thank you very much, glad you enjoy some of my stuff :)

woah cool! I'm relearning French too :D! tell me if you ever want a french learning study buddy

bet, i'm drunk purchasing french books right this second

désolé·e de l'apprendre 😔

Bruh...just put MC Solaar's Prose Combat on repeat until you can speak silky smooth French. That album's a classic.

@letslearn, I legit think we listened to MC Solaar in high school French class lol

@vashti Oh snap, props to the teacher. 😄 I love that old-school, conscious French hip-hop.

Hell yeah man >:-)!! I've never heard that phrase before, but I'm going to remember it

happy new years ! so true also

but i do think that it keeps the way i study somewhat disorganised, incoherent, and eclectic. back then i tried writing notes with my typewriter and by hand to varying--often non-optimal--results. i'm now trying to shift to typed digital notes, and seeing the stuff on your website has only reäffirmed that decision. my thanks again! warmest regards, pao

ps. i read your entry from the 10th inst. have you managed to find the second part of mr. greene's documentary yet? i have both parts alongside an earlier documentary on china (during the great leap, i think?), tibet, and north vietnam. i had one on cuba, too, but i've since lost it--at least i think so.

Both parts of One Man's China: https://archive.org/details/onemanschina Inside North Vietnam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWnL3js6_uM Cuba Va: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvsavJ9UIXA Tibet in 1976: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4bTDTBsEAE

I did find the second part of One Man's China on archive like they posted, but I'd be curious about that one you mentioned during the great leap forward

I'm very glad you like my website and found it somewhat helpful :)

letslearntogether: thank you for the links!

mental-labour: i'll upload the documentary either on youtube, google drive, the internet archive, or all three. i think youtube would be the most convenient, but i worry about it being taken down by the copyright-holder. "cuba va" was itself taken down a few years ago on youtube. i'll see later. regards &c &c

the same channel to whose uploads letslearntogether linked also has the documentary i was referring to, "China!" which was in fact released in 1965, a year before the cultural revolution and well after the great leap, so no need for me to upload it myself: https://youtu.be/kAUQTBrWuJY?si=XswFNYvYdPCC-1d6

one last thing: mr. greene's personal relationship with communism on its own is very interesting. it seems he started out as a sympathiser of the various anti-imperialist movements and projects around the world, including those of china, vietnam, and cuba, and through his travels and involvements matured to become a journalist and propagandiser--i use that last term positively--of the edgar snow-type.

in a lecture (i'll link it here if i ever find it again), he praises the cultural revolution as a sort of "self-correcting mechanism" of the chinese people, and emphasises the need for more self-corrections in the future. i don't think he ever really matured ideologically in the proletarian sense though, as right after saying that he says that the arrest of the gang of four was one such self-correction.

his support for capitalist restoration in china naturally earned him the ire of antirevisionist groupings elsewhere. his talk at the uni of waterloo actually became a focal point of an antirevisionist struggle in the same uni: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ca.firstwave/cpc-china-week.htm. not sure what became of him in the end, but he was an interesting guy all in all

Well, as Mao says, no one can be 100% communist haha

@pao-chingming: You're welcome! The one making the copyright strikes is probably: https://www.concordmedia.org.uk/ through their YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ConcordMediaUK They still try to sell those videos on Vimeo.

As for Mr. Greene, it would seem that he wasn't liked by the "libertarian right" much either. Example: https://web.archive.org/web/20101102052359/http://libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/forep/forep016.pdf ...I genuinely wonder what the author of that article thinks of Operations Gladio, Condor, etc., but I digress.

all my homies hate concord media