I find your focus on totalitarian left peculiar. It's not like they were somehow unique - plenty of totalitarian regimes of all kinds have arrested and executed countless people for whatever.
A few random examples:
* Ottoman genocide of Armenians, on ethnic/religious grounds. The Ottoman Three Pashas regime was as far from left as possible, but plenty totalitarian.
* US internment of "foreign elements", including those with US citizenship, during both World Wars. US was never even center-left, let alone farther, and totalitarian is a stretch. Less bad than the other examples here, but still.
* The many White and Red terrors in the Interwar and post-WW2 years, where vague association was guilt and execution.
* Of course Jews, Roma, Gypsy, dissident in Nazi concentration camps.
* The Herero and Namaqua genocide by the rightist totalitarian-ish Imperial Germany.
* UK mass internment of Boers. Not leftist, not really totalitarian.
Need i go on? Why did you feel the need to pain totalitarian leftist as worse than any other totalitarians?
Your attempt to invalidate a statement with a another set of information is not useful. During the 1900s the left killed people on a scale never seen before in human history. I suppose I do question the psychological need you have to run defense for the left...
> Your attempt to invalidate a statement with a another set of information is not useful
Unless that information makes the statement seem extremely biased, which it does?
> During the 1900s the left killed people on a scale never seen before in human history
And during the 1900s totalitarian rightist killed people on a scale never before seen in human history. Industrial murder factories, with brutal precision, murdering thousands per day by the trainload, with an assembly line of transportation, robbing, murder through poison gas, cremation? Never has humanity sunken so low. Brutal ad-hoc genocides of people murdering another group with their hands due to hatred or misinformation or whatever is more understandable and explainable than cold blooded mechanised precision mass murder on an industrial scale.
Famines due to ethnic cleansing, stupidity, mismanagement and ignorance are aplenty. The Bengali famine is comparable to the Holodomor in scale and reasons, even if the Holodomor was probably more intentional. Nobody has done what the Nazis did at that scale.
So yes, it's extremely stupid to single out totalitarian leftist regimes for their crimes against humanity, as if it's a uniquely leftist thing. It's obvious the people doing that have an anti-left agenda, which is honestly just being stupid.
The USSR, China, Cambodia, Vietnam... it looks like you're mistaking scale with events of lesser time frames and "singular" locations (i.e. Auschwitz, Treblinka, and so on under the Nazis).
I wonder why you feel that it is necessary to attempt to be insulting?
The common factor in mass state murder is militant Facism. There's no right or left, there's a willingness to commit mass-murder and a violent takeover of the state. It's incontrovertible that democide was one of the worst forces of the 20th century, but bizarre and dangerous to associate it with some one-dimensional "left/right" projection of 21st century identity politics.
Pol Pot, Mao, Hitler - these are figureheads that became objects of popular worship. If Monarchies were a thing, they would have been monarchs. If Theocracies were a thing, they would have been theocrats. If corporations were a thing, they would have been admirable profiteers.
I had guessed you were going to drop the ‘Nazis were socialist’ line, and there it is! The ‘National Socialist German Worker’s Party’ were about as socialist as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is democratic (that is, not at all…)
"the left"? You have to be joking! Even US cold war-era anti-communist propaganda wasn't lying this blatantly. Mass incarceration, execution, etc. are a "skill" of all totalitarian regimes, no matter what social/economic policy they happen to support. The church in the middle ages, kings in the era of absolutism, the Axis powers during WWII, regimes of warlords past and present, the various religious states that are doing the bulk of it today... all of these regimes censored, imprisoned and executed their opponents and few could be considered "left".
The original comment was entirely arbitrarily limited to the 1900s, and as it brought "the left" into the discussion unprompted, I can only assume this was done intentionally to justify specifically going after left regimes. So firstly, I don't see why a counter-argument should stick to this arbitrary time frame, and secondly, some of my examples do in fact apply to this time frame too.
