A document lies on my desk. I pick it up and find that it consists of several passages of my own along with some by Lenin, titled “How Marxists Should Properly Approach Revolutionary Mass Movements.” I have no idea which scholarly comrade put it together, but he seems to have armed himself with a few machine guns and several mortars, unleashing a barrage of rapid-fire salvos against our rightist comrades at the Lushan Conference. You splitters within the Party—those who are as right-wing as they come—did you hear the cannonade? Did it strike home, hitting you where it hurts most?  You are unwilling to heed my words. According to you, I have already entered “Stalin’s twilight years”; I am “arbitrary and autocratic,” denying you “freedom” and “democracy”; I am “given to grandiosity and self-aggrandizement,” “biased in what I listen to and whom I trust”; you claim that “when superiors indulge in certain tendencies, subordinates will inevitably go even further”; you say that “one only recognizes the need to turn around once one has gone completely astray—that turn is always a sharp one-hundred-and-eighty-degree about-face”; that I have “deceived” you, “lured you out like big fish,” and that I even “resemble Tito” to some extent. As a result, some can no longer utter a single word in my presence; only your leader is deemed fit to speak. The atmosphere is utterly dark, as if only your emergence could possibly salvage the situation. And so on. Such was your fusillade, which nearly blew half of Lushan to smithereens. Indeed, why would you ever care to listen to my nonsense?  Yet you profess to be foremost Marxist–Leninists, adept at drawing lessons from experience, quick to point out shortcomings yet reluctant to acknowledge achievements. You insist that the General Line must be “revised,” that the Great Leap Forward was “not worth the cost,” that the People’s Communes were “messed up,” and that both the Great Leap Forward and the People’s Communes were merely manifestations of “petty-bourgeois fanaticism.” Very well, then: why not examine how Marx and Lenin commented on the Paris Commune, and how Lenin analyzed the situation during the Russian Revolution? Take a look: which was preferable—the Chinese Revolution or the Paris Commune? And how does the Chinese Revolution compare with the Russian Revolutions of 1905–1907? Furthermore, how does China’s socialist construction in 1958–1959 stack up against Russia in 1919 and 1921, when Lenin penned those two famous articles? Have you seen how Lenin denounced the traitor Plekhanov, how he castigated the “capitalist masters and their lackeys,” as well as “the dying bourgeoisie and the swine-like lackeys of the petty-bourgeois democrats”? If not, I urge you to study these texts.  “To gloat over the difficulties and setbacks of the transitional period, to sow panic, to advocate retrenchment—these are all weapons in the class struggle wielded by the bourgeois intelligentsia. The proletariat will not allow itself to be deceived.” What say you, our right-wing friends?  Since the splitters and those aligned on the right claim to cherish Marxism–Leninism, I propose that this compilation be submitted for discussion throughout the entire Party. I daresay they would hardly object.