this is why i don’t spend a lot of energy trying to convince my western leftist friends to critically challenge their historical perspective on people like mao or stalin. when one of those decade-weeks happen, they’ll see the revolution won’t be clean; they’ll have to acknowledge what is to be done. i think it’s much more effective to focus on proper analysis rather than factual accuracy.

of course, that is not at all to say that the latter is unimportant.