10 pages is enough to link the guy to socialism? really?
Maybe not to start a conversation. But when chiming in to support someone else's claim, and with the clear caveat, then yes, I think it's perfectly OK.
Monsters use any rhetoric they think will fit at their historic moment.
Show me a monster since the advent of socialism that did not use it as its justification. The only one I can think of is Pinochet in Chile (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_coup_of_1973#Casualties ), and even that needs a very loose definition of monster. Certainly the chart-toppers like Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Kim, Pol Pot, Hitler preached socialism. (I'll grant that they generally didn't understand the concept very well, but the point is that it's what they advocated to their partisans and people as the ultimate solution)
I'm not finding counts of deaths, nor listings of atrocities, for these. I think you're stretching the "monster" thing here; they're not in the same league as Lenin and Mao.
what makes you a monster is not that you killed millions, but that you were willing to do it in order to maintain your power
But if you believed that doing so was somehow right (again, the "greatest good" nonsense or something), then it's OK? That's nuts.
I'm not finding counts of deaths, nor listings of atrocities, for these.
Argument from ignorance. They were in the same league from the point of view of their victims.
But if you believed that doing so was somehow right (again, the "greatest good" nonsense or something), then it's OK?
I never said that. From available evidence, not one of the people you mentioned did their atrocities for the ``greatest good'', and it would not matter if that was the case, because the willingness to commit atrocities is the monstrous thing.
Maybe not to start a conversation. But when chiming in to support someone else's claim, and with the clear caveat, then yes, I think it's perfectly OK.
Monsters use any rhetoric they think will fit at their historic moment.
Show me a monster since the advent of socialism that did not use it as its justification. The only one I can think of is Pinochet in Chile (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_coup_of_1973#Casualties ), and even that needs a very loose definition of monster. Certainly the chart-toppers like Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Kim, Pol Pot, Hitler preached socialism. (I'll grant that they generally didn't understand the concept very well, but the point is that it's what they advocated to their partisans and people as the ultimate solution)