"Intellectuals occasionally demur at the quantity of the slaughter, the sheer number of the "necessary murders"; they nearly always have accepted the principle that socialist utopias must, if necessary, be erected on violent foundations.
I well remember my old editor, Kingsley Martin, writing in the New Statesman, by way of a gentle rebuke to Mao Tse-tung, who had just massacred three million people, "Was it really necessary for the Chairman to kill so many?" This provoked a letter from his old liberal friend Leonard Woolf. Would Mr. Martin kindly inform the readers, he asked, "the maximum number of deaths he would have deemed appropriate?""
https://www.fortfreedom.org/h11.htm
I well remember my old editor, Kingsley Martin, writing in the New Statesman, by way of a gentle rebuke to Mao Tse-tung, who had just massacred three million people, "Was it really necessary for the Chairman to kill so many?" This provoked a letter from his old liberal friend Leonard Woolf. Would Mr. Martin kindly inform the readers, he asked, "the maximum number of deaths he would have deemed appropriate?""
https://www.fortfreedom.org/h11.htm