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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.

It is disgraceful that this odious name should adorn any academic award whatsoever. Students burning with righteous zeal should demand its withdrawal. But righteousness on campuses today is more likely to express itself in opposition to Western icons, especially if they are dead white males of European provenance. Wilfrid Laurier University activists, for example, worked to derail (and have apparently succeed in derailing) the Prime Minister Statue Project, a Canada 150 Sesquicentennial initiative, because some of our 22 former prime ministers (and most everyone else alive at the time) were racially insensitive.

Over many years of observing what piques progressives’ indignation and shouldn’t, as well as what should, but doesn’t, I have decided that left-wing ideologues suffer from the political equivalent of a neurological syndrome called “hemispatial neglect.” Those afflicted with hemispatial neglect lose recognition of space on one entire side of the body. It isn’t that they want to see what’s on the side that is lost to them and cannot, it is that they have lost awareness that there is another side. Give them a plate of food, and they will only eat the food on the side they can see, but they will believe they have finished their meal. Ask them to draw a line down the middle of their body and they will draw the line through the middle of their perceptive side.