highlighted bit
In the final reckoning Mao must be accepted as one of history’s great achievers: for devising a peasant-centred revolutionary strategy which enabled China’s Communist party to seize power, against Marx’s prescriptions, from bases in the countryside; for directing the transformation of China from a feudal society wracked by war and bled by corruption, into a unified egalitarian state where nobody starves; and for reviving national pride and confidence so that China could, in Mao’s words, ‘stand up’ among the great power.
This would be considered too radical and pro-Mao today not just for the Economist but for most leftist (socdem & demsoc) publications. Jacobin wouldn’t even publish something like this.
The public discourse really shifted so much to the right after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The western left has thoroughly internalized liberalism and anti-communism.
lol exactly
