DescentBB

To put it brutally, communists may have killed more people than fascists, but we're still not as bad. Communism commits evil when it goes wrong; fascism commits evil when all goes to plan. No one, not even Stalin, ever became a communist in order to do evil, whereas that's the whole point in becoming a fascist.

I've noticed, too, that people who throw around the number of deaths under Stalin and Mao as if that was the final word on the matter tend to throw up their hands in horror if anyone suggests that the millions who have died in the name of religion serve as witnesses to the fact that it is inherently evil. You could even, following the same piles-of-corpses logic, make a case for the family being inherently evil, on the grounds that some 80% of killings take place in it.

But no one would dream of claiming that . Communism alone is slandered as nothing more than the sum of its deaths. Indeed, if you were serious about evaluating the evil of a regime by the number of deaths it caused, you'd have to say the British Empire was worse than the Nazis. Which I don't for a moment believe.

When we feel more revulsion for the smaller crimes of fascism, we are not being illogical but recognizing that a philosophy that is noble but that sometimes goes horribly wrong is still superior to one based on cruelty and inequality. Communism, like Christianity, is a willingness of the heart as much as anything else; a desire for a better world that is easy to mock but hard to live without. Fascism is about killing people.

At the end of the day, any moderate democrat who pours equal scorn on both extremes had probably best not look too hard into the mirror. Because, while we can quantify the deaths caused by both communism and fascism, we will never know how many deaths have been the result of capitalism; of nothing more noble than a rich man wanting to be even richer, and sacrificing the health and lives of millions of workers to achieve this. Don't even try to count how many people capitalism has killed, because not only will you not know where to begin, but also it will never end.