EX IS BETTER THAN IM:

Awaiting China's implosion (SALIM MANSUR, 4/19/08, Toronto Sun)

In the list of tyrants, mass-murderers and psychopaths Mao stands apart. Others in comparison -- Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Idi Amin, Ayatollah Khomeini and the rest -- are merely horrid and detestable characters.

They lacked the aura of philosopher-statesman that brought so many in the West, including president Richard Nixon and the suave Henry Kissinger during their 1972 trip to China, to praise Mao as the "great helmsman" for his history-making role.

But it is Mao's China and not the United States that is a paper tiger held together by undisguised force of communist police and informers.

Though Tibet was devoured brutally and other ethnic minorities repressed cruelly, such as the Uighur Turks in the Xinjiang province who are mostly Muslims -- I have personally witnessed the situation while travelling through the region -- Mao's successors tremble in fear at the possibility the prison he constructed might dissolve, as did the former Soviet Union.