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> Who were Maoist sympathisers in the US and western europe? Not factory workers and peasants.

Very few Western elites were pro-Mao. And general support for communism definitely had a class bias. (Any populism does, for very sympathetic and not-stupid reasons.)

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Maoism was very trendy among western elites, at some point in the 60s and 70s. It was certainly the case in France, for example.

Certainly in France there were a group of intellectual elites who supported Mao, especially since Mao's Cultural Revolution was directly inspired by France's own Paris Commune as well as the fact that many CCP leaders were educated in France.

But to generalize this to say that most of Europe's elite supported Mao, or even that American elites supported Mao, is simply unsupported.

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