it's kind of weird that when Stalin and Lenin went on huge murderous rampages we just shove all of that in the forget box.

@icedquinn we did? i suspect this is more a US thing, where communism was hyped up as a constant threat yet never really existed domestically. over the pond it's very common to use "stalinist" as a slur against leftists, just as "nazi" is used against the right. One reason it doesn't have the same punch is that at least here the general opinion of the cruelty of Soviet communism is that it was just Russians doing Russian things, that they did before that and never stopped doing up until the present time. Idealist leftists from here left for Russia and in many cases never came back alive.