Why communism isn't as hated as nazism?

vladimirk800i (46)in #history • 7 years ago

When people describe particularly evil individuals or regimes, why is it that they use the terms “Nazi” or “fascist,” but almost never “communist?” Given the unparalleled amount of human suffering communists have caused, why is “communist”
so much less a term of revulsion than “nazi?”
Communists killed 70 million people in China, more than 20 million people in the Soviet Union (not including about 5 million Ukrainians during Golodomor), and almost one out of every three Cambodians during Pol Pot's reign. Communists enslaved entire nations inRussia, Vietnam, China, Eastern Europe, North Korea, Cuba and much of Central Asia. So, why doesn’t communism have the same terrible reputation as Nazism?

Reason #1:

There is, widespread ignorance of the communist crime record. Whereas both Right and Left loathe Nazism and teach its evil history, the Left – and I’m talking about the Left, not traditional liberals like Harry Truman or John F. Kennedy – has never loathed communism. And since the left dominates academia, almost no one teaches communism’s evil history.

Reason #2:

The Nazis carried out the Holocaust.

Nothing matches the Holocaust for pure evil. The rounding up of virtually every Jewish
man, woman and child on the Europe and sending them to certain death is unprecedented and unparalleled. The communists killed far more people in their GULags than the Nazis, but never matched the Holocaust in the systemization of genocide. The uniqueness of the Holocaust and the enormous attention to it have helped to ensure that Nazism has a worse name than communism.

Reason #3:

Communism is based on nice sounding theories; Nazism isn’t. It’s based on horrific sounding theories. Intellectuals in general – including, of course, the intellectuals who write history – are seduced by words – so much so, that they deem actions as less significant than words. For that reason, they haven’t focused nearly as much attention on the horrific actions of communists as they have on the horrific actions of the Nazis. They dismiss the evils of communists as perversions of “true, marxist communism.” But they regard Nazi atrocities (correctly) as the logical and inevitable results of Nazism.

Reason #4:

Germans have thoroughly exposed the evils of Nazism, have taken responsibility for them, and have attempted to atone for them. Russians have not done anything similar regarding
Lenin's or Stalin's horrors. To the contrary, Lenin, the father of Soviet
communism, is still widely venerated in Russia. Even less so has China exposed the greatest
mass murderer and enslaver of them all, Mao Zedong. Mao remains revered in China. Every Chinese currency note has his picture on it.
Until Russia and China – and all the rest communist states – acknowledge the evils their countries committed under communism, communism's evils will remain less known than the evils of the German state under Hitler.

Reason #5:

Communists murdered mostly their own people. The Nazis, on the other hand, killed very
few fellow Germans. “World opinion” – that largely meaningless and amoral term – deems the murder of members of one's own group far less noteworthy than the murder of outsiders. That’s why, for example, blacks killing millions of fellow blacks in Africa attracts almost no attention from “world opinion.”

Reason #6:

In the view of the left, the last “good war” was World War II, the war against German Nazism and Japanese fascism.

The left does not regard wars against communist regimes as “good wars.” For example, the American war against Vietnamese communism is regarded as immoral, and the war against Korean communism – and its Chinese
communist backers – is simply ignored. Until the left, and all the institutions influenced by the left, acknowledge how evil communism's been, we will continue to live in a morally
confused world.