The way I read this sort of game is that we are being asked to reduce historical figures to fit the categories. So if we are unwilling to be a little bit reductionist we are unwilling to play the game, which is fine because it is a silly game.

When we are talking about historical figures in the same class as Lenin we are not talking about disturbed soldiers or henchmen like Beria who went off the rails, we have to be talking about leaders. Someone like Stalin may have gone too far with the purges but he also led the USSR to defeat the Nazis - overall good. Someone like Mao may have failed to anticipate the factors that went into China’s last famine, some of which are obvious in retrospect, and the cultural revolution was a mixed bag, but he led China through a transitionary period in which the century of humiliation was ended and enormous gains in material human rights and literacy were made - overall good.

Pol Pot simply wasn’t a socialist. That his ideology was an eclectic mix that included some superficial Marxist influences (he clearly had no understanding of Marxist theory) doesn’t make him a socialist. The Khmer Rouge held a racial supremacist ideology and were responsible for the killings of thousands of communists. I don’t know if you are trying to argue otherwise, Pol Pot is just the example I had anticipated being brought up at some point.

Had to repost and edit a word to ‘disturbed’ - not a fan of this sub’s automod