Originally Posted by
Endus
Those history books only cover basically a single sub-branch of communism, one that's a strong rejection of Marxist principles. Stalin is the archetype, and from there, we get Maoism and Castroism and all the rest, springing from that origin point. And not even Lenin was anywhere close to what Stalin was; Lenin spoke strongly near the end against authoritarianism and centralizing power into the hands of someone like Stalin. As in, he named Stalin, directly, in that accusation.
These autocratic regimes are not the expression of the whole body of communist theory. They are not the only way communism can be implemented. Pretending otherwise is McCarthy level propagandizing. As is pretending that the choices are "capitalism" or "Stalinist communism", when there's a wide range of other economic systems beyond those two.
And it's not like capitalism was not responsible for comparable horrors, either. If you want to delve down into the "which is worse" fight, it's a long and drawn-out argument about how awful and abusive both systems have historically been. Hand-waving the abuses of one system to laud another is how you get propaganda, not history.