The Modern Perception of Communism
Nazism is bad. Even saying “bad” is a great understatement. It is widely taught that Nazi Germany committed atrocities on a massive scale and was a dark time in 20th century history. However, what if there is an equally as bad ideology that has committed greater atrocities than Nazism, but isn’t treated as bad as Nazism? You all have heard about this ideology - it’s communism. Communism has done what the Nazis could only ever dream of doing. At its peak, communism enslaved half of the world population, killed more than 100 million people, starved countless millions, just to name a few. In the Soviet Union, we have the infamous gulags and the purges from Stalin. In China, we have the Great Leap Forward, killing roughly 30-40 million, and the Cultural Revolution, killing roughly 20 million. In Cambodia, we have the Cambodian Genocide, killing roughly 3 million. I could keep going on and on, but at this point, all these deaths are not even tragedies anymore, they’re just bare statistics. When we start counting in the millions and tens of million, there is not much more that needs to be said. All of this happened under the facade of equal rights and fairness for all workers and farmers. To some extent, this is true - everyone was equally poor and equally hungry.
So why is history not so brutal against Nazism as it is with communism? Why is communism not treated with the same hatred as with Nazism? I do not know. There are ways to be educated in this matter, though. A great book I would recommend reading is The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature and more notably survived Stalin’s gulags. His books give great insight into the realities of these “blissful communities” and are real eye openers. It is important to have these insights so we won’t make the same mistake twice, and as a society moving forward, we should now be aware of the problems and atrocities of communist regimes.
