Posted on 03/23/2009 10:30:58 PM PDT by goldstategop
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, 20-30 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 about 70 million people died - nearly all in peacetime! - virtually all of them Chinese. Likewise, the approximately 30 million people that 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 Light 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.
Kent:
>> Here’s the answer: Left = Communist
RLobster:
> No, that’s not the answer!
Me:
Yes it is!! ;-)
RLobster:
> Left = totalitarianism
> That’s why I say, Communist, Nazi, close enough, same thing.
While I agree with what you say about communism and nazism both being totalitarian in nature, the Question was:
‘Why doesn’t communism have as bad a name as Nazism?’
And the answer is - the Left is communist and the Left rule the media. Your ‘answer’ doesn’t address that question.
Saved & forwarded to others.
From a vantage point of American freedom based politics, National Socialism is just as far left as Democratic Socialism.
So, to the question: Why Doesn't Communism have as bad a name as Nazism? Your answer is: "because they're both the same".
Nah, that doesn't even address the question. I'm outta here...
the Left is communist and the Left rule the media
Here's the real answer to the question in the title:
The Left is communist and the Communists rule the media. (the Nazis run the DHHS)
And perhaps the number one reason is that the Left consider themseves to be much smarter than the rest of us. For them to face up to the evils of Communism would mean that they were totally wrong about everything in foreign policy since the 1930’s. Same goes for education, judicial fiat, crime...
I see, you didn't have a clue from the start. Ok, whatever.
When you're in a hole, stop digging.
1. Communists murdered their own people; the Nazis murdered others.
Add to that the fact that, unfortunately, successor governments in nations like Russia, and governments in China and Cuba, acknowledge no particular abuses of human rights. Using the Russian example, if they don't acknowlege the gulags for what they were, thus don't prosecute the persecutors, there's not much than can be done.
Extraordinarily good points, well said. Thanks!
In 1939 the world's great dictators -- Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin -- teamed up to conquer Europe, then the world. And they could easily have succeeded, except that one of the three was insane, and in two years turned on his ally Stalin, in order apparently to impress his enemy, Churchill. It didn't work.
But Hitler's now obvious insanity has prevented anyone not equally insane from saying good words about him. By contrast, Stalin's brutal sanity continues to win grudging admiration, even from people who hate him. I.e., "Yes, he was a devil, but he was our devil," say some in the Left.
The Right of course (that is, our right) will not defend dictators under ANY circumstances, whether they call themselves International Socialists, National Socialists, Fascists, or something else. Dictatorship is dictatorship, and we hate them all -- until, as in 1941, it becomes a matter of life & death. Then: which is the lesser evil, or at least the more distant threat?
In 1941 Hitler's threat was clear and immediate -- he declared war on the US, and sent U-boats to sink more American ships than the Japanese had at Pearl Harbor. At the same time, Americans could see no threat from "Uncle Joe" Stalin. It was seen as a no-brainer.
This in company with the prevalence of the left in academia and the communications media is probably the biggest reason. More specifically, the part of communist theory that has an enduring appeal to adherents is its insistence that it is the means to universal human actualization. Nazism promised that actualization only to the members of the "Aryan" race (and still owes an apology to real Aryans who are neither blond nor beasts).
It's attractive because it's an easy-to-understand descriptive sociological model that incorporates three of the baser of human passions: envy and sadism and the sheer delight of destruction. It provides moral sanction for the adolescent "if you are dissatisfied, lash out!" approach to human relationships. It is cleverly evil where Nazism was merely brutally evil. To one who is murdered for politics the distinction is rather academic.
Yea, well someone tell Prager there are two chances of that happening...slim & none and “Slim” just left the building.
After more than 40 years of Leftist/Socialist/Communist indoctrination in American colleges & universities and with HALF of Americans dependent on the government for their livelihood; it's no wonder America & Americans are in the mess we're in.
Who says “Communism is dead.”
I think I've found the answer.
The Italian word for “Nationalize” is “Nazionalizzare”.
Do you see a familiar word
contained in that translation?
We do pronounce that word as if speaking Italian as well.
The Nazis “nationalized”, ie, they were socialists.
In a rare (for me) instance of descent from Mr. Prager’s opinion I will say that at least in a sense he is wrong here.
Although the Nazis may have set up a much more elaborate system of murder with their extermination camps the Soviets far out did them in the scale of their extermination.
Where the Nazis set up elaborate rail schedules to export their undesirables to camps to meet their deaths in centralized death factories, the Soviets turned the entire country of the Ukraine in to a death camp.
Perhaps the Nazis plan was more complex out of necessity because they were selective in who they wished to murder. But because Stalin wished to murder an entire country there was no necessity to transport the victims to a central location of extermination.
That being said Stalin’s murder of Ukrainians was every bit as systematic in his method of starving the bread basket of Eastern Europe.
The biggest advantage to Stalin’s wholesale murder was that he could quarantine his concentration camp and so limit the number of witnesses. This permitted Stalin to deny the Ukrainian holocaust for many years.
The families of the 20,000 Polish officers murdered at Katyn would beg to differ with that statement.
National Socialist German Workers’ Party
This was the sentiment at the last veteran's day event I went to...
The mood was sad resignation.
The left definately are fascists.
Totalitarian collectivists.
Actually, it came from Nazitionale Socialiste Deutches Arbeiters Partei (aka NSDAP): National Socialist German Worker’s Party.
...Good on yer fer the article...
“Nazi” was German slang for nationalize which, it seems to me, was derived from the the Italian word “NAZIonalizarre”
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