Atlas Obscura provides a Guide to Communist Mummies, and there's plenty more online. Visit
Lenin's Mausoleum, where he has been
kept since 1924, defying his wishes to be buried next to his mother in St. Petersburg. He wasn't alone forever, as
Stalin's body was kept in the mausoleum after his death in 1953, until
his body was quietly removed in October, 1961. Just under eight years later,
Hồ Chí Minh died, and against his wishes to be cremated, a
very large state funeral was held and
Uncle Ho's embalmed remains were placed in a mausoleum. Chairman Mao Zedong made
A Proposal that all Central Leaders be Cremated after Death in 1956, but his wishes were overlooked when
he died in 1976, and he joined the growing ranks of the preserved communist leaders in
his own crystal casket, housed in a grand mausoleum.
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posted by filthy light thief
on Nov 21, 2011 -
30 comments
In 1936 in the Jim Crow South,
Robert F. Williams was an 11-year-old black boy in Monroe, North Carolina, who watched helplessly as
Jesse Helms Sr. (father and namesake of the
former senator) beat an African-American woman to the ground and
"dragged her off to the nearby jailhouse, her dress up over her head, the same way that a cave man would club and drag his sexual prey." Years later, after a stint in the segregated military, Williams returned home to Monroe and worked as an NAACP organizer, where he brought international attention to the
Kissing Case, a 1958 incident in which two black boys under the age of 10 were sentenced to a reformatory for kissing a white girl. By then, Williams had also attracted controversy for his advocacy of armed self-defense, a position he outlined in the book
Negroes with Guns. But it would all change overnight in 1961, when Williams landed on
FBI's Most Wanted list, after being charged with kidnapping a white couple that Williams claimed he was trying to save from an angry black crowd.
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posted by jonp72
on Jun 8, 2010 -
36 comments
Why the Chinese support the Communist party Interviews with four elderly Chinese. Among the answers: "We used to live in a tiny house, over ten people all together, just a place of over ten square metres. Now I often say to my husband that life has been totally different for our grandchildren, not only from ours, but from their parents too. They have nothing to worry about, no need to worry about food, clothes."
posted by shetterly
on Oct 4, 2009 -
52 comments
Ahmadinejad is no Hitler (Los Angeles Times) If you think Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes outlandish comments, consider what Mao Tse-tung said to a visiting head of state in 1954: "If someone else can drop an atomic bomb, then I can too. The death of 10 or 20 million people is nothing to be afraid of."
Nonetheless, 15 years later, a nuclear-armed China was not only contained by the world, it opted for normalization of relations with its archenemy, the United States. Today, it is fashionable to equate Ahmadinejad with Hitler, yet the lesson of the 20th century is that rash leaders can, in fact, be deterred. And Iran's president will prove no exception.
posted by hoder
on Mar 13, 2007 -
77 comments
Kehinde Wiley :
painter and
sculptor . "The subjects, anonymous men in T-shirts and jeans that Wiley approaches on the street, are given the mantle of authority and grandiosity bestowed on figures such as
Napoleon in Jacques-Louis David's famous depiction with a rearing steed or the holiness of saints." (
via)
posted by desjardins
on Mar 7, 2007 -
7 comments
Mo' MAO. "If you stare at a red shape for a long time, when you turn away, your retina will hold the image but you will see a green version of the same shape. In the same way, when I lived in China, I saw the positive image of Mao so many times that my mind now holds a negative image of Mao. In my art I am transferring this psychological feeling to a physical object." --
Zhang Hongtu
posted by gimonca
on Mar 23, 2005 -
15 comments
Comrade, is Piglet revisionism getting you down? Don't be an enemy of the people. Brush up on your Maoist theory with the
Mao of Poo.
posted by alidarbac
on Feb 8, 2004 -
5 comments
