I was watching a video of Jordan Peterson where he said that the “Hammer and Sickle” of Communism should be as reviled as the “Swastika” of Nazism. The moderator of the discussion pointed out that although most current college students agree that Communism has killed over 100 million people (compared to the 12 million of Nazism) and has failed disastrously wherever tried it is still not as loathsome as Nazism. Peterson went on to try and explain why this is so. I’m not going to rehash his explanation here. (You can do a YouTube search to find him discussing this.) What I want to do is show why both these ideologies are loathsome and both are forced to the logical conclusion of mass murder.
Both Nazism and Communism had the end goal of a utopia. In both of them, this utopia could only be reached if it were populated by a “new man.” (By man, they were referring to humankind not a particular sex.) For the Nazis it was the “Aryan,” and for Communist it was the “Soviet Man.”
For the Nazis this Aryan would come about from internal means. He was the result of genetic refinement that could be brought about by eugenic theory that would cause the Aryan to evolve, rein over the world, and make the envisioned utopia.
For the Communist the Soviet Man will result from his external environment. If all class distinctions are stripped away from society, the universal comradeship of the Soviet Man will emerge and with this total equality established, the Communist utopia will be born.
Both of these require complete segregation of those few chosen in whom the perfected human being will emerge. There is a problem with this system. Those segregated cannot be polluted by those outside the group. Absolute purity is required.
In the case of the Nazis, it meant those with non-Aryan blood could not interbreed with Aryans. At first, they tried to accomplish this through the legal system with the Nuremberg Race Laws, but when this failed to accomplish their goals fast enough, they went on to the “Final Solution” resulting in 12 million Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and Poles being killed.
For the Communist, this meant that Bourgeois with its fixation on money and status could not be allowed to corrupt the minds of the workers. Such attitudes had to be purged, and those raised in that environment might be “reeducated,” but the older they were the less chance of reeducation taking effect, and they could never be trusted. In the end the Bourgeois had to be eliminated, since they were parasites in the new Soviet society their deaths were inevitable. Moreover, since their contamination was psychological and not physiological it could be passed on to anyone, and as such, there had to be constant vigilance for any counterrevolutionary, and when even a hint was suspected immediate execution was required. Which ultimately led to the slaughter of over 100 million people in the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, Africa, Latin America, and Indochina.
The “Hammer and Sickle” and the “Swastika” are equally loathsome because the cold logic of both ideologies demands the elimination of all who do not share their vision of the future. Their relentless march toward paradise in this world requires first marching through the hell of their making.