I've actually gotten into it with leftists who believe that because those communists and socialists somehow abandoned the basic leftist ideals, that they were, in fact, right-wingers. Wei usually tries this with Stalin and the other communists, but if every person on the planet who ever called himself a socialist and ran a state indulged in mass murder, then there comes a point where you have to ask yourself if mass murder is a bug or a feature of the left.
Actually it's a by product.
"Any Government Big Enough To Give You Everything You Want Is Also Big Enough To Take Everything You Have."-Thomas Jefferson