Edit: Why downvotes? Idea of communism does not propose violence, Nazis and ISIS on the other hand do.
Heck, there were 2 world wars in which communists countries were only involved in the second, and only on the allies side. How many people were killed there, including civilians?
And let's not get started in the 18th-19th century history, before marxism was even invented...
War, murder and dictatorship are what they are -- they don't just belong to one single side of the political spectrum.
In Indonesia, for one example, nearly a million communist sympathizers were executed by right wingers (as were in Pinochet's Chile and elsewhere). This is an interesting watch:
Only under the naive assumption that we assess things in isolation and not comparatively and in historical perspective.
>It's akin to saying, "We excuse X for doing something bad because Y (something to which we are ideologically opposed) did the same bad thing".
No, it's more akin to saying "You singled out X as the cause of something bad when it's also an attribute of Y".
E.g. something like: "- Python is slow because it's a GC language". "- Nope, Java and Swift also have GC and are very fast".
Also note that I never said anything about "excusing" -- I actually condemn both.
>In other words, it's the "side", not the "principle" you are arguing. If you take that position you can be an apologist for practically anything that happens.
What you can actually be is pragmatic, someone who assesses things in historical and relative perspective, instead of taking sides and singling out.
It's amazing how someone that begins by saying that "this discussion is only about X, anything else is irrelevant", accuses someone adding the stats for Y for comparison as "taking sides".