Stalin and Pol Pot and Saddam used mostly the same methods as Hitler and as Pinochet and just like the Taliban.
They wanted total power to reform the society to their day dreams. There is not much difference if you call your Economy Plan “Five Year Plan” or “Maximale Kriegswirtschaft”. In the end everyone gets under the foot of the Big Brother, the Grosser Führer, вождь woschd (Yes, Stalin let himself call Führer as did several other Extremist leaders).
We need to learn that the Extremists are much further away from the middle than the parties of the middle to each other. But also the Extremists are much closer to themselves.
Even Trump and Putin show a lot of those methods and while Trump dreams of US Fascism and Putin dreams of Reviving Stalinism their Objectives are just the same: Total power for themselfes.
Oh, I hear you already screaming “But they weren’t Socialists/Fascists” - well, they were part of the Socialist International, they called themselves Socialists and people travelled there to see Socialism. “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”
The Way less extreme people defend themselves from the more extreme people is just “But they weren’t true right/left wing. They were something else!” - Boy, I am so tired of it. If 99% if your ventures into Extremism always end the same then I see a pattern that the results will ALWAYS be the same.
And seeing how easily East Germans nowadays change from Ultra-Left to Ultra-Right and visa versa I say: Proof by Observation in the Wild.
I am not even talking about the US where 90% of the people simply don’t even understand what left, right, middle, liberal and Extremism means. When giving a kid free health care is socialism and people think free voting is disrespectable liberalism.