Maonster

WaPo runs a review of MAO: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. According to the review (and others I've seen), the book details Mao's atrocities and shows that he was quite possibly as heinous as Hitler and Stalin. He was a perverse sadist who killed millions.

What I found interesting, though, was the review's admission that Mao was a darling of "the left":

On the left, the view of the chairman has remained petrified in the 1930s, when the American journalist Edgar Snow wrote Red Star Over China , a flattering account of Mao and his communist comrades' fight against Japanese aggressors and Chiang Kai-shek's corrupt nationalist regime, and in the 1960s, when Mao fever swept American college campuses. (I remember going to sleep as a youngster to the chants of Columbia University students: "Mao, Mao, Chairman Mao.") From the right, Mao looked good for standing up to the Soviets in the 1970s.

Yes, the reviewer throws "the right" in there, too, but the bulk of the passage highlights the left's love of communism in general. And to the extent "the right" embraced Mao at all, it was for strategic--not common-traveler--reasons.