Jim:

I said some time ago that we'd arrived at our core contretemps. And we are not playing atrocity vs. atrocity, not me, anyway. I'm concerned with how do we deal with human nature. You are deeply enmired in the Gods of Ideology (Book reference: The God That Failed) and your carefully cherry-picked historical recitations. We are not making progress at this point, just trading ripostes. And you are still ignoring what points I've made.
I was talking to some fellow coffee house denizens yesterday and was reminded of the fact that the Bolsheviks, the Communists, named themselves Bolsheviks and labeled the Socialists Mensheviks despite the fact that the Bolsheviks were in theminority and the Mensheviks greatly outnumbered them! Fake facts from the get-go. And the Bolsheviks withdrew from WWI not so much in a bid for peace but as a deal with the Germans who'd enabled Lenin to get into Russia. But with the Bolsheviks leadership and force went hand-in-hand. They didn't bother with things like campaigns and votes, they had a much better target for the Russian military than Germans. Russians!