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Communists were already doing that a hundred years ago, it's a common trick. They even used to play themselves up as victims when the czar pardoned them for trying to assassinate his family, and it worked on the intelligencia because they are universally retarded and easily molded by any propaganda delivered with enough repetition and chutzpah.
Just one of those little moldbuggian "isn't that weird" quirks of history you only notice examining it from a critical perspective.
Anarchists, not communists. Random assassinations of public figures are a chaotic evil act, not a lawful evil one.
Sorry, but this is Reddit nonsense. Real life does not follow D&D character alignment rules, and no communist is going to say "oh noes, I can't assassinate this strategic opponent because someone's interpretation of 'authoritarianism' means I must follow the laws of a regime I abhor".
Communists avoided random assassinations precisely because it was an anarchist tactic, and communists are not anarchists and did not want to be mistaken for them. "Don't be an anarchist, they are ineffectual morons" is a fairly common theme of early 20th century communist propaganda. The relatively small number of communist assassinations (Icepick Ho!) were carried out by professionals working for Soviet intelligence.
Lawful vs chaotic evil is a convenient way of explaining the difference between communists and anarchists to modern American geeks who are not familiar with the history.
Is that really true? Alexander II, Stolypin, Skalon, Sipyagin, von Plehve, Bogolepov - most of the assassination victims of the russian empire were done in by revolutionary socialists, and most of those killings were by SRs proper.
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You have to balance this against assassination targets like Lincoln and JFK, though, who I think definitely got cast in a sympathetic light post-assassination.
Funnily enough there's another moldbuggian take about that.
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