Nausea

Just as the Murdoch press gets so delightfully skewered by the Guardian's superb investigative journalism, we forget it has its own middle-class sewer - yes, the comments pages where the readership can get their rocks off on, ever so understandable, mass murder.  The latest piece masturbates to the memory of Mao with a breathtaking piece of 'yes buttery'.

It is tempting to denounce Mao as a monster, and to dismiss the Maoists of today as no less criminally deluded than Peru's Shining Path guerillas, or the Khmer Rouge. Certainly, the scale of the violence Mao inflicted on China dwarfs all other crimes and disasters committed during the course of nation-building in the last two centuries. But political and economic modernisers elsewhere also exacted a terrible human cost from their allegedly backward peoples.

This is even more irritating as the theme he hangs this on, the crisis of rural communities, is incredibly important. But there are much better guides to it, as there are to Mao.