A little knowledge of history is a dangerous thing. Nazis started the Holocaust. Communists just had different genocides in mind.
Let's see. The idea is that communism proved itself forever good because the Soviet Union liberated some of the Nazi death camps that attempted to exterminate Europe's Jewish population.
Somehow this is supposed to mean that Bernie Sanders socialism (which is the economic policy of communists, recall) is admirable and desirable, I think. Or maybe that "antifa" violent thugs are the good guys when you compare them to the pathetic loser white supremacists who couldn't scrape together a three-team football league based on their most recent demonstration in Washington, D.C.
One, I thought modern communists have been telling us that the Soviet Union failed because "true" communism hadn't truly been put into practice in the USSR?
Two, America helped liberate the death camps, too. Does that mean that America, Christianity, and capitalism are forever good?
Three, wasn't this an issue of international socialists (the USSR, until Stalin declared socialism in one country as their policy) defeating national socialists (the Nazis)?
Four, let's look at what happened.
--The Soviet communists set up their own concentration camp system (the gulags) for all people in the Soviet Union even before World War II.
--The Soviet communists committed their own pre-war genocide against Ukrainians (tip to Instapundit).
--The Soviet communists had no problem enabling the Nazis with the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact--even as Nazi Germany ramped up persecution of German Jews, telegraphing their hatred--that green-lighted Germany's invasion of Poland in exchange for Russia getting a free hand against Finland (which lost territory but defended their independence in a bloody war), Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, parts of Romania, and the eastern portion of Poland.
--The Soviet communists committed mass murder against Polish leaders to keep them from organizing resistance.
So the Soviet communists had no problem with mass murder and imprisonment.
And by Soviet communist actions, Germany was enabled to expand and gain control of a lot of Polish Jews to exterminate, while securing their eastern flank in order to attack into the West to gain control of even more Jews to exterminate.
But the Soviet communists did defeat the Nazis on the eastern front and ultimately take Berlin. Defeating Germany is what ended the Holocaust. That proves they are good, right?
Well, no. Not quite if your history goes beyond a bumper sticker or meme.
--The Soviets only fought the Nazis because the Nazis rapidly defeated France and inflicted a military defeat on Britain, knocking them back to their island nation, and then invaded the USSR. Had Hitler not attacked the expanded Soviet Union, Stalin would have been happy to watch the Western allies and Germany batter each other--all while Hitler slaughtered Jews--until the USSR was ready to break the pact and attack Germany. Clearly, the Soviet communists wanted to defeat Nazi Germany--not to stop the Holocaust.
--Also, without American, British, and Commonwealth military offensives in the air and on the ground, plus massive military and civilian aid shipped to the USSR at high cost in the face of German interdiction, the Soviets would not have marched on Berlin. Even with Western armies, navies, air forces, and direct aid, the Soviets lost at least 25 million people to defeat the Nazis. How much more could they have (or would they have) endured without Western participation in the war? If the Russians managed to push the Germans back to Minsk and Kiev (and without Western help the Russians might have been pushed east and unable to drive west)--but at the loss of 25 million just to get there--do you really think Stalin would have said that to stop the Holocaust he'd lose 25 million more rather than make another pact with Hitler and end the war, leaving Hitler to kill as many non-Russians as Hitler wanted?
--And once Nazi Germany was defeated, the Soviet communists went on with their own gulags--not being opposed to concentration camps even if the Russians preferred to work their inmates to death rather than simply kill them off as the Nazis did with Jews.
--At this point, should we mention that post World War II era mass slaughters that Chinese and Cambodian communists inflicted on their own people when they had the power and guns?
--And Soviet communism failed economically leading to the collapse of the USSR, when the ethnic and national components of the USSR--including the largest component, Russia!--escaped communist imperial rule just as fast as they could.
Yes, defeating Germany was necessary to end the Holocaust. And the USSR was part of that. That's good. I'm glad they helped. As Churchill said (if memory is correct), if Hitler invaded Hell, Churchill would at least make a favorable mention of the Devil in Parliament.
But the role of the USSR was no validation of communism's goodness. At best you can say that communism is a lesser form of mass-murdering evil than Nazism was.
The West helped defeat Nazism and then took an even bigger role to defeat Soviet communism. The free democratic West is what should be celebrated for its willingness to defeat evil--not the effing communists for just wanting to be the only surviving evil system in Europe.
Sadly, only Nazism was delegitimized as an ideology while communism gets a pass for comparable evil. Nobody ever argues that "true" Nazism hasn't really been tried yet, so let's give it another good ol' college try, eh?
So reject socialism that ruins countries and reject the antifa thugs who--no matter how unlikely it is that those pathetic losers will succeed (just as unlikely as the even rarer white supremacists)--just want to impose their own form of evil on the rest of us.
UPDATE: A late addition, with a tip to Instapundit. The two ideologies are virtual twins, including their racism and anti-Semitism. We'd be better off if we weren't seduced by happy words that conceal the ugly hate that destroys us all in the end.
