I suspect the pain is primarily self-inflicted, as in "how could I have ever liked Mao?".

And the review does not discuss his sexual abuse of young girls (whether the book mentions it or not, I don't know).

The left needs to learn how to find better icons. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the rest were pretty much monsters from the beginning. And why profess shock? The Great Leap Forward was just as destructive as the Cultural Revolution, and it was no secret in the West.

I'm waiting for the story of the costs of the deindustrialization of the United States.

Thank goodness all these people surprised about Mao still have their Che t-shirts to fall back on.

What I fing incredible is people actually thought he was a good guy until now. WTF?

Yes, Derf, because our peasants are dying in their millions from the lack of good manufacturing jobs. By the way, how many fewer jobs do you think we have since the hayday of industrial manufacturing and how much less do you think the median income is?

Personally, I'm an environmentalist so I welcome the die-off as a good thing in itself, and not simply as a cost of a securing a cleaner environment through the death of manufacturing.

Unknown? To whom?

Mao's Red terror was always there for all to see.
Those claiming not to have known of this super-holocaust were at best vincibly ignorant. Most were much deeper into moral culpability, vicariously partaking of the persecution and extirmination of elders and bearers of traditional culture.

Reminds me of that bit in "Barbarians at the Gate" where the aging liberal Lothario is trying to pick up his foxy Chinese translator by talking about how awesome the Cultural Revolution was. She curtly informs him that her entire family was wiped out by Mao and gives him the cold shoulder for the rest of his stay.

"vincibly ignorant" -- and these days, most of the people who iconize a Mao or Che are just agressively stupid.

Mr. Ortega:
Notice that the same people who lionize Che and Mao in spite of all the evidence of their misdeeds are often the same people who are perfectly willing to believe that George Bush and Karl Rove feast on the living flesh of infants in the Oval Office based on a rumor scrawled on a Greenwich Village men's room wall. Funny old world, isn't it?

pchuck:

One of my favorite examples is Barbara Ehrenreich, who traveled to China in 1974 and was given a nice Potemkin Village tour and came back spouting the usual utopian blather in an issue of the Monthly Review:

The disappearance of the Little Red Book is by no means a repudiation of Mao's thought — quite the opposite. The Red Book was a shortcut to Mao Tsetung Thought; today there are no shortcuts. In the Movement to Criticize Lin Piao and Confucius everyone is urged to read the basic texts of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought for themselves. Peasants, formerly illiterate old people, young students, workers, are reading and discussing "The Critique of the Gotha Program," "Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism" . . .

Even the Columbia Journalism Review had a word of criticism for this:

The essay contains not a word about the purges, executions, and show trials that characterized the Cultural Revolution; most of those events had preceded her visit by a few short years. Ehrenreich admits today that she was "not very aware" of those aspects of Mao's rule. "I did notice, the one time we went to the university in Beijing, the faculty seemed really nervous," she says. "Later I realized they must have been having a rough time."

Yeah, a rough time, like working a series of comparatively well-paying "low-end" American jobs, or losing your weekly backpage column in Time magazine. Stay as sweet as you are, Barbara.

Mao was the greatest mass murderer of the 20th Century, making Hitler and the Nazis look like second stringers. From 20th Century Atlas - Death Tools: "Perhaps a better way of estimating would be to add up the individual components. The medians here are:
1) Purges, etc. during the first few years: 2M (10 estimates)
2) Great Leap Forward: 30M (12 estimates)
3) Cultural Revolution: 500T (10 estimates)
4) Ethnic Minorities, primarily Tibetans: 750-900T (8 estimates, see below)
5) Labor Camps: 15-20M (4 estimates)
This produces a total of some 48,250,000 to 53,400,000 deaths. The weak link in this calculation is in the Labor Camp numbers for which we only have 4 estimates."

Nor is there any excuse for ignorance of these numbers. Robert L. Walker, in a 1971 report to the US Senate Committee of the Judiciary, The Human Cost of Communism in China, estimated the total deaths under the Communist PRC at 32M to 59.5M.

Posted by: jd watson at October 18, 2005 7:23 PM

The left has never minded the deaths of Asians or peasants in their millions.

You forget to add Jews, considering the number of Holocaust Deniers and "anti-Zionists" within their ranks these days.