Red Azalea, Anchee Min's memoir of growing up in Maoist China. Striking how much backbiting goes on in a collectivist dictatorship. The backbiting reminds me of the gestalt at a summer camp for adolescent boys, or early adolescence at large, basically one's junior high school period from twelve to fourteen. Where there's not enough to go around--enough food, enough esteem, enough comfort, happiness, whatever--there is something like a war of all against all, despite whatever talk there may be of comradeship or class solidarity. And as for the enforced veneration of the top leaders, Mao more than anyone--Mao more than ever?--it surely has nothing to do with anything Marx ever envisioned.
On a related note, in re that iconic photograph of Che Guevara circa '60--it's interesting that a physician-turned-guerrilla-turned-bureaucrat who soon returned to guerrilla life basically invented--inadvertently, one assumes--the look and mystique of the rock star when Jim Morrison was still in high school and the Beatles still looked like a bunch of juvenile delinquents.