Your detractors will say you are a ruthless authoritarian.

To which we will reply: "My dear sirs, you are right, that is just what we are. All the experience the people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforce the people's democratic dictatorship, that is, to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right."

Soon it transpired that such leniency was only undermining the strength of the authority of the Soviets. We committed a mistake in showing such leniency toward the enemies of the working class. If we repeated this mistake any further, we would have committed a crime toward the working class. We would have betrayed its interest. And this became perfectly clear very soon. It became very sure that the greater our leniency toward our enemies, the greater their resistance.

—Stalin (Interview by Emil Ludwig)

There is very much an experience of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" even in something as mild as trying to make a communist-sympathizing point on the internet. To some, there is nothing you can say that is considered valid. They decided you weren't worth listening to from the moment you said something that set off their McCarthy Communism Detector 5000 (TM). But they sure will pretend like they are interested in entertaining "debate" in spite of this, taking you down a path of wild generalizations and hypotheticals, while running away from anything factual you bring up about history that counters the narrative they've been told.

And that's not even getting into the people who are actively scheming against communism, as you are talking about. Some of it's plain people being tricked into thinking only in binary terms of good/evil, freedom/authority, and superimpose hypotheticals over reality.

I think of that saying that goes, "No plan survives contact with the enemy." But varied for the situation, "No liberalism survives contact with the enemy." Those who live by hypotheticals can only have control over hypotheticals. The imperialists of the world seem content to let them muck about with that, as it poses no material threat to their power on its own and can be misdirected into schools of thought that confuse and distract from what is happening.

These are very true words and even the reactions to this site show how true that is. Liberals will claim we’re authoritarian and crush dissent without a second thought. Then they go on to lie about our positions towards various marginalized groups and countries. Those in the echo chamber believe it and repeat every word while the more curious-minded second-guess what they hear and give it a look.

If that were true then there never would have been any socialist states at all, never mind the ones that still stand today.

The thing is that they don't even do anything, it is the mislead working class people, working as their enforcers, that do their dirty work.

My gut leads me to think that the truth lies on the side of what Noah and Brendan said. Why? Because I've listened to Vincent Bevins before on interviews and he's still fighting with that idealism. Why do I make this claim? Because he still thinks that some people involved in the HK riots, the guarimbas in Venezuela, the Maidan shit, etc, were well-meaning, but their movements were taken over by reaction, in other words, co-opted. I do not believe that and hindsight is 20/20. These activities from the moment they were invented had a direction, and just because some well-meaning folks who spout ''leftist'' slogans were duped, does not mean those movements were at any time on our side.

Let's look at the HK shit. We saw from the beginning, Union Jacks and signs asking Trump to intervene. Later we saw even Azov clowns over there, and they were calling people in the mainland of China, cockroaches or locusts. Nobody here with their head on straight, will look at that and conceive, in any way possible, that those people are ''left'' or fighting for anything good. Let's look at Maidan next. I don't give a shit if Yanukovych isn't a lefty or anything, but the people out in the streets were supportive of the EU, that's a red flag for me, while shouting pro-Western slogans, and being overtly Russophobic, plus, we even saw US officials on stage over there.

But, bro, I see a US flag or something, and my sirens go off. Because I've seen enough, man. I've been following Venezuela's story closely for the past 6yrs or so, and I've learned so much observing escuálidos. These people never act spontaneously or alone. Reaction is always directed, and from the same studio at ''Always the Same Map, Inc.''