That’s what the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wondered when he complained of the hypocrisy of the anticommunist liberal who objected to Stalinist violence: “He forgets that communism does not invent violence but finds it already established, that for the moment the question is not to know whether one accepts or rejects violence, but whether the violence with which one is allied is ‘progressive’ and tends towards its own suppression or towards self-perpetuation.
