Many Western nations managed to "uplift farmers and the working class" without killing upwards of 30 million of them. We did this, generally, without empowering student mobs to trash all the history we now claim we're proud of, and without massacring the wealthy and the educated on the altar of cultural revolution. One of the many ironies of the modern Chinese nationalist is that, were it not for generals countermanding the Red Guard, the evidence they claim for their greatness would have been totally destroyed by Mao's own faction. We have no equivalent of Mao's campaign against the Four Olds, having largely gotten over iconoclastic religious hysteria in medieval times. We never went around killing sparrows to avert famine (which caused a surge in locusts that made famine worse) — of all our many retarded leaders, none have been so retarded as that. Our war heroes did not hide in mountains waiting for the Kuomintang to do all their fighting for them, only to emerge and claim credit after the fact. The Communists are not war heroes. They drove the war heroes out of the country they fought to save. We have managed to make modern nations of citizens, not subjects; and our technological prowess today is the product of invention, not theft. We have empowered our ethnic and religious minorities, almost to a fault, while the Chinese government locks them up in camps that we consider horrors. As is usually the case, Communist doctrines of "colonialism" and "imperialism" - the latter a Leninist propaganda trick designed to save Marxism from all its failed predictions - are spread today to spare Communism the shame of its own deeds. And we are able (and even encouraged) to criticise our most important leaders and heroes, while the Communist Party apparatchik must debase his own intellect before he is allowed to speak. China does have a rich and wonderful history. Mao created none of it, and destroyed much of it. The fat ass of his legacy squats on what remains.

If you have to apologise for calling Chairman Mao a dictator then you might as well give up speech entirely. It's like apologising for saying the sky is blue, the world is round, the French are revolting.