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captveg wrote: Wed Feb 05, 2025 6:22 pm The Heart of Lincoln (1915), starring and directed by Francis Ford (John Ford's older brother) discovered in Long Island

Spoiler

The great leader and mentor Chairman Mao taught us: "Using novels to carry out anti-Party activities is a great invention. Anybody who wants to topple a regime must first build public opinion and carry out work on the ideological front. This goes for both the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary classes."

The counter-revolutionary film Counterattack, carefully planned and produced by the anti-Party clique of Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, Jiang Qing, and Yao Wenyuan, is a great poisonous weed of counter-revolutionary propaganda, cultivated so they could usurp the Party and seize power.

During the production of Counterattack, the "Gang of Four" and their cronies proclaimed with wicked intentions that "To grasp Counterattack is a great affair," that it "must be incorporated into the broader political struggle," that it "can be sent to the Central Committee," and that it should be made into "a microcosm of society as a whole." Through the despicable method of "a thief shouting 'Stop, thief!'," they deliberately inverted the relationship between the enemy and ourselves. In this film, they concocted the figure of a provincial Party first secretary and imbued him with their deep hatred of the proletariat, compounded it with evils of the sort only they could commit, and sought in vain to create chaos to bring down those comrades upholding Marxism in the Party, the government, and the military. The so-called "main hero" of Counterattack is shown relentlessly carrying out anti-Party activities, while another so-called "hero" embodies the "Gang of Four"'s cabal of bourgeois conspirators and careerists. After shooting was completed, the "Gang of Four" boasted that this reactionary film was a "heavy artillery shell" and a "powerful earthquake," then prepared to release it across the nation at an opportune moment to bolster their plot to usurp supreme leadership of the Party and the state, bringing about their dream of a so-called "grand festival"* of counter-revolutionary restoration.

With a single blow, the Party Central Committee, under the enlightened leadership of Comrade Hua Guofeng, smashed the "Gang of Four"'s wicked plot to usurp the Party and seize power. This reactionary film was quickly exposed by the broad revolutionary masses and became a document of the "Gang of Four"'s vain schemes to usurp the Party and seize power, subvert the dictatorship of the proletariat, and restore capitalism.

These internal screenings of the reactionary film Counterattack, with accompanying public criticism, have been organized for the purposes of revealing the true counter-revolutionary face of the extreme-rightist "Gang of Four" clique, transforming poisonous weeds into fertilizer, and allowing senior cadres and the masses to more deeply understand the great significance of smashing the Wang-Zhang-Jiang-Yao anti-Party clique, thereby carrying through to its end the great struggle to expose and criticize the "Gang of Four."

*This is the term (derived from Lenin: "Revolutions are the festivals of the oppressed and the exploited") that the Gang of Four supposedly used for their planned seizure of power. It was also the title of another "conspiracy film," directed by Xie Jin, which unlike Counterattack was still in production at the time of the Gang's fall and as such never completed.

Provincial Party secretary Han Ling, sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, is restored to his position and returns to Beijing. His first action is to conduct a comprehensive reorganization of units under his control, including pushing through the provincial committee a resolution opposing Yellow River University's "no exam" system for selecting new students, promoting an examination system instead. Han Ling's committee is criticized by the University's Party secretary Jiang Tao and provincial committee Director Zhao, who call Han's action "reversing a verdict." Even though he is jailed, Jiang Tao persists in his views, and the struggle continues. Shortly afterwards, the Central government issues two decisions supporting Jiang Tao and ordering his release, and the "counterattack rightist reversal of verdicts campaign" begins.