Conversing with Marxists, you will find yourself hard pressed to decipher what to make of the Kurdish national liberation struggle.

Is the PKK the proper organization to support? Does material support from American imperialism invalidate the organization altogether? Or does socialization of the economy trump the importance of Western imperialism’s helping hand?

The typical answer of the Marxist-Leninist is that support for a certain state depends on three factors.

Whether it is a socialist state Whether it is “resisting American imperialism” (as US imperialism is the imperialism of the world’s most powerful capitalist class, and thus it is the duty of a Marxist-Leninist to oppose US imperialism whatever its dirty fingers stroke, even if it is simply giving aid to another nation) Whether it supports the right of self-determination of other nations (however, self-determination becomes ambiguous for the Marxist-Leninist, as it was okay for Red Russia to invade Poland in 1920 and okay for Red China to invade Tibet in 1950); so, really, the right of self-determination for other nations from the capitalist powers, like the US, EU, or China (although some Leninists will even defend comrade Xi)

This is a fine position to hold if you let unwavering dogmatism trump basic empathy. That might not make sense to the Leninist revolutionary.

“By opposing imperialism from the world’s biggest capitalist parasite, we are inherently empathetic, supporting the oppressed of the world, and raising their consciousness to win the world, to dispossess the capitalists, and create a socialist society. Being a Leninist lacks empathy? What, are you some fascist who believes in Holodomor? That has been disproven, you know.”

I am not going to get into the subject of genocides/democides in communist countries and I am not going to express my opinion on the nature or justifiability of mass killings in countries where the red flag flew. If there’s one thing I agree with communists on, it’s the over-emphasis on mass murder in debates about communism.

My problem with Leninists is they don’t even acknowledge that mass killings could be a problem in a socialist country. My problem is that the logic of treating Marxism as a science, where it is obligatory for Marxists to support any country who hold the three criteria above, does not even consider the question of human life. A human life is meaningless when the revolution awaits.

Let us assume that no Marxist-Leninist country has ever committed an unjustified mass killing. Let us presume that the Holodomor was actually Nazi propaganda and was nothing more than a famine fixed by Stalin’s genius. Let us presume that the Great Purge was purely a way of getting rid of Nazis. Let us presume that the mass killings that supposedly happened in every communist country are all lies.

Fine.

But, what happens when there is an unjustified genocide in a Communist country? What happens if the Party does decide to get rid of ethnicity A or ethnicity B because the Party fears that that ethnicity might hold counter-revolutionary beliefs?

Based on the three criteria that Leninists use to quantify their support for a government, it would still be obligatory to support that government even with the genocide the government is committing.

Leninism disregards all human life and value in order to proceed to the final goal, which is undoubtedly, a noble one. But nevertheless, it does not matter if people die or people starve. If communism is reached, it was worth it, right? After all, it was Eric Hobsbawm, a life-long Leninist and Soviet apologist, who said that if communism was reached, Stalin’s mass murders would have been justified, in a 1997 BBC interview.

I believe Leninists know, even if it is just in the subconscious, that their ideology falls in direct contrast with caring about human life, even if their ultimate goal is to create a system which would value human life more than any that has ever existed. This is why they deny the nightmare that was Stalin’s Russia or Ceausescu’s Romania or Mao’s cultural revolution. It is cognitive dissonance in its most basic sense.

If communist countries never committed any genocides or mass killings, then it still could be said that they valued human life, while meeting the three criteria listed. Admission that those genocides really were real and really did happen is an admission that Marxism-Leninism completely disregards morality in pursuit of the final goal, and no human wants to say that about their ideology, because it is an inhuman thing to believe.

The intentions of every Communist Party to ever rule over a geographic area were good and right because they were Communists and they knew what was best for everyone. That is the logic that Leninists rely on in order to believe the lie that no Communist nation was ever a horrible nightmare. And that logic is wrong.

Yes, Communist countries really were awful places to live for the most part. Yes, conditions for the poor were bettered. Yes, life in Eastern Europe after Stalin’s brutal reign was mediocre for the most part (besides for a few Stalinist holdouts like Romania and Albania), but generally, the ideology was terrible. That is why Communists must deny them.

Because to admit those massacres is to admit that their ideology is only driven by science, and that their science completely disregards morality. As long as those massacres never happened, 20th century Communism was a success, right?