1 00:00:01,540 --> 00:00:07,300 When people describe particularly evil individuals or regimes, why is it that they use the terms 2 00:00:07,300 --> 00:00:11,600 “Nazi” or “fascist,” but almost never “communist?” 3 00:00:11,610 --> 00:00:16,920 Given the unparalleled amount of human suffering communists have caused, why is “communist” 4 00:00:16,920 --> 00:00:20,880 so much less a term of revulsion than “Nazi?” 5 00:00:20,880 --> 00:00:25,430 Communists killed 70 million people in China, more than 20 million people in the Soviet 6 00:00:25,430 --> 00:00:32,560 Union (not including about 5 million Ukrainians), and almost one out of every three Cambodians. 7 00:00:32,560 --> 00:00:38,540 And communists enslaved entire nations in Russia, Vietnam, China, Eastern Europe, North 8 00:00:38,540 --> 00:00:42,020 Korea, Cuba and much of Central Asia. 9 00:00:42,020 --> 00:00:45,320 They ruined the lives of well over a billion people. 10 00:00:45,320 --> 00:00:51,100 So, why doesn’t communism have the same terrible reputation as Nazism? 11 00:00:51,100 --> 00:00:57,380 Reason Number 1: There is, simply put, widespread ignorance of the communist record. 12 00:00:57,380 --> 00:01:02,860 Whereas both right and left loathe Nazism and teach its evil history, the left 13 00:01:02,860 --> 00:01:09,300 – and I’m talking about the left, not traditional liberals like Harry Truman or John F. Kennedy – 14 00:01:09,300 --> 00:01:11,680 has never loathed communism. 15 00:01:11,680 --> 00:01:18,480 And since the left dominates academia, almost no one teaches communism’s evil history. 16 00:01:18,480 --> 00:01:23,020 Reason Number 2: The Nazis carried out the Holocaust. 17 00:01:23,030 --> 00:01:25,840 Nothing matches the Holocaust for pure evil. 18 00:01:25,840 --> 00:01:30,920 The rounding up of virtually every Jewish man, woman, child, and baby on the European 19 00:01:30,920 --> 00:01:36,990 continent and sending them to die is unprecedented and unparalleled. 20 00:01:36,990 --> 00:01:42,110 The communists killed far more people than the Nazis, but never matched the Holocaust 21 00:01:42,110 --> 00:01:45,360 in the systemization of genocide. 22 00:01:45,360 --> 00:01:51,030 The uniqueness of the Holocaust and the enormous attention rightly paid to it have helped ensure 23 00:01:51,030 --> 00:01:55,320 that Nazism has a worse name than communism. 24 00:01:55,320 --> 00:02:01,920 Reason Number 3: Communism is based on nice sounding theories; Nazism isn’t. 25 00:02:01,920 --> 00:02:05,040 It’s based on heinous sounding theories. 26 00:02:05,040 --> 00:02:09,540 Intellectuals in general – including, of course, the intellectuals who write history – 27 00:02:09,540 --> 00:02:16,240 are seduced by words – so much so, that they deem actions as less significant than words. 28 00:02:16,240 --> 00:02:21,299 For that reason, they haven’t focused nearly as much attention on the horrific actions 29 00:02:21,299 --> 00:02:25,730 of communists as they have on the horrific actions of the Nazis. 30 00:02:25,730 --> 00:02:31,120 They dismiss the evils of communists as perversions of “true communism.” 31 00:02:31,120 --> 00:02:38,960 But they regard Nazi atrocities (correctly) as the logical and inevitable results of Nazism. 32 00:02:38,960 --> 00:02:45,180 Reason Number 4: Germans have thoroughly exposed the evils of Nazism, have taken responsibility 33 00:02:45,180 --> 00:02:48,620 for them, and have attempted to atone for them. 34 00:02:48,620 --> 00:02:53,680 Russians have not done anything similar regarding Lenin's or Stalin's horrors. 35 00:02:53,680 --> 00:02:59,600 To the contrary, Lenin, the father of Soviet communism, is still widely venerated in Russia. 36 00:02:59,600 --> 00:03:06,860 And as regards Stalin, as University of London Russian historian Donald Rayfield puts it, 37 00:03:06,860 --> 00:03:14,180 “People still deny, by assertion or implication, Stalin's holocaust.” 38 00:03:14,180 --> 00:03:20,920 Even less so has China exposed the greatest mass murderer and enslaver of them all, Mao Zedong. 39 00:03:20,920 --> 00:03:22,820 Mao remains revered in China. 40 00:03:22,820 --> 00:03:27,080 Every Chinese currency note has his picture on it. 41 00:03:27,080 --> 00:03:32,160 Until Russia and China – and Vietnam, and Cuba, and North Korea – acknowledge the 42 00:03:32,160 --> 00:03:38,189 evils their countries committed under communism, communism's evils will remain less known than 43 00:03:38,189 --> 00:03:42,200 the evils of the German state under Hitler. 44 00:03:42,200 --> 00:03:46,699 Reason Number 5: Communists murdered mostly their own people. 45 00:03:46,700 --> 00:03:50,660 The Nazis, on the other hand, killed very few fellow Germans. 46 00:03:50,660 --> 00:03:56,340 “World opinion” – that largely meaningless and amoral term – deems the murder of members 47 00:03:56,340 --> 00:04:01,460 of one's own group far less noteworthy than the murder of outsiders. 48 00:04:01,460 --> 00:04:06,260 That’s why, for example, blacks killing millions of fellow blacks in Africa elicits 49 00:04:06,260 --> 00:04:10,740 almost no attention from “world opinion.” 50 00:04:10,740 --> 00:04:18,320 And Reason Number 6: In the view of the left, the last “good war” was World War II, 51 00:04:18,320 --> 00:04:22,320 the war against German Nazism and Japanese fascism. 52 00:04:22,320 --> 00:04:27,639 The left does not regard wars against communist regimes as “good wars.” 53 00:04:27,639 --> 00:04:33,491 For example, the American war against Vietnamese communism is regarded as immoral, and the 54 00:04:33,500 --> 00:04:39,520 war against Korean communism – and its Chinese communist backers – is simply ignored. 55 00:04:39,520 --> 00:04:45,300 Until the left, and all the institutions influenced by the left, acknowledge how evil communism 56 00:04:45,300 --> 00:04:50,580 has been, we will continue to live in a morally confused world. 57 00:04:50,580 --> 00:04:55,580 In the meantime, all good people owe it to the victims of communism 58 00:04:55,580 --> 00:04:58,020 to learn what happened to them. 59 00:04:58,020 --> 00:05:06,500 Even worse than being murdered or enslaved is a world that doesn’t even know that you were. 60 00:05:06,520 --> 00:05:08,660 I’m Dennis Prager.