There really is no other way to say this: Communism causes genocide. Communists and Nazis are identical in their disregard for human life. Unlike the one-testicled Austrian corporal and failed house-painter, Hitler, the Communists under Stalin, and Mao, and Castro, and Pol Pot were not targeting specific groups only. They were killing everyone who was not a true believing commie. And they killed their own for all kinds of reasons like all good third-world tinpot dictators do: they did not want competition.

The term “fellow traveler” or “useful idiot” refers to the media types and Americans and Brits who followed the utopia of the Bolshevik hellhole and lapped up Stalin’s lies like a hyena laps up water. They reported on the greatness and ignored the clear evidence of genocide. Sort of like Rodman and his best friend Kim Jong Un. And ignored all evidence of murder, famine, and yes, genocide. Again, despite the propaganda, it is clear that Communism kills.

Even the New York Times, which was where the infamous Walter Durant wrote about the glories of Stalinist Russia worked, has a few…less friendly opinions here. Bret Stephens asked quite a few questions about why communist genocide and horrors are minimized if they are discussed at all. And his questions are sadly valid.

But they’re worth asking because so many of today’s progressives remain in a permanent and dangerous state of semi-denial about the legacy of Communism a century after its birth in Russia.

No, they are not true-believing Communists. No, they are not unaware of the toll of the Great Leap Forward or the Killing Fields. No, they are not plotting to undermine democracy.

But they will insist that there is an essential difference between Nazism and Communism — between race-hatred and class-hatred; Buchenwald and the gulag — that morally favors the latter. They will attempt to dissociate Communist theory from practice in an effort to acquit the former. They will balance acknowledgment of the repression and mass murder of Communism with references to its “real advances and achievements.” They will say that true communism has never been tried. They will write about Stalinist playwright Lillian Hellman in tones of sympathy and understanding they never extend to film director Elia Kazan.

And this includes those godawful Che T-shirts. Yes, Communism was tried and it failed miserably at a terrible cost.

The Crimean Tatars have a heartbreaking story which was memorialized by Jamila and won the 2016 Eurovision award and is told here.

Her song opens with the uncompromising lyrics: “When strangers are coming. They come to your house, they kill you all and say: ‘We’re not guilty … not guilty’.”

Jamala’s great-grandmother was deported along with her four sons and one daughter. “This song really is about my family,” Jamala said. “I had to write it. It is a memorial song and it is difficult for me to sing it.”

Stalin’s government had accused Tatars of collaborating with Nazi forces who occupied the Crimean peninsula and in 1944 forcibly moved them from their homes to central Asia and other more remote parts of the USSR. Between 20% and 50% of the deportees died within the first two years of exile.

And Stalin was no better to his POW’s that survived the Concentration Camps. Who their commie masters sent to the Gulags. For being captured. That nasty bit of history is discussed here.

I learned that many across the Soviet Union initially welcomed the Germans as liberators from Communism, and that most Soviet POWs bitterly fought repatriation after the war’s end—not surprisingly, since their homecoming usually ended in the gulag as punishment for the “treason” of letting themselves be captured alive.

The claim that Communism was never tried kind of falls apart fast when one actually looks at recent world history. Starting with China and the Tibetan genocide as discussed here. Incidentally, this has been going on since 1950. China’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution was a charming period of mass murder in the name of communism. Then there are the killing fields of Laos and Cambodia, the North Korean death camps, and the Venezuelan famine. Not to mention Cuban refugees coming over on a raft made of garbage to escape the communist paradise. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the fruit of communism.

It’s a bitter fact that the most astonishing strategic victory by the West in the last century turns out to be the one whose lessons we’ve never seriously bothered to teach, much less to learn. An ideology that at one point enslaved and immiserated roughly a third of the world collapsed without a fight and was exposed for all to see. Yet we still have trouble condemning it as we do equivalent evils. And we treat its sympathizers as romantics and idealists, rather than as the fools, fanatics or cynics they really were and are.

Winston Churchill wrote that when the Germans allowed the leader of the Bolsheviks to travel from Switzerland to St. Petersburg in 1917, “they turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus.”

A century on, the bacillus isn’t eradicated, and our immunity to it is still in doubt.

As for Che, he was not a nice guy as the Daily Beast mentioned here and Slate mentioned here

Che was an enemy of freedom, and yet he has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice. He stood for the ancient rigidities of Latin-American thought, in a Marxist-Leninist version, and he has been celebrated as a free-thinker and a rebel.

Face it, communists are the other face of fascism. Hitler and Stalin were not that far apart. And neither is an acceptable road to follow.