Can you elaborate on that? (the whole contradiction between Mao and other leaders and the culture revolution)
I also did not understand your comment about Taoism.

Thank you for your reply,
I think that your comment touches on the question of why do we need leaders? and is it only people from a cirtan class that can speak and fight by the name of the oppress? (political identity)
Revolution is a science, and it requires years and years of studying and applying it to reality. reality changes all the time,(while some things do not) and there is always a need to keep applying this science to reality. This requires people who can not only read and study but who can also understand because of their experience what is the right line in any given situation. The proletarian by definition is the people who never got any education and who are spending there days looking for a jobs and survival. Marx for example believed that a revolution will occur from the contradictions between the workers and the state, Lenin however developed this understanding. Lenin determined that the science of revolution would need to be brout to the proletarian from outside.
Marx, engle, Lenin, Mao, bob avikian, gonzalo, are all academic people from an upper middle class. The question is however not who you are but what you say: does you're understanding correspond to reality? Are the things that you developing are in the interest of the proletarian?
We did not chose this contradictions, the differences in classes is part of capitalism, and more fundamentally contradictions are part of reality (dialectical materialism)
Regarding the second part of the question, most of what you know came from other people ( books, ideas), there is no such thing as just learning from your own experience. Not only that, the interest of the proletarian is international and does not stop at one nationality, or state. Being a communist means that you become part of a global class, that the kids in Africa who are starving to death because of the World bank are part of your class, that the immigrants who are are trying to survive in Europe are part of your class, and that the people of Iraq who are being occupied are part of your class too.

The revolution in the 20th was defeated and hundred of communists were killed. It was defeated partly because of the understanding that only the workers are the people who have an interest in a revolution. Mao developed this understanding and concluded that the peasants have an interest in the revolution too. Not only that but that in third world countries you start your revolution from the side country and not from the city's. (a view that changed the way Maoists wage revolution in third world countries). Mao understood that while the proletarian has to be the beck bone of the revolution other classes could be united too. Like the poor peasants who while owing a plot of land, can barley survive and are oppress in millions different ways. (In your country for exempla a true Maoist party will unite between oppressed Jews and oppressed Arabs.) Stalin was oppose to this understanding for a long time, he actually supported chi kan check, under the impression that chi would create a broader class of proletarian with the indastilazetion of chine.

The culture revolution was a revolution inside a revolution. I recommend you to read more about the culture revolution and about what did and did not happened there. Part of the old culture that you are talking about involved not only respecting the alders (older men not women), but also trading with woman, and the right of land lords to kill and starve there peasants.
Mao unlike Stalin understood that old ideas do not just die by killing people, but that’s it takes a mass movement of millions and millions of people to debate and struggle over ideas in order to keep society on the socialist road.
Communist view the roll of the youth quite differently than in a capitalist society. The youth is the next generation and there for needs to be educated in the science of revolution and in leadership. (Or the revolution will die) Under Mao millions of youth were called to go to the side country to serve the people and to brake down division in society.

Or as Mao put it:
"The young people are the most active and vital force in society. They are the most eager to learn and the least conservative in their thinking. This is especially so in the era of socialism. We hope that the local Party organizations in various places will help and work with the Youth League organizations and go into the question of bringing into full play the energy of our youth in particular. The Party organizations should not treat them in the same way as everybody else and ignore their special characteristics. Of course, the young people should learn from the old and other adults, and should strive as much as possible to engage in all sorts of useful activities with their agreement."
Introductory note to "A Youth Shock Brigade of the No. 9 Agricultural Socialist

"If our Party does not have a great many new cadres working in unity and cooperation with the old cadres, our cause will come to a stop. All old cadres, therefore, should welcome the new ones with the utmost enthusiasm and show them the warmest solicitude. True, new cadres have their shortcomings. They have not been long in the revolution and lack experience, and unavoidably some have brought with them vestiges of the unwholesome ideology of the old society, remnants of the ideology of petty-bourgeois individualism. But such shortcomings can be gradually eliminated through education and tempering in the revolution. The strong point of the new cadres, as Stalin has said, is that they are acutely sensitive to what is new and are therefore enthusiastic and active to a high degree - the very qualities which some of the old cadres lack. Cadres, new and old, should respect each other, learn from each other and overcome their own shortcomings by learning from each other's strong points, so as to unite as one in the common cause and guard against sectarian tendencies."
"Rectify the Party's Style of Work" (February 1, 1942), Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 47.

Please let me know if you have any disagreements or question with what I wrote.

I'm sorry it took me so long, I was quite busy lately.

Thank you for your kind responds,
For security reasons I would rather not discuss any personal information. (and I would recommend you to do the same)
Where I am, its not easy…..
Let's just say that I got my best political education in your country.

What I meant with my remark about the intellectuals, was not that the workers could never understand the science of revolution, but that it requires years and years of studying, (and some privilege to allow your self to do so). Malcom X became the leader that he was because he was stuck in jail and had no choice but to sit down and study. Think about it in terms of studying astronomy or psychology. Marxism, on some levels, can even be more complicated, and requires a lot of free time and privilege (that people who work 14-hour days don’t have). Do you think that a Palestinian who is spending his days trying to pass through check-points will have the time to dig in to Marxism? This privilege takes a lot of responsibility, and leaders in, communist terms, entail people who give them selves (through the structure of the party) to the masses 24/7. Marx ,Lenin , Stalin, Mao, and other communist leader sacrifice there lives and families for the betterment of humanity.
Not everyone can become a leader, and furthermore, not everyone has, as Stalin put it "what it takes", living behind everything that you were, so you can become a communist and give your self fully to the masses.
Stalin was the best in his times. And he wrote a couple of good books.
Theoretically he was nothing like Marx Lenin or Mao, on the other hand I don’t think that Marx and Lenin faced the same difficulties that he faced. Things are not just created perfect. Everything in the universe develops through contradictions and leaps, the development of a fetus happens in leaps in the uterus, and then the fetus becomes a human through a leap (by coming out of the uterus) learning for example how to walk does not come neutrally to him, through trying again and again(contradiction) he learns more and more and finally makes the leap and start walking. Marxism like everything else is the same. And there is also the relationship between theory and practice.

With regard to books on revolutionary China, I feel that a lot of them can be very bias. Not only that, there is an effort in the West to slander communism. To convince people (especially the oppressed) that change could never happen and that they should just except their pathetic roles. A good example is the site that I criticized in an earlier post. How can you even pretend to do serious research when you quote the killing of an oppressive and corrupt army who used to kill and rape whole villages, as one of the crimes of communism? Or to use as one of your research, a CIA official (the organization that backed the murders and corrupt roll of Chi Kan check for years). Or historians that don’t believe that long march happened and that fighting against the Japanese was a plot by Mao? It seems to me that it's very easy to write "books" about how bad communism was. All you need to do is to find a publisher. Noam Chomski made a really good point once saying that you don’t need to explain your self when you talk about how America is grate. But when you say "I think America is an imperialist country " suddenly you need hours and hours to explain what you said and why its right. As Mao said "the dominant ideas in society are the ideas of the ruling class", and until we get to better days the truth is not going to be known to the majority. I'm not suggesting to ignore the critique of the people against communism, but just to put it in context, and to use 10% of the critique that you would use when you here someone talking positively about communism. And I also feel that a lot of the books on the Chines revolution that are promoted in the West have the same theme (there is a long list of books that would never be republished because of their positive attitudes toward the Chines revolution and communism). I am tired of reading books by intellectual who whine about how hard it was to move to the side country and work and educate the masses. They would have never become what they are without living on the backs of the poor. And more than that, millions and millions of chines were living in the side country, dying from preventable diseases, starvation and being killed and raped by land lords and nobody ever asked them if they chose to live this way or if they would like to change it. I, for example see no problem with sending white privileged people from America to Africa (or Israelis to Gaza), to help people over there to build there lives again. They would never be who they are without the oppression of third world countries. I also think its unproductive to read books by people who not only were privilege in the old chine (and never saw a problem with that) but worked for and supported different imperialist powers. As I said before, to understand the situation in Iraq would you read a book by a Haliburton employee? Or to understand what happened in El Salvador in the 80s would read a book by somebody who worked for the Regan administration? Again, not to dismiss critic on communism. We all need to read as much as we can about the culture revolution, and the fact that your ideology is wrong does not means that you always will be wrong, there were errors made under Stalin and Mao, and we need to learn from them so we can do better next time, all I'm asking is to use some commonsense, and not to just accept everything that is said on communism just because it fits the criteria of "communism is bad"

I did not understand your comment on the youth, are you saying that the youth in china knew less then old people who believed that a women are the property of the husband? Or old people who believe in none existent gods? Or more fundamentally people who believed that China should just became a powerful country, or as Dang x Ping said it "it does not matter if a cat is white or black as long as its catches mice"? There was a struggle in China over what direction and line the country should go, and Mao looking at Russia understood that if millions of people would not debate this issues like that, China would become capitalist again under the leaders.
I think that you looking at it from the prospective of "one men is controlling a country", there is no such thing as one man who can dominant millions of people, classes dominant society. And in the case of Mao, millions of people took up what Mao have written and acted according to it. Communists see the masses as decisive in changing society, "relying on the masses" is an important part of communism. And under Mao the masses were the leaders of society. And this is why communists say that under the dictatorship of the proletarian the masses enjoy more freedom then under any capitalist society. Your question however touches on the implication that you made about my age. It does not matter how old you are or who you are as long as what you say the truth. As long as what you say corresponds to reality. If a kid at age of six would say that the law of gravity is real, he is right, his age would not change the fact that the law of gravity exist. Marx and Engles wrote the communist manifesto at the age of 24, and Fred Hampton a brilliant leader of the Black Panthers was murdered by the FBI at the age of 21, and Gorge Jackson lead a jail rebellion in his 20s, some of us, develop faster then other. And the question is again not who I am but what I say. Not how I sound or the fact that I'm a radical (history as always being change by radicals). But what I say, do the things that I say correspond to reality? Do the things that I say are objectively true? Capitalism is killing us all, and communism is the only way out is indeed objectively true.

There is no such thing as "human nature". Society has changed with the economic system. All those different in classes have evolved with the emergence of class society. Your right, racism, like other false beliefs, hold society together. If we all viewed each other as equal, it would be very difficult to control us all. I think that if you really research the experience of the Russian and especially the Chinese revolution, you would not think that there is 'no hope.' For me its amazing that they succeeded to do what they did, or that they accomplish so much under such difficulties, in so little time. Its just shows you what the human race is capable of when it get the chance. Poverty has always been part of the human history, the difference is that now there is the economic basis feed everybody. Capitalism was needed in a certain period of history, but now its completely unneeded
I don’t understand your comment about the "need" for the World Bank, are you suggesting that some people need to be oppressed? That some people from a certain races need to starve and die by the name of history? Why them and not you?

It took hundred and hundred of years for capitalism to arrive from feudalism, judging by the fact that Marxism have only been around for 150 years. I would say that we are doing pretty good. I also think, that a lot of times we talk from a position of privilege, when we treat Marxism as another philosophy. For the people in third world the option is ether to die on their feet or on their knees, and with Marxism they have a choice for a better future. And morally even for us, understanding that we benefit from starvation and death takes responsibility. You don’t need to be a communist to understand that the exploitation of people is wrong and to act accordingly. And this socialist trend that you associate your self with, would never uproot capitalist oppression, and the fact that some capitalist countries can allow them selves to be "socialist" to a degree, is only because they had enough capital coming from the exploitation of people from other countries. Some examples may include the case of Europe, the exploitation of Africa, and the case of your country with the exploitation of the Palestinians and the billions of blood-dripping dollars from america. (Not to disrespect your political beliefs, or to say that we cannot unite against different forms of oppression)

I also did not understand your comment on what books I should read. I like to read different books on different issues, and more than that, sometimes I even like to watch movies. I would disagree with the statement by Haim Gory, (if I understood it right), and would say that there is an objective reality, and a book that tells a story about how Palestinians are living happily in Gaza would be wrong. In class society ideas correspond to class out look. And although art is a reflection of reality, ideas in art can represent a certain class outlook (not all art).
One of the books that you recommend (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress) is a fictional piece (I did not find any information on the other), and from the review that I read on it, it does not correspond to what actually happened in China. This is not to say that there is nothing to learn from it or that artistically it is not good. It's hard to me to determine where the writer got his information from. There was no such thing in revolutionary China as sons of doctors being sent to the side country, or band books. On the contrary, millions of people who never had the privilege of learning how to read and write, under Mao, were studying philosophy and participating in aspects of culture which they previously has no access to. Even according to Western reports, literacy went from 15% before the revolution to 90% afterwards in the mid 70's. As I said, it seems to me that it's very easy to publish a book against communism.

Looking forward to your answer