Word: backward
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...native Hunan, Mao tirelessly tried to organize the peasants. But Li Lisan, Mao's noncommittal correspondent, was chosen by Moscow to head the Chinese party. In orthodox Marxist fashion, Li Lisan based his hopes on the urban proletariat; he considered China's peasant millions too backward to grasp the new revolutionary science...
...spotting his songs. The only top-ranking Broadway composer besides Irving Berlin who writes his own lyrics, he usually begins with a song title to fit the plot situation, then finds his melody, and later fits the words to it. He begins with the last line and works backward. Close at hand is an exhaustive library of rhyming and foreign dictionaries (he speaks French, German, Spanish and Italian), geographical guides and other reference books...
Hope for the Backward. Genetics probably offers the Soviet authorities one of their trickiest methods of posing as a source of scientific light and hope. Western genetics, following Mendel and Morgan, teaches that the inherited characteristics of living organisms are largely controlled by genes passed down from parents to offspring. During sexual reproduction the genes are shuffled, but except in the case of accidental mutations they are not changed. Lysenko teaches that the form of an organism is determined by the environment in which it develops. He claims to have modified plant species merely by moving them around Russia. (Western...
...propaganda, Lysenkoism is promising. The so-called backward peoples of the world, to whom Communists are making an intense appeal, may like the suggestion that a better environment (provided, of course, by Communism) can turn their children, in one generation's time, into superiors of the strutting white men who have ruled them for centuries past...
Western genetics does not maintain that "backward" races are backward because of hereditary deficiencies. All humans, say the geneticists, have about the same genetic potentialities. Individual deficiencies come from defects of culture, early nutrition, etc. But such details of accepted science are not likely to be expounded by Soviet propagandists. Western genetics (primacy of heredity) can be made to sound like a "master race" doctrine, and Lysenkoism (primacy of environment) can be made to sound like light and hope-out of Soviet Russia...