Roland Boer's Blog, page 65

My trip to North Korea: 13 Misconceptions Corrected

This one is cross-posted from the Prole Center, which cross-posted it from Liberation News:

By Marcel Cartier.

I had the unique opportunity to spend several days in three different parts of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, more commonly just referred to as “North” Korea. This was an exceptionally life-changing experience that challenged many of the pre-conceptions that myself and fellow western visitors who accompanied me from Beijing had going in. Here are some things about North K...

The powerful symbolism of a Grexit

Are we witnessing the end of the myth of Western classicism? By this I mean the myth that ancient Greece, with its philosophers, drama, art, culture and pretence at democracy, is the foundation of ‘Western’ – that is, European – culture. The efforts by many of the north-western European powers to force Greece out of the Eurozone and the European Union suggest that we may well be seeing the end of that myth.

Slightly less than two hundred years ago, ancient Greece entered forcefully into the W...

Great film: Across the Plateau

This is one I am watching now, dreaming of cycle touring in China in coming years. It is about six retired people, from Guangzhou, who ride more than 3,000 km from north-west China and into Tibet, passing through lhasa and then to Everest base camp. The film is called ‘Across the Plateau‘.

Take Me to Paradise: T-shirts from the DPRK (North Korea)

My great weakness is collecting t-shirts with socialist themes. So I could not help myself on my first trip to the DPRK (North Korea). The first is innocent enough:

See you in Pyongyang – as one does. Innocent enough. Yet I did find that in my accommodation building in Beijing there were a good number of South Koreans. From time to time they gave me puzzled looks, since of course they knew what the flag meant, if not the welcome.

This one has a bit more bite, since Panmunjom is the village...

Two Chinas

I keep being struck, whenever I travel between China and Australia, of the strange sense of two worlds or two planets … and two Chinas.

Let me put it in terms of a couple of conversations I had during the last few months in China.

The first was held in Shanghai, with someone who spent some time in Canada a while back. She reflected on reading local newspaper stories about China. They depicted a terrible, dystopian place, with a ‘totalitarian’ government hell-bent on suppressing its people. At...

The desire to be a Protestant

‘At times I regretted not being a Protestant, so that I might be more of a philosopher without ceasing to be a Christian’.

Joseph-Ernest Renan, author of theLife of Jesus (1863).

New grant: from the Beijing Centre for Studies on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics

I have today signed the contract on a new and rather exciting grant. The project is called ‘Chinese Marxism: Concerning the Sinification of Marxism in Chinese Academia’. The project and its grant are significant on a number of counts. First, it is my first completely Chinese grant, in my capacity as being on the staff of Renmin (People’s) University of China – theuniversity first established under Mao Zedong’s influence in Yan’an in 1937. Second, I am learning much about the way Chinese grant...

The origins of the DPRK: From Division to Reunification

The propaganda on which we were raised had it that the Second World War came to an end through the decisive action of the United States in dropping a couple of atomic bombs on Japan. Then, US troops immediately moved to the Korean Peninsula to ensure that the freedom-loving Koreans were not subjected to the totalitarian rule of evil communists. They were not entirely successful, because the north had been overrun by the Soviet Red Army, which brutally imposed collectivisation and socialist me...

The League of the Militant Godless: a Russian version of the Reformation?

I am working my way through Farnham Maynard’sReligion and Revolution (1947). He was canon of St Peter’s, Eastern Hill, Melbourne, from 1926 to 1944. He saw socialism arising from Christianity, especially the Anglo-Catholicism he championed. Indeed, he managed to escape the Australian government’s ban on people travelling to the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. He toured for eight months in 1952, moving across eastern Europe, through Russia and then to a conference in Beijing.

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Cooperation between Christians and Communists – Australian style

I am writing an article on Farnham Maynard (1881-1973), who was a priest in the Anglican Church of Australia in the middle of the twentieth century. He wrote a number booklets and contributions to books on Christianity and communism, which were texts of speeches he gave: Economics and the Kingdom of God (1929), ‘Christianity and Socialism’ in A Fair Hearing for Socialism (1944) and Religion and Revolution (1947). More on this material soon, but I am quite intrigued by a forword given to the f...