"The leftist usually doesn't seek to outright kill their victims, but simply to deny to people the ability to live."
Any reluctance remains only as long as they don't have total power to do exactly that.
.....then there's this:
"We must rid ourselves once and for all of the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life." Leon Trotsky
A swift death is kinder than what the leftist generally leaves, the existence on the verge of starvation and exposure to elements. The hopelessness of toil with no possibility of gain.
“The basic cause of totalitarianism is two ideas: men’s rejection of reason in favor of faith, and of self-interest in favor of self-sacrifice.”
―
Ayn Rand,
We the Living
"A swift death is kinder than what the leftist generally leaves, the existence on the verge of starvation and exposure to elements."
You've got quite the point there.
"During the early 1930s every non-apparatchik in the USSR was hungry, and the peasants were starving in their millions. The zeks [prisoners] of the gulag, from 1918 to 1956, were always somewhere in between.
The mature gulag ran on food and the deprivation of food. Illuminatingly, the history of Communism keeps bringing us back to this: the scarcity or absence of food.
[In] his natural indifference to all human suffering Frenkel was an excellent Bolshevik.It was he who advised Stalin to run the gulag on the steady deprivation of food.
Again they used norms and quotas:
for the full norm: 700 grams of bread, plus soup and buckwheatfor those not attaining the norm: 400 grams of bread, plus soup
The ‘full norm' was near-unachievable (sometimes more than 200 times higher than the Tsarist equivalent).A socialist-realist superman might manage it, for a time. But you were not meant to manage it. As the zek increasingly fell further behind the norm, he weakened further too, and his ration would soon be demoted to ‘punitive' (300 grams).
As for the rations, [historian Robert] Conquest cites those of the Japanese POW camps on the River Kwai: ‘There, prisoners got a daily ration norm of 700 grams of rice, 600 of vegetables, 100 of meat, 20 of sugar, 20 of salt, and 5 of oil…';
all these items were, of course, great rarities and delicacies in the archipelago.Solzhenitsyn describes a seven-ounce loaf (218 grams): ‘sticky as clay, a piece little bigger than a matchbox…'"
Martin Amis, "Koba The Dread."
Under socialism, the hero is the one who 'improves' the way of the collective, no matter the cost in human lives....or supports the Iran Nuclear Treaty.