Maurice to the media on the Maple Leafs: "You're going to kill these guys and they don't deserve it. ... The margin for error is small. Before the puck dropped tonight, there were 5 teams in the NHL left. ... The puck went our way tonight, that's it."
The opening scene in Netflix's #3BodyProblem is a brilliant, terrifying depiction of China's Cultural Revolution. Watch it now.
The entire series is worth watching, but this scene, moved from the middle of the original novel to the start of the English translation, provides a rare but important depiction of a society run amok by power-mad, ideology-crazed groups hell-bent on purifying society along Marxist-Maoist lines.
We should not trivialize the rampant and state-sanctioned violence of the Cultural Revolution with cheap allusions to recent political protests in the United States. As many as 2 million people were killed during the Cultural Revolution and many times that were sentenced to labor camps and forcibly resettled, or saw their lives upended.
But we absolutely should do more to understand and illustrate the unadorned brutality of 20th-century (and 21st-century) totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. A good starting place is to survey the raft of movies created by citizens of the former Soviet Union and its satellites in the wake of the collapse in communism. Read these two stories from @reason abt such fare: https://t.co/05XcDZ9mN5
https://t.co/HzmFl9VitN
And with regard to China and the Cultural Revolution, watch @joanchenchong's searing directorial debut, 1998's Xiu Xiu or The Sent-Down Girl, after which she was banned from China. https://t.co/VFw7TjnK62