Killer 'Kitsch'

"The 20th century was remarkable not only for the number and scale of the atrocities it witnessed but also for the slowness with which these frightful events were recognized for what they were, let alone condemned. Of these crimes, which began with the mass murders by Lenin and Stalin in the USSR (costing 20 million lives) and continued through the Nazi Holocaust and the democides in China and Cambodia, only the Nazi horror is regularly acknowledged and truly well known.

"This is particularly the case with the crimes of Mao Zedong. ... China has never repudiated Mao as Khrushchev did Stalin at the [Communist Party] congress of 1956. ... Nor, with honorable exceptions, have Western scholars ever dealt with Mao as at least some did with Lenin and Stalin. Today, no one in his right mind would put a portrait of Hitler in his house. Yet, in many places in the West, Mao kitsch -- posters, badges, busts, and so forth -- is still considered not only acceptable but fashionable."

Arthur Waldron, writing on "Mao Lives," in the October issue of Commentary