A Review of Mao: The Unknown Story

"Of all the follies of the 20th century's "useful idiots", popular enthusiasm for Mao Tse-tung was among the most foolish. It reached its zenith in western Left-wing circles in the 1960s and was compounded a decade later by tourists who flocked into China after the Cultural Revolution, headed by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. They professed to see virtues in a Chinese leader who surpassed Hitler and Stalin as a mass murderer. Kissinger made the preposterous assertion that Mao and his coterie were ''a group of monks… who have… kept their revolutionary purity''. Nixon's staff asserted that under Mao's rule, ''the lives of the Chinese masses have been greatly improved.'' Mao is thought to have been responsible for some 70 million deaths in purges and authorised famines. Since the victims were anonymous Chinese without friends in the West, it seemed churlish for outsiders to make much of the matter, except when the Great Helmsman ventured outside his own borders and began to massacre Tibetans, as he did in 1960. " (LINK)