Posted on 03/25/2009 6:42:47 AM PDT by IbJensen
Why is it that when people want to describe particularly evil individuals or regimes, they use the terms “Nazi” or “Fascist” but almost never “Communist?”
Given the amount the human suffering Communists have caused — 70 million killed in China, 20 to 30 million in the former Soviet Union and almost one-third of all Cambodians; the decimation of Tibetan and Chinese culture; totalitarian enslavement of North Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese and Russians; a generation deprived of human rights in Cuba; and much more — why is “Communist” so much less a term of revulsion than “Nazi?”
There are Mao Restaurants in major cities in the Western world. Can one imagine Hitler Restaurants? Che Guevara T-shirts are ubiquitous, yet there are no Heinrich Himmler T-shirts.
This question is of vital significance. First, without moral clarity, humanity has little chance of avoiding a dark future. Second, the reasons for this moral imbalance tell us a great deal about ourselves today.
Here, then, are seven reasons.
1. Communists murdered their own people; the Nazis murdered others. Under Mao Zedong about 70 million people died — nearly all in peacetime — virtually all of them Chinese. Likewise, the approximately 30 million people that Joesph Stalin had killed were nearly all Russians, and those who were not Russian, Ukrainians for example, were members of other Soviet nationalities.
The Nazis, on the other hand, killed very few fellow Germans. Their victims were Jews, Slavs and members of other “non-Aryan” and “inferior” groups.
“World opinion” — that vapid amoral concept — deems the murder of members of one’s group far less noteworthy than the murder of outsiders. That is one reason why blacks killing millions of fellow blacks in the Congo right now elicits no attention from “world opinion.” But if an Israeli soldier is charged with having killed a Gaza woman and two children, it makes the front page of world newspapers.
2. Communism is based on lovely sounding theories; Nazism is based on heinous sounding theories.
Intellectuals, among whom are the people who write history, are seduced by words — so much so that deeds are deemed considerably less significant. Communism’s words are far more intellectually and morally appealing than the moronic and vile racism of Nazism. The monstrous evils of communists have not been focused on nearly as much as the monstrous deeds of the Nazis.
The former have been regularly dismissed as perversions of a beautiful doctrine (though Christians who committed evil in the name of Christianity are never regarded by these same people as having perverted a beautiful doctrine), whereas Nazi atrocities have been perceived (correctly) as the logical and inevitable results of Nazi ideology.
This seduction by words while ignoring deeds has been a major factor in the ongoing appeal of the left to intellectuals.
How else explain the appeal of a Che Guevara or Fidel Castro to so many left-wing intellectuals, other than that they care more about beautiful words than about vile deeds?
3. Germans have thoroughly exposed the evils of Nazism, have taken responsibility for them, and attempted to atone for them. Russians have not done anything similar regarding Lenin’s or Stalin’s horrors. Indeed, an ex-KGB man runs Russia, Lenin is still widely revered, and, in the words of University of London Russian historian Donald Rayfield, “people still deny by assertion or implication, Stalin’s holocaust.”
Nor has China in any way exposed the greatest mass murderer and enslaver of them all, Mao Zedong. Mao remains revered in China.
Until Russia and China acknowledge the evil their states have done under communism, communism’s evils will remain less acknowledged by the world than the evils of the German state under Hitler.
4. Communism won, Nazism lost. And the winners write history.
5. Nothing matches the Holocaust. The rounding up of virtually every Jewish man, woman, child, and baby on the European continent and sending them to die is unprecedented and unparalleled. The communists killed far more people than the Nazis did but never matched the Holocaust in the systemization of murder. The uniqueness of the Holocaust and the enormous attention paid to it since then has helped ensure that Nazism has a worse name than communism.
6. There is, simply put, widespread ignorance of communist atrocities compared to those of the Nazis. Whereas, both right and left loathe Nazism and teach its evil history, the left dominates the teaching profession and therefore almost no one teaches communist atrocities. As much as intellectuals on the left may argue that they loathe Stalin or the North Korean regime, few on the left loathe communism.
As the French put it, “pas d’enemis a la gauche,” which in English means “no enemies on the left.” This is certainly true of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban communism. Check your local university’s courses and see how many classes are given on communist totalitarianism or mass murder compared to the number of classes about Nazism’s immoral record.
7. Finally, in the view of the left, the last “good war” America fought was World War II, the war against German and Japanese fascism. The left does not regard America’s wars against communist regimes as good wars. The war against Vietnamese communism is regarded as immoral and the war against Korean (and Chinese) communism is simply ignored.
Until the left and all the institutions influenced by the left acknowledge how evil communism has been, we will continue to live in a morally confused world. Conversely, the day the left does come to grips with communism’s legacy of human destruction, it will be a very positive sign that the world’s moral compass has begun to correct itself.
Ah, Wiener Schitzle ala Holstein!.
I agree, Communism needs a new name to better describe it.
How about eat-shitism?
That would make them cannibals wouldn’t it...
DING! Winner!
There are Mao Restaurants in major cities in the Western world. Can one imagine Hitler Restaurants?
In India, swastikas a still a good luck sign. Many restaurants have them on their signs, menus on the walls, etc. It is a little weird...
Who wants to bet that there'll never be an Obama Birthday celebration?
Schitzle =schnitzle
HITLER RESTAURANT MOTTO” “Vee vill cook und you vill like it!”
No doubt. And Bambi wants his own version of “Young Pioneers.”
Amazing how the fickle, once rabid followers turn on their leader.
With the Nazis, we had a decisive engagement in which we beat them, whereas we coexisted with communists and must excuse and rationalize the practice, making it a virtue: tolerance, peaceful co-existence.
Also, there are more Germans among us, descendants of Germans, than there are Russian or Chinese or Cambodian. This matters a lot. Paradoxically, you tolerate less from your nearer relations; thus civil wars are the most intense. The ancient demands of unity are encoded in our minds. Moral clarity is not.
It is not only intellectuals who are seduced by words. We all are. We need the words to make sense of the deeds and occurrences. Opposition to Nazism was useful, in fact vital, and it was sold to us; victory made that opposition holy.
You are right of course. Each victims group yells louder that someone in their history had it worse then the other and no generation in history, no tribe was wiped out, no entire village destroyed - each picks its own point in history to yell victim the loudest.
As a point, while a large population of jews were rounded up and killed in Germany, the percentage was not as high as say Freemasons. Over 90% of them were killed and it is still illegal to be one in Germany. Not true with jews.
Communism had better marketing.
Now, class, I have highlighted the key words in this example. Who can tell me which logical fallacy is being committed here?
Yes? You, in the back?
It's the "No True Scotsman" fallacy of ad hoc classification of cases to make one's assertion true by definition.Correct! You go to the head of the class!
There is already a “Martin Luther King” day, just have O’Bama change his birthday to that same day, and he shall be celebrated forever.
What the US had back in the 1930’s was almost indistinguishable from the early days of Spanish or Italian fascism, but the system was poorly enough carried out so mostly it was not really effective in total control of the population. The Germans, however, being much more efficient and disciplined, managed to make the corporate state work in a much more streamlined and apparently acceptable manner. There had to be in internal enemy to keep the majority focused on maintaining the degree of control applied by the guiding authority, so the Nazi leaders chose some of the old targets - the infirm, the mentally challenged, the insane, the deviants, and most of all, the “racially impure”, codeword for Jews, Gypsies, and non-white immigrants to Europe, be they Orientals, African, or Middle Eastern types. Poles, being part Slavic, were only marginally acceptable.
But with today’s advanced communications and monitoring capability, the German application of the corporate state to the civilian population becomes much more possible here in the Untied States of America. Therefore, they need an internal enemy, most recently chosen to be the “unreconstructed” fundamentalist religious types, the “right-wing” conspiracy types, and the various collections of cranks and persons of low sociability.
Stalin’s objection to the corporate state that was so widespread in other parts of the world, is that they were in direct competition with his own brand of snake oil, and in the instance of the German National Socialism, worked MUCH better than the Soviet system. Even Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere worked much better than the Soviet system, and in a more rational world, the combined pincer of Japan and Germany would have fractured the USSR years ago.
But NOOOO, the Japanese had to go wake up the sleeping giant, the United States, in 1941. Vladivostock would have been a much better target tactically.
The swastika long predates National Socialism. It is an ancient symbol found in many cultures. Some think the Nazis picked it partly because they associated it with the Aryans who conquered the original darker-skinned peoples of India.
The real reason Communism is never attacked as severely as National Socialism or Fascism is that Communists and their propaganda deeply penetrated our culture, and remain active today. Heck, our current President is a communist; his parents and grandparents were fellow travelers (at least), his mentor Frank Davis was a commie, his friend and collaborator Bill Ayers is a communist, etc.
Has "genocide" been taken? How about "wholesale slaughter"? "Tyranny"? "Butchery?" "Procrustean egalitarianism?"
I agree with you. That the genocides of the Third Reich were carried out with typical German efficiency does not make them any more abominable than the random slaughter of millions at the hands of Stalin's apparatus.
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