by Eric Florack

I got an email from a reader a few days ago after he had read my column "The Left Has Always Been This Way".

We got into it a bit. He didn't disagree with the overall premise, but wanted to go over some of the finer points. That discussion has been rattling around in my skull ever since—one of those exchanges you replay at 2 a.m., wishing you'd landed the point harder the first time. He asked a question I've turned over myself for years and never once seen anyone in the respectable press, much less The New York Times, answer honestly, mostly because answering it honestly requires admitting some uncomfortable things about people they still invite to dinner parties.

Here's roughly what he wrote: We've spent 80 years, and rightly so, keeping the number of people Hitler and his henchmen murdered burned into public memory. That anger is more than justified. So why don't we hear anywhere near as much about the far larger number of people killed in the name of communism—Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Che, the whole rogues' gallery?

Fair question. It also happens to explain why "socialism" got a full rebrand, a merch line, and a fan club full of people who should know better but simply never bothered to check the math.

The numbers, first, because unlike certain politicians, they don't lie

The Nazi regime murdered roughly six million Jews in the Holocaust. Widen the lens to everyone else the Nazi regime marked for death—Roma, Slavs, people with disabilities, political prisoners, and Soviet POWs—and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's own figures land at approximately 17 million. Monstrous. Nothing below is an attempt to shrink that number by so much as a decimal point, so save the outraged email—I'm two steps ahead of you.

Now look at communism's ledger, and try to keep your jaw off the floor. The Black Book of Communism — compiled by French historian Stéphane Courtois and a team of actual European scholars, working from Soviet bloc archives that spent decades welded shut for exactly this reason — puts the worldwide death toll of communist regimes at 85 to 100 million. Roughly 20 million in the USSR. Sixty-five million in China. Two million each in Cambodia and North Korea. A grab-bag of smaller totals scattered from Vietnam to Eastern Europe to Africa, because evidently no continent got left out of the fun. Mark Kramer, the Harvard scholar who edited the English edition, later told the Cato Institute that fresh research still puts the number "upward of 80 million." Take the low end and communism still outkills the Holocaust nearly five to one. Take the high end and you're at six to one.

Go ahead, run the numbers yourself. I'll get some coffee while you do.

So why isn't it taught with the same reverence and the same field trips?

Four reasons. None of them flattering to the people who've spent eighty years curating what the rest of us are permitted to remember.

One: the victors write the history books, and communism, inconveniently, was standing on the winning side. The Allies beat the Nazis, which bought them Nuremberg, decades of denazification, and total custody of the narrative. The Soviets — who murdered more of their own citizens than Hitler managed to murder of anyone — got to sit at the same winners' table. Funny how that works. You don't put your liberators on trial, even the ones who spent the postwar years perfecting their own genocide on a bigger budget. Stalin's crimes got buried under the rubble of Berlin instead of stacked in a courtroom next to it. I have spent most of my life believing General Patton had a point about them.

Two: communism kept a standing army of Western apologists who never fully stood down. Nazism has, thankfully, no defenders left in polite company — you will not find a tenured professor gently contextualizing the Wannsee Conference. Communism, rebranded today as "democratic socialism," still gets elected officials, faculty lounges, and a healthy chunk of cable and dead tree news carrying its water, apparently free of charge. That's not an accident. It's the leftover residue of a Cold War in which plenty of Western academics and journalists either didn't believe the death tolls, didn't want to believe them, or found it more career-advancing not to report them. Some of that residue is still on the walls. Go check a syllabus. A name you’ll never see in one of those is Walter Duranty.

Three: McCarthy handed the anti-Communist cause a self-inflicted black eye that it's still recovering from.Even Anne Applebaum, who is nobody's idea of a conservative fellow traveler and has spent a career documenting communism's crimes in exhausting, admirable detail, makes essentially this point in her essay on Robert Conquest: Joe McCarthy did more damage to the anti-Communist cause than the Politburo ever managed, because his reckless, indiscriminate flailing let every future critic wave off legitimate anti-communist arguments as paranoid witch-hunting —regardless of how many declassified documents later proved him closer to correct than his detractors ever wanted to admit. Say something true in a sloppy enough way and you hand the other side a permission slip to ignore it for the next 50 years. Congratulations, senator, you played yourself.

Four: geography hid the bodies, because dictators are only careless when they think nobody's watching. The Holocaust happened in the middle of Europe, got documented by liberating armies with cameras rolling, and left behind camps you can still walk through today with a guide and a gift shop. The Holodomor in Ukraine, the Great Leap Forward in China, and the Filling Fields of Cambodia — these happened inside sealed societies that controlled every reporter, every camera, and every scrap of the record for decades. It took Robert Conquest's 1986 book, The Harvest of Sorrow, to drag the Ukrainian famine into Western consciousness at all — and even then, he got sneered at for the trouble. One UCLA Soviet specialist at the time huffed that the book would only find an audience "in today's conservative political climate," as if documenting a state-engineered famine that starved millions to death were a partisan indulgence rather than, you know, a fact with a body count. No film crews. No liberation footage. No memorial with a parking lot. Out of frame, out of mind, out of the curriculum.

Before the hate mail writes itself

Let me take a moment to head off the inevitable, because I already know exactly how this will get twisted the second it leaves my screen: Nothing here argues the Holocaust's memory is somehow overdone. It isn't, and frankly I don't think it can be. Save your indignation; I already agree with you.

What I am saying is that we've applied two wildly different standards to two ideologies with comparably murderous résumés, and only one of them still gets a pass in faculty lounges, campaign literature, and what passes for the mainstream press these days. Only one of them gets positions in our own government after a rebranding. Guess which is which.

Nazism lost the argument and the war on the same afternoon. Communism won its war against the Nazis, so was able to spend the next 80 years rewriting the gruesome history of the much larger war it waged against its own people — and mostly got away with it. The argument, it turns out, is still being fought, mainly by people who've never once had to explain why a system responsible for somewhere between 85 and 100 million corpses gets a rebrand and Senate seats including one avowed communist who owns three houses, and another living in Gracie Mansion, while a system responsible for a fifth of that body count correctly gets neither.

That's not whataboutism. That's arithmetic. And arithmetic, unlike certain "historians," doesn't grade on a curve for good intentions. The bias I'm calling out here is exactly why I said the other day that the left has always been like this. The connection between those deaths, the ideology that led to them, and its modern political expression in the United States — the Democratic Socialists of America — is direct and undeniable.