<What you should understand is that there were (and sometimes still are) communist parties, trotskiist parties, maoist parties all over western Europe , but they are all in democracies; it's not because a party might be from the left or even extreme left that it won't respect the democratic rules and rituals. They don't kill people just because they want to express themselves.

Everybody eventually has to learn the hard way. Totalitarians work within democracies because they are forced to. When they finally gain power, it becomes a whole new story. Communists don't kill people to express themselves, they kill people to stay in power, and they start the killing as soon as they can manage it. Chavez in Argentina was already taking snipers to protestors.

...What went on in the SU or goes on in China has more to do with the kind of regime than the kind of party.

This particular myth is most often heard from mindless leftists in my country as "Soviet and Maoist communism isn't REAL communism." Apparently Khmer Rouge, Cuban, East German, North Vietnamese, and North Korean communism were also unusual distortions of REAL communism.

The fact that every communist nation in existence, without exception, has turned into a totalitarian hellhole, murdering its own citizens and locking them inside the country, is lost on these poor boobs. A person with a functional forebrain might begin to see some sort of pattern here.

We have solid evidence of the differences between communism and capitalism. It is almost on the level of a scientific experiment. Germany. Korea. China and Taiwan. Viet Nam. Nations with uniform cultures, resources, histories, and racial types. These entities were then split in two, with all variables the same except for one: choice of a political system. Look at the results. I'm not sure what more proof a rational person would need.

The core of communist principles is anti-human by its nature. You cannot have a communist society without totalitarian oppression. Hayek proved this back in the '40s, and it has been obvious in practice ever since.

If, God forbid, a communist regime ever got hold of a Western European country, the result would be no different. Why communists are tolerated, and even encouraged, in European politics when Nazis would be (properly) run out of town on a rail (look at the furious response to Le Pen, who is a half-assed Nazi at best) continues to flabbergast me.