Viewing genocide as bad is not a ‘left wing’ political view… You could be firmly into capitalism and still believe that genocide is bad. You could be fully into communism and think genocide is a stellar way to advance your goals. Socialism is left, in it’s many forms, including things like universal healthcare, education, etc. Communism is extreme left. As long as someone believes that more privatisation or a more open market is the way to solve social issues, they are right of centre regardless of whether they think that slaughtering a group of people bad or not, or think that the environment needs to be protected. ‘Left’ is the economic way in which one goes solving social issues, not just believing genocide is bad or that climate change is an issue to be addressed.

Use healthcare as an easy example: People of many different political viewpoints can agree that healthcare is important to society as a whole. A left wing approach to this would be to create a universal centrally run healthcare system that treats everyone equitably, accepts that some people will use more benefit than they pay, and others will pay more than they use, but overall society will be healthy and everyone pays less in general as a result and lives in a place where people suffer less and are happier. A right wing approach would be to allow private companies to provide healthcare incentivised by the ability to earn a profit, and let them figure out how to deliver that service, maybe the government steps in to try and regulate different industries, provide tax breaks or investments, or otherwise try and coax them to provide a better service or prevent them from being too greedy.

Just simply believing in a social cause does not make one ‘left’. It’s all about the implementation of the solution that counts. The Democrats in the US are quite right of centre, and the US has spent generations trying to violently overthrow and prevent social governments from forming and spread their propaganda far and wide that anything left of centre is full blown authoritarian communism.

Lenin and Stalin were very very left. But they were filthy butchers who went on a slaughtering spree and did much more harm than just their ideology. Viewing genocide as bad as just a ‘left’ wing issue completely dilutes what ‘left’ is. That’s how our political parties keep moving right.