Six Times the Bodies, Half the Outrage: Communism's Missing Reckoninghttps://pjmedia.com/eric-florack/2026/07/27/six-times-the-bodies-half-the-outrage-communisms-missing-reckoning-n4955488I 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.
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So why isn't it taught with the same reverence and the same field trips?
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One: the victors write the history books, and communism, inconveniently, was standing on the winning side.
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Two: communism kept a standing army of Western apologists who never fully stood down.
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Three: McCarthy handed the anti-Communist cause a self-inflicted black eye that it's still recovering from.
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Four: geography hid the bodies, because dictators are only careless when they think nobody's watching.[/i
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Like Eric Florack, I do not believe the Holocaust is fake, exaggerated, or over-emphasized. I know it is not necessary to say this to fellow Cave-Dwellers, but DU onlurkers might harbor stooopid stereotypes of conservatives.
The basic fact is that Mao and Stalin, in sheer numbers, reduce Hitler to modern history's third most murderous monster, and in terms of percentage of a country's population, history's worst murderous monster was Pol Pot. Hitler's opprobrium is well deserved; the near obscurity of Mao's and Stalin's slaughters is scandalous. WRT the reasons given in the article, in reverse order:
Museums of Nazi concentration camps predate the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mrs. SVPete and I toured Dachau (near Munich) in 2000, some nine years after that fall. Poland has a museum at Auschwitz. I doubt that any of Stalin's former camps has a significant museum, and if any, probably built after the fall of the USSR.
The weird thing about McCarthy is that he lied but was correct. He had no list of Communist agents. Yet, the agents were there, and probably more than he claimed. The story should be narrated by Rod Serling.
To me, the scandal of the obscurity is largely founded on the lying Communism/Communist apologists. From Walter Duranty (or earlier) to the academics and "journalists" of today, these apologist KNEW/KNOW they were and are lying. And they continued even after Khrushchev gave them some "permission" to tell some truth about Stalin. Solzhenitsyn's massive
Gulag Archipelago was derided. The works of Robert Conquest were similarly dismissed and derided.
The Black Book of Communism is little known, even though many of the scholars contributing to the project were socialists. IOW, the near obscurity is a conspiracy - more a phenomenon of common POVs than of organization - of silence and derision.
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