#PREVIEW: The homicidal rage of the teenaged Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution recalled painfully by one of participants more than five decades later. Tania Branigan.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 1 September 2023
⏱️ 2 minutes
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Summary
Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution Hardcover – May 9, 2023 by Tania Branigan (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Red-Memory-Afterlives-Cultural-Revolution/dp/1324051957
Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the stories of individuals who lived through the madness. Deftly exploring how this era defined a generation and continues to impact China today, Branigan asks: What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited, or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?
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1966 Cultural Revolution
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Transcript
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| 0:30.0 | This is John Bachelors. I speak with Tonya Brannigan tonight. Her new book is Red Memories. |
| 0:35.0 | This is the story of the red guards told from the point of view of the survivors, |
| 0:40.0 | not just the victims, although they were all victims of craze thinking, |
| 0:45.9 | but also the perpetrators of the red guards who were teenagers at the time, |
| 0:50.4 | and their memories are clouded by decades of regret, |
| 0:54.4 | sentimentality, and also not able to access the complete story, because they're often still in |
| 1:01.9 | China, or have escaped from China and then returned. The red guard's story is yet untold to the |
| 1:08.6 | Chinese people, a learned from Tonya Brannigan, and this particular moment is when one person |
| 1:15.6 | who's very young, a young woman, witnesses horror that she can't shake from her memory, decades later. |
| 1:24.4 | Who's Tonya? |
| 1:27.4 | And so as she sees this man bleeding on the ground, she realizes |
| 1:34.8 | as she looks that there is an entire baseball court full of corpses, a whole, |
| 1:43.6 | a whole number of people who have clearly been beaten to death by red guards. |
| 1:49.4 | And what was most striking perhaps was that even speaking about that, all those decades later, |
| 1:56.2 | it was clearly something that was profoundly traumatic and very real for her even in that moment. |
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