Theodore Dalrymple, the great English physician and social commentator, meditates on the question in this piece at FrontPage Magazine.
It is intrinsically unlikely that a man espouses a totalitarian doctrine of proved and indisputable viciousness and violence from a love of peace and a dislike of poverty.
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Let me repeat this for emphasis. Dalrymple states: “. . . it seems likely that he joined [the Communist Party] at some time between 1936 and 1938. By then, communism in Russia had brought two massive famines causing the deaths of millions, routinely more executions in a day than Tsarism performed in a century (and this from the very first moment of Bolshevik power), the establishment of vast forced labour camps in which hundreds of thousands had already died, and the utter decimation of intellectual life. It is a myth that none of this was known or knowable at the time: on the contrary, it was all perfectly well known, if widely ignored.”
I could not have rattle these details off the top of my head, so I want to copy them here to help other ignorant souls who stumble over our blog.