PREVIEW: #CULTURAL REVOLUTION: Another excerpt from conversation with author Tania Branigan re her new book, RED MEMORY re the Red Guard survivors in the 21st Century, living out their lives with sentimental reflections of their cruel conduct. More later
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2024
⏱️ 4 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
1966 Red Guards and fearful citizens
Transcript
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| 0:28.0 | This is John Batcheler, continuing conversation with Tanya Branigan, her book Red Memory, the After Lives of |
| 0:36.0 | China's Cultural Revolution, visiting with the teenagers who were the Red Guard in the 60s and |
| 0:41.7 | 70s, now in their 60s, in the 1960s and |
| 0:45.4 | 1970s, who are now in their 60s and 70s as grown-ups, as seniors, as retired people are sentimental about those days, though they participated |
| 0:56.9 | in brutality and sadism and beating and murder, it is an odd thing that you can be the same human being when you're 16 that you are at 66. |
| 1:09.0 | Very odd and the memories are challenging, especially with the Red Guard. |
| 1:14.0 | What this describes as a time of total anarchy, engineered by Mao and the Maoists, something |
| 1:21.4 | that is always a threat to come back in China and elsewhere. |
| 1:26.0 | Here's Tanya Brown again on sentimentality about the Red Guards. But of course like so many Red Guards at the time she was also very |
| 1:38.5 | zealous herself in a sense. She had a very idealistic view. It's very hard for us to imagine, I think, how it must have been in that moment growing up in a country where you were constantly told that the People's Republic was under threat, which of course was true in a sense. |
| 1:56.1 | Chan Kaishek certainly was still hoping to come and reclaim the mainland at some point. |
| 2:02.3 | You had a country that felt profoundly threatened at the same time |
| 2:07.0 | had been brought up with this ideal of revolutionary struggle and sacrifice, their parents in many cases have sacrificed immensely to bring about the |
| 2:15.6 | Communist Revolution. They've been brought up to worship now. So there is this very intense |
| 2:21.1 | atmosphere and these very young people, children really, who are being told that they should go out and destroy that they should force people to become better communists in a sense and so you herself while she was disturbed by some of the things she saw |
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