[wilsocr88]

Am I overreaching, or am I trying to warn the West against allowing resentment-based ideology to take hold?

Read about Soviet dekulakization, and ponder how that could've happened. It started with "this whole society, the shoulders of which I now stand upon, is wholly bad and corrupt, irreversably, nose-to-tail, and we must destroy it all (so that nobody else can gain the influence over society that I have achieved)."

When you believe that the only moral position is for "your side" to hold power, and to use it against the other side, you'll justify any atrocity.

[andrepd]

It's a great example that you brought up, dekulakization, because it illustrates exactly my point. Pre-Soviet Russia was indeed an atrociously brutal an unjust place to live. Is it any wonder that resentment and revolt ensued, and that people exploded in a murderous rage? Not good, but very understandable. Maybe if the Czars had actually worked towards a more equal society instead of crushing millions of peasants under their yoke there wouldn't have been a dramatic reaction to the state of affairs, don't you think?

Likewise today: improvements in quality of life have stagnated in huge parts of the world, wages are falling in real terms, inequality rises to Gilded Age levels, democracy is backsliding. Is it any wonder there is "resentment"?