I was debating with a lib who argued that Lenin was a murderer and kept talking about how 200,000 people died in the Red Terror. I responded by saying you could say the same thing about the founding fathers, after all, all those civilians wouldn't have died if some rich landowners just payed their taxes.
Anyway, how do you guys respond to liberals when they shit their pants about stuff like this?
Or if they're someone you have to deal with regularly, push the hardest line you can without making them completely shut you out. Even if they don't accept it, and they probably won't, you'll still be undermining their worldview and normalizing actual leftist positions, to say nothing of the effect that simply being told something over and over has on memories.
In my experience, the strongest rhetorical focus is on just random mundane shit like the Soviet entertainment industry or the different organizational experiments that China carried out at the local level over the 50s and 60s, because for a lot of people their entire understanding of bad country comes from pop culture propaganda and liberal histories of a few leaders, beyond that they're not seen as real places with real people that did real things and actually had lives. To your average lib the USSR is just like a fucking photograph of an apartment building in winter tiled over and over while a schoolteacher voice talks about how it was bad and unfree and everyone was sad because they didn't have TacoDonalds crispy mountain dew burgeritos and nintendo and got sent to live underground if they complained, so anything that conveys the fact that it was not, in fact, a fucking cartoon dystopia helps break down their conditioning.