From The International Herald Tribune:
If ever there was a believer in the power of the written word, it was a best- selling author and former librarian, Mao Zedong.
As Mao explained to an early chronicler of his life, Edgar Snow, “Three books especially deeply carved my mind, and built up in me a faith in Marxism, from which, once I had accepted it as the correct interpretation of history, I did not afterward waver.” Those books, he said, were a book about the history of socialism, a book about the history of class struggle and “The Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
According to the Marxist Internet Archive at www.marxists.org, an online community that produces and organizes an ever-growing Marxist library, the wheel has turned full circle.
People at the site say they suspect the Chinese government is behind computer attacks that are jeopardizing the site’s ability to provide Marxist texts, and might force the library to stop providing material written in Chinese.
“We are not 100 percent sure this is the Chinese government; there are a lot of possibilities,” said Brian Basgen, who has worked on the archive since 1990. But he noted that the archive had been temporarily banned by the Chinese government before, about two years ago.
“There is a motive,” he said. “They have done it to us in the past. What they are doing is targeting just the Chinese files.” [Full Text]
