Ok, I'm back. I've been thinking about this, and I think it would be best if I presented my own ideas in a more organized form, and then said what I think you a

Ok, I'm back. I've been thinking about this, and I think it would be best if I presented my own ideas in a more organized form, and then said what I think you are saying, and ask some questions. So here is how I look at things To start out, dictatorships vary greatly in how cruel and oppressive they are. And how oppressive they are is greatly determined by whether or not they are ideological. The non-ideological dictatorships are often less violent, while the ones that are ideologically revolutionary invariably are very oppressive. The reason is they have different sorts of goals. Non-ideological dictators just want to stay in power and make use of the state for their own benefit. To achieve this they only need to eliminate and suppress any political opposition, through means such as jail, execution, and controlling the media. The rest of the society they leave as it is. On the other hand, revolutionary ideological dictatorships want to radically change the whole culture and society, top to bottom. The problem is that invariably a large portion of the population is opposed to this, to the bottom of their souls. So the regime has to resort to extreme measures, like endless propaganda, and violence such as execution, imprisonment, labor camps, and starvation, and aimed at large portions of the public. The idea is to eliminate opponents (Stalin: "Man is a problem. No man, no problem") and terrorizing everyone else. Now Marxism-Leninism is such a radical philosophy, and so whenever Marxist-Leninists come to power, they invariably resort to all these extreme measures. Yes it matters that they come to power generally through violent revolution. And yes it matters that they face military threats. But the heart of the matter is that they have ideological goals that can only be achieved by great violence against their people. And this means that the personality of the leader, like Lenin's ambition, is not what is key here. A leader who was basically a good person but believed in Marxism-Leninism would still have to follow similar policies. Most radical Islamic terrorists for instance, sincerely want to do what they think is good for the world, the problem is their ideology and what it clearly requires. One more point. Marxist-Leninist regimes differ in how extreme their ideologies are, and that considerably effects how violent they are. Now I apply all that to the case of the Pol Pot regime, and it was Marxist-Leninist, and so I think one could have predicted with certainty from the begining that it would be violent. And it had an extreme form of Marxism-Leninism, so one would expect it to be very high in violence. End part 1