You can’t tell me the Great Purge is something a left-wing person would do. He thought Hitler was “a great man”.
I’m far from an expert in political history, but if we were to look at controversial figures on the left, Guevara and Castro are probably the “worst” I can think of that still clearly had left-wing ideals in mind.
Leftism isn’t synonymous with being a good person. As for Hitler, many Americans called Hitler a great man as well, it wasn’t until wartime that anyone went against Hitler meaningfully.
Stalin and Mao were both leftists, and both pretty damn brutal. Read anything Stalin has written, and it’s clear that he certainly believed himself to be a leftist, and a student of Marx and Lenin, no matter how horrible his actions.
I mean, it’s not an absolute, but Wikipedia defines Left-wing politics as “the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy as a whole or certain social hierarchies”.
Stalin actively repressed and killed ethnic minorities during the Great Purge. That’s absolutely not egalitarianism. I don’t know much of his politics but if he was trying to be a communist, his government was not really a “Dictatorship of the proletariat”. He could’ve written anything, actions speak clearer than words.
You can’t tell me the Great Purge is something a left-wing person would do. He thought Hitler was “a great man”.
I’m far from an expert in political history, but if we were to look at controversial figures on the left, Guevara and Castro are probably the “worst” I can think of that still clearly had left-wing ideals in mind.
Leftism isn’t synonymous with being a good person. As for Hitler, many Americans called Hitler a great man as well, it wasn’t until wartime that anyone went against Hitler meaningfully.
Stalin and Mao were both leftists, and both pretty damn brutal. Read anything Stalin has written, and it’s clear that he certainly believed himself to be a leftist, and a student of Marx and Lenin, no matter how horrible his actions.
I mean, it’s not an absolute, but Wikipedia defines Left-wing politics as “the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy as a whole or certain social hierarchies”.
Stalin actively repressed and killed ethnic minorities during the Great Purge. That’s absolutely not egalitarianism. I don’t know much of his politics but if he was trying to be a communist, his government was not really a “Dictatorship of the proletariat”. He could’ve written anything, actions speak clearer than words.