I will always reject that quote from Marx as being bad and wrong. Someone who makes no excuses for their terror is a monster, not a revolutionary.
Killing the Romanov children was an abominable, cruel, and disgusting act. Shooting their family in front of them was an abominable, cruel, and disgusting act. Attempting to do something similar to another contemporary family would be wrong.
This is not the popular opinion on this board, but it remains my firm conviction.
Tbf Marx has other quotes praising the Paris commune for abstaining from unnecessary violence, "unlike bourgeois 'revolutions'". To understand that other quote, you have to first understand that terror didn't really mean the same thing it does now, and also he wrote it as a response to some monarch or whatever he was who shut down the newspaper the communists were publishing and prosecuted them, so it was more like a threat than a general rule.
I will always reject that quote from Marx as being bad and wrong. Someone who makes no excuses for their terror is a monster, not a revolutionary.
Killing the Romanov children was an abominable, cruel, and disgusting act. Shooting their family in front of them was an abominable, cruel, and disgusting act. Attempting to do something similar to another contemporary family would be wrong.
This is not the popular opinion on this board, but it remains my firm conviction.
Tbf Marx has other quotes praising the Paris commune for abstaining from unnecessary violence, "unlike bourgeois 'revolutions'". To understand that other quote, you have to first understand that terror didn't really mean the same thing it does now, and also he wrote it as a response to some monarch or whatever he was who shut down the newspaper the communists were publishing and prosecuted them, so it was more like a threat than a general rule.