These days it’s all the rage to be ‘anti-fascist.’  That’s cool.  Fascism was, and is, bad.  Every school-kid can tell you about the time he or she spent studying Nazi Germany and the death camps.  (Not so much about Italy, Spain or especially the miseries caused by the Japanese war machine, but that’s another rant.)

If you watch a movie with some sort of over-arching ‘bad guy’ theme, or some evil cabal of tyrants, it’s often something with a nazi tone.  Nazis still around or new nazis.

But I am constantly surprised by the fact that young people rarely know anything about all of the blood spilled by Communists.  You rarely see them as the bad guys in film or print.  Sure, in Red Dawn it was Russians and Cubans, and in the new Red Dawn it was North Koreans. But I can’t think of many other modern films which focus negative attention on the blood-crazed spawn of Marx.

In case the dear reader needs an update, the last one hundred or so years saw at least 100,000,000 (that’s one hundred million) human beings tortured, starved and or out-right murdered by the purveyors of communist ideology.  If that’s a surprise it’s because your teachers either 1) didn’t know about it or 2) didn’t think it was all that important. What with Fascists to worry about.

I have mentioned before that it is worth reading The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  The book is an account of the terrors of Russian communism and of the misery of life in the concentration camps so graciously provided for Soviet citizens to be used as slave labor, rehabilitated into good Communists or simply worked to death.

Of course, the Chinese communists, whose power persists today into an unholy combination of centrally controlled capitalism mixed with Maoist state-run terror, are the modern inheritors of communist oppression.  Sure, they make cheap products and so many industries benefit from Chinese (slave) labor, and Disney and the NBA and tech firms make unimaginable profits from them.  But the oppression and misery they cause is every bit as real as it was under Mao himself.  Just ask a Uighur Muslim who has been tortured, raped, worked in cotton fields, stripped of cultural identity and forced to undergo indoctrination.

The list of communist miseries is long and the river of blood is deep.  It has been fed by not only Russia and China but by Eastern European states under the Soviets and by those in the sphere of China, like Vietnam, Cambodia and Burma.  Communism has led to misery in Africa and South America as well.

While I’m not expert on communism, my point here is merely that all too many people think that the only form of tyranny in the world is the right-wing, fascist flavor. And this speaks to a poor education.  Any teacher worth his or her salary should be pointing out this fundamental fact:  it is possible for both right and left to cause enormous human suffering. And it’s inexcusable to teach about the six million from the holocaust (as unbelievably horrible as that was) and ignore 100 million caused by communism.

The fascists may seem worse because they were superficially more racist, and interested in their own ethnic groups and so were willing to visit horrors on those who were genetically and culturally different from them.

But the communists are equally monstrous because they were  (and are) willing to cause suffering to anyone and everyone who differed in ideology from their central tenets.  (They were not constrained by anything so simple as race.) And over the years that has meant political opponents, foreign citizens, religious believers, homosexuals and just about anyone that fell into their cross-hairs.

Here it is important to remember that the true disciples of both groups believed, wholeheartedly, that they were making things better.  For their own racial group, or for the ‘worker’ or the poor.  Or, of course, for their own bank-accounts.  When one genuinely believes such a thing, then it’s not so hard to cause suffering along the way.

It is once again rather cool to be a Marxist.  Antifa and other modern groups have their own Marxist sympathies, overt and subtle.  (Mind you, I don’t think many of them really read much about Marx.  And indeed I genuinely believe that there are some remarkably compassionate and thoughtful Marxists who just want everyone treated equitably. I also don’t think that they’re interested in the sort of misery inflicted by Lenin, Stalin, Mao and all the rest.)

But since communism grew from the teachings of Marx, it suggests to me that it wouldn’t be hard for modern groups to become very sympathetic to mass tyranny.  Their behaviors on the street last Summer is evidence that violence is no problem if it is perceived to advance their goals.

All I’m saying is that we need to remember that violence and oppression, torture and death are tools used with equal alacrity on both fringes of the political spectrum.  (I’m talking especially to you, teachers and professors.)

And if you think fascists are bad, please, please take a minute and read about the history of communism before you embrace (or worse, ignore) its blood-soaked banner.

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