[bananaface]

I get what you're saying but Marxists don't bomb the homes of billionaires, or shoot them. There's no actual warfare, genuine violence is directed at the right, not the rich. They do make a show of constructing a set of gallows in front of Jeff Bezos' house but they don't actually do anything to him, and that's a big difference. I think it's because they don't have the fight-or-flight terror that drives far right-wingers to push the gas pedal of their car into crowds of protestors. They might, in a different system. But I think then the ideology would be different.

In the 70s there were genuine left-wing terrorists like the Weathermen, which might be a good comparison, but the vibe I get is that they liked violence first, and fell into a movement that gave them a justification to perform it. They didn't seem scared to me. The far left rarely seems genuinely scared, but the far right seems very scared.

The difference to me is that nowadays, left-wing threat narratives tend to exist to justify behaviour they already want to engage in, whereas right-wing threat narratives exist much more to be scary. Toward the center things are similar but the differences are quite stark at the fringes.

I don't mean this as a technical argument or anything. I could be wrong, I'm just trying to describe my instinct.

> The Great Purge

Was a genocide by people who attained power, not the fringes of society acting out for weird psychological reasons. I wouldn't really compare the motivations. Dictators are dictators, right or left, and the support they get is much more transactional. I'm also skeptical that Lenin was genuinely motivated by Marxism. I think Marxism was an excuse he could use to gain power.