Criminal movements: communism and nazism deserve the same rejection

To this day, one of the paradoxes of democratic societies remains the different treatment given to certain totalitarian movements.

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At the end of World War II, the world discovered with horror the crimes perpetrated by Adolf Hitler's dictatorship, especially the Holocaust, a genocide that consisted of the planned extermination of millions of people, with six million Jews as the main victims. National-Socialism demonstrated the depths of depravity and perversion to which a totalitarian ideology can descend—ideologies that reject freedom and democracy. These are ideologies that reject freedom and democracy, demand absolute power for the State, and dehumanize entire groups of people based on their race, nationality, religion, or social class, creating an environment conducive to mass killings.

Although nazi movements still exist today, fortunately they are purely marginal. National socialism has become a haven for moral deviants, for people who lack the slightest empathy and who are capable of taking their hatred to extremes that have no place in a democratic society, because no society that truly believes in freedom can be indifferent or impartial to criminal movements, which is the best way to describe those whose political ideas advocate turning entire countries into prisons where anyone can be incarcerated, tortured, and murdered simply for defending freedom and democracy.

The rejection of nazism is a sign of good moral health. What is incomprehensible is that communism continues to enjoy such tolerance in many democratic countries today. Communism is not a democratic ideology, as some claim. It is a totalitarian movement that has left a trail of more than 100 million corpses and that still today keeps a fifth of humanity subjected to dictatorships such as mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Eritrea, Laos, and Vietnam.

Communism, like nazism, is a criminal movement. It proved itself to be so from the very first time it came to power. Let us remember that in just over six years, Lenin's dictatorship murdered more than a million people, deploying a purely insane machinery of repression and torture. Despite this, portraits and even statues of Lenin can still be seen in democratic countries, a sign of the amnesia on the part of many regarding the horrendous crimes perpetrated by that bloodthirsty dictator and the communist movement to which he belonged. If it would be logical for there to be an outrage if a statue of Hitler were erected in a democratic country, or if portraits of that mass murderer who perpetrated the Holocaust were publicly displayed, why don't the mass murderers of communism provoke the same outrage?

We must end this paradox now. The victims of nazi and communist crimes deserve the same respect. Being a victim of crimes committed by a totalitarian ideology should not be considered solely in terms of the criminals' ideology. That one murderer believes they have better ideas than another is no reason for their victims to receive unequal treatment, and establishing biases in this regard is unbecoming of democrats.

Of course, much of that bias and preferential treatment of communism comes from the political left and its media arm, as we had the opportunity to verify five years ago when the left and the far left joined their votes in Spain to vote against the European resolution condemning the crimes of nazism and communism, for the mere fact that communism is in their same ideological neighborhood (Spain is the only European country that has communists in its government, formed by a coalition with the socialists). It is grotesque to see that these are the same people who boast of "historical memory", while imposing absolute amnesia towards the victims of communism, despite everything we know today about the atrocities committed by those totalitarians.