They have no trouble accepting that Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Pol Pot who led vast, popular movements of awful violence whose only legacies were social disasters on an unprecedented scale were men of the left.
Indeed, the greatness of those disasters, their unprecedented cost, magnitude, and body count, were all due specifically to the most leftist traits of their regimes.
More than anything else, it was through their radical leftism that they did such epochal harm.
And yet, almost no one "serious" accepts the evident truth that both Mussolini and Hitler, like Bismarck, like Teddy Roosevelt, were men of the left.
Or that Fascism and Nazism - National Socialism - were leftist movements.
But of course it was not owing to their leftist features that these regimes were and were regarded as radical or extreme, or that, anyway in Hitler's case, their movements were so spectacularly malevolent and caused such historic disasters.
Of the communists we can say they were horrors because they were leftist and that their historic and successful malevolence was intrinsically leftist.
Whereas Hitler's evil and the malevolence of Hitlerism owed nothing to the modest leftism of the man, the ideology, or the regime.
And as to Mussolini, well.
Neither he, nor Franco, nor the other non-communist movements or dictators of the period should even be mentioned in the same discussion with Stalin, Mao, and Hitler.
Evil for evil, body counts and all else considered, they are orders of magnitude inferior to the communists as producers of social devastation.
Like Salazar and Peron, and the whole tribe of Latin non-communists.
Or Chiang Kai Shek, of course.
Or the generals or princes who occasionally rule various places in Southeast Asia.
Many of whom have been and continue to be men of the left every bit as clearly and seriously as Bismarck and Mussolini.
But not men of the radical left.
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