"We MUST be right..."
There is a frequent, delusional argument, intended to defend bad choices in public and private life, that may be summed up as: "We just have to be right. How could anyone who is in the wrong make the sacrifices we have made?" Specifically, accounts of the history of Communism and associated movements, even by hostile writers, often include a certain kind of description of its members and protagonists, especially of the first generation, that sounds almost like praise. We read of the discipline, the dedication, the asceticism even, of these people.
That is, of course, rather one-sided. By no means all Communists were dedicated or ascetic; what is known of the private lives of Mao Zedong, with his harem of underage girls, and Tito, with his estates and belief that if he had been born in the USA he would have been a dollar billionaire, does not suggest much by way of self-denial. But this attitude is wrong in a deeper sense.
The heart of the wrongness is to assume that single qualities that are often found in the lives of heroes, geniuses, and saints, are by that reason good in themselves. Wrong. What makes a hero a hero is not just discipline, but the just cause to fight and die for. A man can be a hero, like Oskar Schindler, having spent a lot of his life being a bit of a crook, but finding, in the face of a terrible evil that everyone around him had accepted, that he was not going to - even if he had to be alone. What makes a genius a genius is not dedication, but insight beyond the obvious; some geniuses, indeed, leave the impression that they gave up their trade when it started to become too demanding - Shakespeare was silent for the last ten years of his life, Rossini gave up large-scale composition after the Guillaume Tell had cost him six months of work instead of the usual few weeks. And yet these two men were geniuses, and the work they did make is immortal. What makes a saint a saint is not asceticism, but the love for God and fellow man and for God's creation, and that can be found even in most un-ascetic persons. Indeed, if a martyr is a saint, then there have been martyrs who, until their time came, had lived self-indulgent lives. There is a terrible story of a Dutch parish priest who had been notorious for his loose living, and who was captured by Calvinists and told, with a noose around his neck, to recant his Catholic faith. There among murderous enemies, on the edge of eternity, he answered: "A fornicator, I am, but a heretic - ncver!" And he died in the truth, and that makes him a saint. It was to a convicted thief and murderer that God said, "Tonight you shall be with Me in paradise," because he had spoken the truth aloud as he was dying.