[KirinDave]

China is a more complicated story, I think.

But North Korea and pre-Stalin Communist Russia are not regarded as "successful" and Post-Stalin Russia is reasonably rejected as a tenable example of leftism. Cuba, I think, is looked upon more favorably now than when it was more centrally managed?

[jquery]

Is "not real communism" still the go-to counterpoint? Can we excuse the failures of Nazism and fascism by saying they weren't real fascism? I don't think so. Judge political ideologies by their results, not their lofty intentions.

[KirinDave]

The failure of Communist Russia was in losing power to someone who used fundamentist rhetoric to sieze power and then subvert that system.

Stalin's late Russia was something quite different from where it started. In much the same fashion that we recognize China's form of government fundamentally changed TO Communism we can recognize that it lost hold.

And if you need a source of negative propaganda about Communist government, look no further than China. A sexual harassment crisis it's illegal to talk about, systemic religious and ethnic persecution, a 2 tiered oligarchic economic system, dark but weighty rumors of involuntary organ harvesting... You name it, they got it, where "it" is bad outcomes.

I'm always surprised that there aren't more proponents of modern, IT-informed government systems in our community.