At right is the late William Hinton, Maoist. Along with Edgar Snow and Anna Louise Strong, Mr. Hinton was one of the most prominent of Mao's useful western fools.
According to his obituary in the Marxist journal Monthly Review, which he did so much to aid and vice-versa, Hinton read Snow's fiction-written-as-nonfiction Red Star Over China and the great man's chronicle "changed his life." It changed his life says Monthly Review "from that of a pacifist to that of a Marxist." The observant will notice M.R.'s dichotomy: pacifist at one end, Marxist on the other.
M.R. was accurate in making that dichotomy, both in general and in Mr. Hinton's case in particular, for the latter praised Maoist murder from the state's founding in 1949 through the Great Leap Forward, which cost perhaps 30,000,000 lives, through the Cultural Revolution, a pup by Mao's body count standards at only perhaps 3,000,000.
In 1972 Hinton wrote Turning Point in China praising the C.R., regretting only that it did not meet all of its goals, and blithely predicting that China would need many more cultural revolutions in the future.
When the Great Henchman died, and Deng Xiaoping began the process of stopping the Chinese Holocaust and putting China on the path to its current astonishing economic recovery, Mr. Hinton wrote an article in the worthy Monthly Review, issuing the most damning accusation he could think of, that Deng had shifted "from the socialist road to the capitalist road."
In 1993, on the 100th anniversary of Mao's birth, Hinton and some of the old gang got together in Beijing for a celebration. Hinton, according to his obit in The Guardian, leaped onto the stage and began singing a song to the good old days. Bet there wasn't a dry eye in the house.
What does this have to do with the price of tea in China today? Above left is
Carma Hinton, William's issue, who following in the family tradition of fiction masquerading as nonfiction, produced the propa-docu film Morning Sun, partly funded with my and your tax dollars through the National Endowment for the (In)Humanities with additional funding by PBS.
What kind of quality controls are in place at NEH and PBS? How obvious was it that this was going to be a film of propaganda? Carma must have had on her resume or somewhere that her father was William Hinton. If not a .4 second search on Google would have provided the link. The Chinese village that Mr. Hinton lived in and
wrote about was called Longbow. The name of Carma Hinton's production
company is Longbow. William Hinton wrote glowingly about the most psychotic and murderous regime in mankind's history; now his daughter comes hat-in-hand wanting tax dollars to make a film on the Cultural Revolution. What?
Did NEH or PBS notice that the faces of some of the interviewees--all former Red Guards--were blacked out, a la mafia informers? Did they ask why that was necessary and if the interviewees had something to hide?
What did Margo Adler, a real, like journalist, think when she read the script and saw that Song Binbin was allowed to talk and talk and talk and issue laughingly preposterous denials of everything? Her journalist's head didn't go "Hmm, something's fishy here,"? How could it not?
Who in Congress is responsible for oversight of NEH and PBS? Do they know about the outrage that is Morning Sun?
Didn't anybody think before giving approval for funding that maybe the end product would be a little...slanted... when produced by Carma Hinton?
Next up from NEH and PBS: Allesandra Mussolini's documentary The Trains Ran on Time, a moving examination of life in fascist Italy. This is Public Occurrences.
PUBLIC OCCURRENCES
