The fact that you think “The Left” is some kind of unified bloc, and furthermore that a government calling themselves leftist actually implies they are leftist, illustrates your poor understanding of the topic.

Yes, Lemmy has tankies. No, I don’t think you could reasonably class tankies and people who defend those kinds of things as meaningfully leftist.

Furthermore, attributing these mass killings and/or genocides (which are horrific, to be very clear) to a vague and highly questionable “Leftism™” while refusing to attribute the millions of deaths due to preventable hunger, colonialism, Irish Famine, Bengal Famine, the way the US handles migrants and invades countries, etc. to capitalism and the organisational/governmental approaches it encourages is a clear and transparent attempt to smear leftism as a whole because of the actions of States that were essentially a slightly different form of capitalism that happened to use the aesthetic of leftism while maintaining the worker/owner relations and hierarchies associated with capitalism, but with owners being various State entities rather than individual investors.

More importantly, I’m very confused at why on earth this is on this thread at all ;p