The user you asked already replied with a good answer, essentially:
It’s not necessary or particularly useful to talk about specific leaders
It requires a lot of context to justify or refute the atrocities that most western people attribute to him. To many, it’s comparable to someone trying to justify Hitler to you. They’re both accused of being genocidal undemocratic repressive invasive dictators, compared to the (alleged) democratic free benevolent USA. Like AmericanCommunist22 said, it requires some priming for someone to be warm to the idea and not just shut you out entirely.
So really, for anyone casual, it’s unhelpful to bring up unless they have specific concerns about him.
The user you asked already replied with a good answer, essentially:
It’s not necessary or particularly useful to talk about specific leaders
It requires a lot of context to justify or refute the atrocities that most western people attribute to him. To many, it’s comparable to someone trying to justify Hitler to you. They’re both accused of being genocidal undemocratic repressive invasive dictators, compared to the (alleged) democratic free benevolent USA. Like AmericanCommunist22 said, it requires some priming for someone to be warm to the idea and not just shut you out entirely.
So really, for anyone casual, it’s unhelpful to bring up unless they have specific concerns about him.