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By Elias Atienza
“In the Now,” a Russia Today news project, released a video saying that the far right is distorting the facts about the Soviet Union and trying to make them worse than Nazism. The fact is, this just plain wrong. The Soviet Union, along with the other communist nations that emerged in China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other places, killed tens of millions and ruined the lives of hundreds of millions.
The Soviet Union alone killed millions of people before World War II. The Holodomor, which is recognized as genocide by Ukraine and 15 other countries including the United States, was the man-made famine that killed an estimated 7.5 to 10 million people in the 1930s, which is just under the amount of people that died in the Holocaust. Or the Great Purge, when Stalin liquidated the Red Army’s leadership and killed between 600,000 people and 3 million and lead to the Soviets being humiliated in the Winter War and being unprepared for the German invasion in World War II. Two to three million people are believed to have perished in the gulags and labor camps set up by the Stalin regime.
Though he disagrees with the estimates above, (he argues that Stalin killed only six million people, still horrifically high before World War II) Timothy Snyder argued that Stalin’s motives were just as bad as Hitler’s:
“At the same time, we see that the motives of these killing actions were sometimes far more often national, or even ethnic, than we had assumed. Indeed it was Stalin, not Hitler, who initiated the first ethnic killing campaigns in interwar Europe.”
The only reason that we ended allying with the Soviet Union over Hitler, is because Hitler was the more aggressive of the two. With his intent focused on conquering Europe in the name of Nazism. He hated communism and used the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact only to avoid fighting a two-front war and focus on knocking out the Western Allies. Indeed, the Soviets invaded Western Poland, dooming the Eastern European country and the millions to Nazi oppression and death camps, along with killing tens of thousands of Poles in shootings.
The Nazis systematically murdered at least eleven million people, including up to six million Jews. The death counts are comparable. But communism usually escapes this because the Nazis sought to murder an entire religious and ethnic group based on their religious views while communism was widespread in their net of death.
As Dennis Prager puts it for why communism isn’t viewed as just as bad as Nazism:
“The Nazis carried out the Holocaust. Nothing matches the Holocaust for pure evil. The rounding up of virtually every Jewish man, woman, child, and baby on the European continent and sending them to die? It is unprecedented and unparalleled. The communists killed far more people than the Nazis but never matched the Holocaust in the systemisation of genocide. The uniqueness of the Holocaust and the enormous attention, rightfully paid to it, have helped ensure that Nazism has a worse name than communism.”
“In the Now” tries to paint the picture that the far right is responsible for people trying to say that communism and the Soviet Union is just as bad as Nazism. And yet people like Dennis Prager, myself, and countless others, communism is just as bad as fascism and the Soviet Union was just as bad as the Third Reich. We are not far-righters nor are we Nazi apologists. We hate nazism, fascism, and communism equally.
As I wrote for Mustang News:
“So if you want to punch a Nazi, fine. Do it. I don’t condone it nor would I ever punch someone for their political beliefs, but I won’t shed a tear for an idiot who thinks white people are the greatest thing to walk the Earth and has some deeply seeded desire to deport me back to the Philippines (even though I was born in the U.S.) But I also won’t shed a tear for the communists who hate private property, think people deserve to be shot for thinking capitalism works, condone mass murder from communist figures and believe in state control of everything.”
Communism has committed great evils. We cannot be blind to this. The Soviets did much of the heavy lifting in the war against German nazism and paid a heavy price and for that, we should be grateful. But we should also recognize that the Soviet Union was evil as well.
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