U.S. in an anti-Soviet alliance) when, in 1979, after Vietnam occupied Cambodia to depose the Khmer Rouge, China attacked Vietnam, and the Soviet Union prepared to attack China. How difficult, in those days, to be a "Third World Marxist"! http://www.revolutionintheair.com/reviews/goldner.html -- Michael Pugliese