&gt;<i>Your comment is irrelevant to the point being discussed, which was specifically about communism.</i><p>Only under the naive assumption that we assess things in isolation and not comparatively and in historical perspective.<p>&gt;<i>It&#x27;s akin to saying, &quot;We excuse X for doing something bad because Y (something to which we are ideologically opposed) did the same bad thing&quot;.</i><p>No, it&#x27;s more akin to saying &quot;You singled out X as the cause of something bad when it&#x27;s also an attribute of Y&quot;.<p>E.g. something like:
&quot;- Python is slow because it&#x27;s a GC language&quot;.
&quot;- Nope, Java and Swift also have GC and are very fast&quot;.<p>Also note that I never said anything about &quot;excusing&quot; -- I actually condemn both.<p>&gt;<i>In other words, it&#x27;s the &quot;side&quot;, not the &quot;principle&quot; you are arguing. If you take that position you can be an apologist for practically anything that happens.</i><p>What you can actually be is pragmatic, someone who assesses things in historical and relative perspective, instead of taking sides and singling out.<p>It&#x27;s amazing how someone that begins by saying that &quot;this discussion is only about X, anything else is irrelevant&quot;, accuses someone adding the stats for Y for comparison as &quot;taking sides&quot;.