when people say communism kills, but support the police, the military, the sweatshops with no safety regulations, the sick being refused medical care, the homeless freezing to death, the hungry starving to death, the blatant imperialism imposed on the world which kills millions upon millions, they do not truly care about loss of life, they care about loss of their wealth.
Once upon a time I compared the per-capita death counts of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Augusto Pinochet.
Augusto Pinochet was not a kind man. He killed people that didn’t need to be killed. He dropped people out of helicopters. He used methods of great violence. No one should imitate him.
But he still had roughly an order of magnitude fewer deaths as a result of his great tragedies than the worst excesses of Communism.
So, for those people who believe Communism - not boring Welfare Capitalism or Social Democracy - tends towards some of its most spectacular 20th century failures, the may allow the factories, and the rationing, and the insufficient care, and still come out ahead.