[IronJack]

you openly wonder why the Left still embraces Mao Zedung as a great leader

For the same reason they embrace Karl Marx as a great thinker and remain silent on the predations of Josef Stalin and Fidel Castro. For the same reason they revere the cowardly Che Guevara and the sleazy Eva Peron. Part of it is a misplaced sense of romanticism; they glorify these vermin as "little people" who fought the Establishment and won. Never mind that few accomplished anything on their own; they stole it from someone else or married it. And their accomplishments are always promissory notes payable in somebody else's blood.

More than that, they are all proof that socialism can ascend. Now, granted, it makes a mess of everything it touches, but the pantheon of liberal heros reminds the vanishing liberal that even idiots can still have hope.

[holden]

Before I was old enough to know better, our elementary school teachers were all-too-willing to have us go out to the local bookstores to spend our paperboy, detasselling, and lawn mowing money to buy Mao's little red books.

It was disgusting.

HF

[RayChuang88]

I think once the Communist government of Fidel Castro ends we will finally find out that Castro was just a bad a tyrranical thug as Stalin and Mao Zedung ever was. It could take decades to undo what Castro did to that country--a country that could have been the economic superpower of Latin America had that country been a proper representative republic.