The great cop-out.

Somewhere down south, Frank McGahon has an argument with Diana Pérez García. Diana objects to being described as a supporter of the creed of Mao and Stalin just because she describes herself as a Communist. Perhaps she isn't aware that Communism was the creed of Mao and Stalin. But probably not. More likely, she's one of the thousands of modern-day Communists who insist that, once they succeed in having their revolution and bringing about a new Communist state, it won't, unlike every Communist state that has ever existed, quickly turn into a living hell, because their Communism is proper Communism. The world has never seen a true Communist state, they earnestly tell us.

I disrespectfully disagree.

Communists who claim not to support Stalin or Mao miss the point. Before Lenin even took power, plenty of people predicted that Communism would inevitably lead to atrocity. The reason they were able to make that prediction is that the seeds of atrocity are sown in the ideology itself. Atrocities didn't occur despite Communism; they happened because of it. It would be easy to disprove this if it weren't true: just point out the Communist state which isn't a waking nightmare for its inhabitants. The point is that you don't have to support Stalin when you're supporting the introduction of a system that inevitably leads to Stalin. And, if you succeed in introducing that system, your eventual protestations to the victims that you had no idea what was coming will sound especially weak in the light of the repeated lessons you refused to learn from history and the repeated warnings you dismissed as slander.