<I would appreciate it if you would stop treating the eastern European dictatorships of the last century as the prime examples of tyranny in the history of the world in an attempt to associate anything left of center with tyranny.

Sorry. It's true. I don't know about anything "left of center," but you should harbor no illusions about the history of the Left in general.

The Marxist socialist dictatorships of the last century dwarf almost any other tyranny in history in sheer human destruction. If you include National Socialism in this, it gets even worse. See the tables below.

Every nation run according to pure socialist principles, which are the core philosophy of the Left, has become a ghastly tyranny. There have been no exceptions.

Every national government that has engaged in the deliberate mass murder of its own citizens has called itself "socialist." I have found no exceptions to this either.

At some point, even the most evasive mind should begin to detect a pattern here.

The hallmark of those who think "left of center" is that most solutions to problems involve an increase in centralized power and a decrease in individual liberties, particularly in the field of economics, but in many other areas as well. Constantly increasing government power eventually leads to tyranny. It's really that simple.

Some interesting tables from this extremely useful site:

Of all this pre-twentieth century, killing--massacres, infanticide, executions, genocides, sacrifices, burnings, deaths by mistreatment, and the like--that to which we can put numbers add up to a grand total of from near 89,000,000 to
slightly over 260,000,000 million men, women, and children dead. An appropriate mid-democide estimate might be around 133,000,000 killed. The more exact total given by a variety of calculations is shown in table 3.1 along with the
more extraordinarily bloody or interesting cases I have sketched above. To get some idea as to how far this total may
be off, observe that if government massacred people in previous centuries in the same proportion to world population
as in our century, then as shown in the table's hypothetical total (calculated from the 20th century democide rate
derived in Death By Government and the world's population for each century since 30 B.C.133) almost a fantastic
626,000,000 people would have been killed; even possibly over 1,138,000,000--over a billion people. As should be clear,
an estimated pre-20th century democide of near 133,000,000 cannot even approximate the actual number murdered by
governments or their surrogates, and probably reflects only a small fraction of those so wiped out during the
thousands of years of written history.

Please note the totals for the 20th century alone compared to the estimates--even the high ones--for the last 2,000 years. And please note who did most of it.