Most American Communists seem to believe this - that some form of "Democratic Communism" is possible, and that the totalitarian forms Communism has taken in every country where it has been tried are a result of the cultural ideals of the nation in question, and not any fault of Communism itself.
Somehow it never occurs to them that an ideology based on redistributing wealth at gunpoint just might tend to create a hierarchy controlled by the guys with the biggest guns.
And what they really don't realize is, that would be us, baby.
Your comments are right on the mark. I used debate the commies over on DU until I got sick of them. Almost all of them can't make the connection between the communist system and it inherent totalitarianism. They have genuinely convinced themselves that real Communism has yet to be tried.
The final paragraph pf Jason Muravchik's Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism reads:
By no means all socialists were killers or amoral. Many were sincere humanitarians; mostly these were the adherents of democratic socialism. But democratic socialism turned out to be a contradiction in terms, for where socialists proceeded democratically, the found themselves on a trajectory that took them further and further from socialism. Long before Lenin, socialist thinkers had anticipated the problem. The imaginary utopias of Plato, Moore, Campanella and Edward Bellamy, whose 1887 novel, Looking Backward, was the most popular socialist book in American history, all relied on coercion, as did the plans of The Conspiracy of Equals. Only once did democratic socialists manage to create socialism. That was the kibbutz. And after they had experienced it, they chose democratically to abolish it.
Well, Yes. But in a weekend dispute with a left-infected indicidual, who wanted an "anything but Bush Revolution" I suggested that perhaps before he used the word "Revolution" he should pay more attention to who actually has the guns...