Elan Colen, MD

“He jailed socialists, so he wasn’t a socialist.” This is the argument every single person in my replies thinks is a mic drop. It’s actually the weakest one available, and it collapses in five seconds. Lenin banned the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries. Both were socialist parties. By your logic, Lenin wasn’t a socialist. Stalin shot Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and sent an ice axe through Trotsky’s skull. All of them were founding fathers of the Bolshevik revolution. By your logic, Stalin wasn’t a socialist. Mao purged Liu Shaoqi, the President of the People’s Republic, and let him die in a cell. Pol Pot murdered his own cadres by the thousands. Robespierre sent Danton to the guillotine, then got the guillotine himself. There’s a reason Vergniaud said the Revolution, like Saturn, devours its own children. Purging rival socialists isn’t evidence against collectivism. It’s one of its most reliable signatures. Why? Because when the state decides everything, there can only be one plan. Two factions with two plans for the same economy can’t coexist. One has to disappear. In a free society, disagreements get settled by markets and elections. In a planned society, they get settled by the secret police. Hitler crushing the SPD and the KPD, then murdering Röhm and Strasser in his own party, is exactly what you’d predict from a regime competing for the same thing: total control of the economy and of society. And that’s the real question. Not “what did he call himself” and not “who did he arrest”. The question is: who runs the economy? Under the Nazis, independent unions were abolished and replaced by a state labor front. Prices and wages were frozen by decree. Investment was directed by a Four-Year Plan. Private property existed on paper, as long as owners did exactly what the state told them to do. Hayek saw this in real time. He dedicated The Road to Serfdom “To the socialists of all parties” precisely because he understood that the planners of the left and the planners of the right were the same species. Collectivism isn’t a color on the political spectrum. It’s the belief that a central authority can and should direct the economy. Once you accept that, the purges, the camps and the one-party state aren’t accidents. They’re the operating manual. So no, “he jailed communists” doesn’t refute anything. Communists jailed communists for seventy years. Read Hayek. Then come back.