PRESS RELEASE

THE HARVARD CRIMSON REFUSES TO PUBLISH PAID AD;
DEEMS INTELLECTUAL CHALLENGE “TOO CONTROVERSIAL”

RAYMOND LOTTA AVAILABLE FOR INTERVIEWS AND COMMENTARY

Please Contact:
Stan Lawrence, 781-367-5937 or Anne Magrath, 312-399-1981
Email lottaonyourcampus@yahoo.com

Raymond Lotta, a leading scholar on the socialist experiences of the twentieth century, especially the Chinese Revolution, has issued an open letter to debate to Roderick MacFarquhar, an academic historian of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and a professor at Harvard.

The open letter was submitted as a paid advertisement to The Harvard Crimson. However, according to the Business Manager, the ad will not appear because Crimson President Peter Zhu has deemed it “too controversial.”

The ad is spurred by MacFarquhar’s blatant distortions of the Cultural Revolution that serve to buttress the “official verdicts” on communist revolution in the twentieth century as nightmares and failures. These “verdicts,” the ad explains, are not true and serve to reinforce the oppressive status quo. The ad goes on to say that the stakes “are “nothing less than historical truth and human possibility.”

The censorship of the ad by the Crimson violates all principles of critical thinking and inquiry. The censorship serves to suppress the truth about communism, and a two-sided debate about communist revolution—precisely what Lotta is taking on and breaking through in his tour titled “Everything You’ve Been Told About Communism is Wrong: Capitalism Is A Failure, Revolution Is The Solution.”

Lotta will be speaking at Harvard on April 14, 7 pm, Emerson Hall, Room 105.

Lotta’ s campus tour has already taken him to UC Berkeley, UCLA, NYU, and the University of Chicago, the last of which witnessed a spirited discussion and debate attended by some 300 students. Scholars in the field and other areas have called on people to engage with Lotta's work and campus speaking tour...and for liberal ideologues of anticommunism to debate Lotta.

Organizers of Lotta's speaking tour are calling on those who oppose such censorship and institutional thought control to voice their protest by writing the Crimson.

About Raymond Lotta: Raymond Lotta is a revolutionary intellectual who takes Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism as his foundation. Lotta has written and lectured widely on issues of the world economy and the experience of communist revolution in the 20th century. He is the author of America in Decline, and the editor of Mao Makes Five, a collection of articles from the Cultural Revolution, and of the English translation of the Shanghai Textbook on Political Economy.