Most Mao and Stalin fans have a more nuanced take on it, if they’ve actually read anything by them. The theory they espouse demands that you look at things so not totalities and take into account several different things when thinking critically of political figures in history. It’s like… one of the major points of dialectics in Marxist theory.

But people see someone defending certain aspects of a person like Stalin and Mao and immediately think “OH THIS PERSON THINKS THEY DID NOTHING WRONG” which is something I’ve only seen in memes, and those memes are mostly making fun of people who think in absolutes like that.