Nobody on earth has any leg to stand on when criticizing someone else for ethnic cleansings in the 20th century. The US and all the other colonial powers enthusiastically sold entire races into slavery for banana corporations and murdered millions who didn't like it. It really irks me how smug and judgmental Westerners in fucking COLONIAL STATES get over other people's violent checkered pasts.

This is very easy for modern liberals to moralize about from the position of incredibly cossetted and, frankly, delusional modern attitudes that don't have to stand up to the rigors of reality. This all happened IMMEDIATELY after WW1. Any mask or veil of civility or high minded political sophistry was ripped entirely off a long time ago, and the reality was very apparent for every political actor of the time: The only thing that matters is power. And if you don't use it, your enemies will, at your violent expense. Churchill literally immediately gave all the help he could to the Whites in the civil war to 'strangle Bolshevism in it's cradle', this was the USSR's welcome party to global politics and their relationship with the West only got worse from then on.

I'd like to see any modern liberal lead the nascent USSR under all these threats while maintaining these fanciful modern attitudes that are essentially just performances of personal virtue projected onto politics.