LETTERS

...The two, obviously, are not the same...

...I had no quarrel with Salisbury's main outline of events (which I summarized in the first part of my review) and I found his work to be, on the whole, "painstaking and meticulous...

...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...

...It has rather been an elite corps of politically articulate leaders organized along Leninist lines but drawn on its top levels from various strata of Chinese society...

...Addison Gayle, of course, is capable of defending himself, but surely he is not an ethnocentrist...

...Mr...

...Asante can't even sustain the logic of his simplistic arguments for more than a single sentence...

...The point Salisbury makes is that the cadre that came out intact from the Long March was the cadre that established Communist rule in 1949...

...This is in line with what the best scholars of the Chinese Communist revolution have written...

...David Rockefeller was not being recruited for Maoism or Dengism (if there is such an animal) when he was given repeated red-carpet welcomes to China...

...First of all, the Chinese had denied Salisbury's request for twelve years and granted it when they were allowing a very wide diversity of people to come to China, for varied purposes...

...In the end, it won China for Mao Zedong and his Communists...

...Black artists such as Stevie Wonder, Wynton Marsalis, Bill Cosby, Charles Fuller, Sonia Sanchez, and Haki Madhubuti produce unambiguous art because they do not suffer from the kind of distortion of place or audience that Kilson appears to experience...

...How does Leys go about demolishing Salisbury's book...

...As I read that sentence I wondered for a moment why it was so familiar...

...q • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...

...Salisbury points out that the dead and deserters were more numerous because the Red Army added to its ranks as it went along) still served to become the basis for the Communist triumph...

...In fact, every gain toward full participation in all sectors of American society has resulted from the agitations and intellectual struggles waged by Kilson's "ethnocentrists...

...I have yet to hear a white writer expressing the desire for creative autonomy from his or her culture...

...It was, as he writes, a "nucleus for the revolution that they all believed they would bring to China...

...I hesitate to reply to Molefi Asante's comments on my article, for a very good reason—Asante's criticisms are lacking in rudimentary intellectual quality...

...Leys says it's an exaggeration to say that Mao "saved the situation" in the Long March, noting that at the end of the march, "they were a mere four thousand out of the 86,000 who had evacuated the Jiangxi base twelve months earlier...

...The Harlem Renaissance, more than anything else, was a small cadre of black artists performing in a few well-todo homes of white patrons...

...In Leys's view, Salisbury's association with Burchett reveals Salisbury's "working methods...

...Leys argues that the Chinese Communists allowed Salisbury to write this book because they felt he would do a propaganda job for them...

...a battle that again and again came within a hair's breadth of defeat and disaster...

...Salisbury shows that Mao proved to be as murderous a dictator as Stalin...

...Yet even a reader with a child's brain would not misconstrue as Asante does the following observation I made about right-wing 382 black intellectuals: "Neoconservatives such as Sowell and [Walter] Williams are pathetically uncritical of the American establishment's plutocratic pretensions— pretensions aggressively reinforced under two Reagan administrations...

...This sentence identifies a basic element in the paradox of blackness in American society, but Asante lacks the wit to grasp such paradox...

...Salisbury rejects suggestions of clinical illness or any other excuse for Mao's (and Stalin's) behavior...

...Mao's role in the Long March is examined to explain how Mao became ascendant in the Chinese Communist Party and how it triumphed in the end...

...They understand that you are not less human or less "universal" because you are black...

...Actually, Salisbury's book whitewashes neither Soviet nor Chinese Communism...

...Anyway, David Rockefeller and Harrison Salisbury are guests in China...

...The Afrocentric artist or writer knows full well that her or his art will be available for the entire society...

...But Salisbury is happy that much of this Maoist madness has been rejected...

...He asks them as they and he recount stories of endless death sentences during the Long March itself...

...Why did he savage his comrades of the Long March and shake China into anarchy...

...Others have shown that the black right-wingers have produced not one political, cultural, or economic advance for black Americans...

...For example, Asante claims "there is no ambiguous status of blackness," and then proceeds in the next sentence to describe a fundamental source of the ambiguity of black ethnicity in white America—"There are only ambiguous people who happen to have African ancestry...

...384...

...It was a triumph of human survival, a deadly, endless retreat from the claws of Chiang Kai-shek...

...The Paradoxes of Blackness: Notes on the Crisis of Black Intellectuals" could have been more aptly titled "Notes on the Crisis of Martin Kilson...

...It seems to occur because he confuses blackness with black people, but blackness is not merely a color but a philosophical perspective...

...Is Salisbury supposed to be serving Soviet disinformation here...

...There are only ambiguous people who happen to have African ancestry...

...and on illustrating the shallowness of Molefi Kete Asante's intellect...

...But because we have a long "lead time" for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...

...Then I recalled Salisbury's book and picked it up again—the figures come from his book and appear not once but at least three times, in the beginning, the middle, and the end...

...And ad hominern and guilt by association methods are combined by Leys's charge that Salisbury was friendly with Wilfred Burchett and that in Salisbury's 1967 book on the folly of America's war against Vietnam, he was fed material by Burchett, who was, indeed as Leys says, a "notorious agent of Soviet disinformation...

...To wit—a brilliant comedian from a once heavily denigrated ethnicity dominating TV ratings by serving up for white viewers (and black ones too) comic episodes that are blackness-tinged but deferential toward mainstream Americanism...

...Schwartz writes: The Chinese Communist Party under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung has not been the party of the industrial proletariat nor has it been the party of the peasantry in the Marxist-Leninist sense...

...They are not busy denying their blackness either as artists or as human beings...

...observe the trenchant comment by Benjamin I. Schwartz in his book, "Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao...

...But when Salisbury interviews numerous survivors of the Cultural Revolution madness, he asks them bluntly how all this could happen...

...Salisbury tackles the matter of how Mao turned the triumph of Communism into a war against the people, bringing them famine instead of plenty and a murderous decimation of Communist ranks equaled only by Stalin's pogroms...

...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...

...Apparently Leys is not...

...Clark does not seem to have read my article...

...Under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung this elite group has come to realize in the face of Marxist-Leninist dogma that the peasantry could itself provide the mass basis and the motive power for a revolutionary transformation...

...Similarly, the very fact of the "Bill Cosby Show" is riddled with irony and paradox regarding black/white patterns in American life...

...There is no "ambiguous status of blackness" either as a philosophy or in any personal sense...

...What I find most terrifying about Kilson's essay is his cavalier attitude toward historical analysis...

...There has never been a paradox of blackness...

...Rather better than the times when some Americans and many Chinese were being jailed, tortured, and murdered in China...

...It was fought without a plan...

...Asante offers a list of black artists he says produce "unambiguous art"—whatever that is—yet if you ponder his list for one minute there is nothing straightforward or one-dimensional about the artists named...

...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, please do it quickly...

...None of those he interviews cite what Salisbury does himself, that the atrocities are "one more product of the hysteria that arises within a closed conspiratorial world...

...Yet in the very same breath we find Asante celebrating Harlem Renaissance artists as "the strongest intellectual heritage of Black America...

...If this proves to be the case, there should indeed be much cause for rejoicing, as Mr...

...No one has asked the question more dramatically than Salisbury does in this book: "The question nags— why did Mao's eyes turn cold...

...He asks why the Communist authorities suddenly showed such sympathetic interest in his project, while denying it to others...

...A black aesthetic theorist is no more an ethnocentrist than a white intellectual who is a European aesthetic theorist or an Asian who is an Asian aesthetic theorist...

...I could go on, and on...

...Kilson's so-called "creative autonomy" of the Harlem Renaissance writers had little to do with the black masses (such as was the case in the 1960s) and the war for American egalitarianism and economic justice...

...q Editors: I found it difficult to recognize Harrison E. Salisbury's book, The Long March, in the review by Simon Leys (Dissent, Spring 1986...

...Salisbury opens his book with the declaration that It was not a "march" in the conventional sense, not a military campaign, not a victory...

...Or is it Chinese Communist disinformation...

...Yet, we are dealing here with a very sensitive subject, on which full light will probably never be shed—and my feeling is that this book, however useful in some respects, should be handled with caution...

...Precisely because Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, among others, did not denigrate either the philosophy of blackness or their own blackness as human beings, they were able to command a far greater mass audience than any of Kilson's philosophical deviants...

...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...

...Schwartz relates this to the experience of the Long March: Having taken the initiative in the field of strategy in the early thirties, having exercised actual state power during the Soviet period, and having led the movement through the vicissitudes of the Long March, 383 Mao was now sufficiently self-confident to take the initiative in the field of theoretical formulation...

...There is no paradox of blackness as there is no paradox of whiteness...

...When Andre Breton commented that Aime Cesaire was a surrealist, Cesaire was quick to remind him that as a black man he wrote poetry that spoke to the reality of his world...

...Salisbury explains how an event that was really a retreat, that decimated the Red troops (by far more than the figures quoted by Leys...

...For instance, Asante remarks (wrongly I should add) that the Harlem Renaissance intellectuals were "more than anything else...

...It does the reverse, it shows that despite the truly epic significance of the Long March, the only way China could make any progress would be by ridding itself of Mao and Maoism...

...The Chinese Communist Party under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung has been .. . an elite of professional revolutionaries which has risen to power by basing itself on the dynamic of peasant discontent...

...For example, Stevie Wonder's pop-swooning for mainly middle-class white audiences is a way of packaging black entertainment modalities that is fundamentally different from, say, the mode-and-purpose of ethnocentric pop-poetry by Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee...

...My uneasiness comes essentially from the fact that the general inspiration of Salisbury's narrative seems to coincide exactly with the new political line in China...

...If Leys is right and the Communists wanted what Salisbury produced, then the Deng transformation in China is more basic than anyone, even Salisbury, has suggested...

...He tells of the fate of American missionaries, such as John and Betty Stam, who were killed by the Long Marchers while their three-month-old baby was left to fend for herself...

...Kilson admits he does not understand black America's attraction to what he calls the populist road because it is in his words "constrictive for those black intellectuals who seek creative autonomy...

...Salisbury does not argue, as Leys implies, that the Long March was a great victory...

...This book, Leys argues, is just what the Communists wanted in a situation where they have to dump Mao's policies but still defend their legitimacy...

...Such a perspective is hammered out of the existential encounter of those who articulate it...

...He draws a deadly parallel between the crimes of the Russian and the Chinese Communists...

...Mao was excluded from the preparations and was only told at the eleventh hour...

...This uneasiness is further reinforced by the knowledge that, in the past—in at least one significant instance— Salisbury appears to have uncritically transmitted communist propaganda material...

...It did that by creating the cadre, the elite that Schwartz writes about, who found support among the land-hungry peasants and the people as a whole who wanted to defeat the Japanese invasion...

...So ultimately there is no competition for the cultural or market values of blackness as Kilson suggests...

...Salisbury's book, far from being an exercise in hagiography, describes how the Long March became the cauldron in which the Maoist cadre was forged and organized to take power...

...Leys's charge is that Salisbury was welcomed to perform as a Chinese Communist agent...

...Naturally, we cannot exclude the logical possibility that Salisbury's harmony of views with the present Chinese line simply resulted from a common dedication to historical truth...

...That's what the book is about...

...a small cadre of black artists performing in a few well-to-do homes of white patrons" (and just before writing this sentence Asante has the gall to attack me for a "cavalier attitude toward historical analysis...

...There is really no person who is "just a human being," because all human beings are inextricably connected to some core cultural community...

...The dust on the pages of Kilson's essay smells of the early 1970s inasmuch as the language he resorts to for a discussion of black intellectuals is as dated as his ideas...

...Kilson's confusion relates to a sense of inferiority often found among historically oppressed people...

...From what do they seek autonomy...

...Clark himself observed quite pertinently...

...Compounding illogicality even further, Asante proceeds to criticize my analysis of right-wing black intellectuals like Thomas Sowell, Ann Wortham, and Glenn Loury, charging me with raising these black right-wing "flag-bearers to respectability...

...But I'll leave it to your readers to finish the boring chore...

...In his quest to obfuscate the strongest intellectual heritage of black America, Kilson tries to raise the right-wing flagbearers to respectability...

...Alas...

...Salisbury describes how the Communists raised money during the Long March—by taking hostages, holding them for ransom and killing them if their friends or relatives didn't come across...

...there is only the persistent need for the black artist and intellectual to be as true to his or her center as the white or Jewish artist or intellectual seeks to be...