What next, the Paul Bernardo Scholarship in Women's Studies? University of Victoria offers Chairman Mao Scholarship in Pacific and Asian Studies program

Barbara Kay in National Post:

It’s no secret that Western campuses are dominated by the regressive left. But certain indices of academics’ love affair with the far left still have the power to shock. The University of Victoria is inviting applications from students in its Pacific and Asian Studies program for two awards “in memory of the late Mao Tse Tung” — one to be applied for a study tour of China, the other to promote the study of modern China.

Now the Mao Tse Tung Memorial Course and Travel Awards don’t amount, in monetary terms, to a hill of beans — a few hundred dollars together, barely enough to cover, say, a single forced abortion, perhaps two summary executions, or a month’s maintenance for a political prisoner — but, of course, it is the principle that matters.

Mao, who led the Chinese Communist Party from 1935 until his death in 1976, was a psychopathic tyrant. He ruled by terror, and was abetted in his crimes against humanity — mass executions, deliberate pauperization and starvation of the peasantry, “re-education” gulags and total elimination of all freedoms — by fellow-travelling Western intellectuals and naive celebrities.

Mao eclipsed fellow monsters Hitler, Pol Pot and even Stalin for the sheer numbers of deaths for which he was directly responsible. And yet, through his cult of personality, he became a kind of living god in China and Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book a talisman for Western lefties...