Understanding Fascism and Communism is about More than How Many Millions Died

My writing on nazism/fascism vs communism was never intended as a numbers game, ranking the horribleness of different ideologies by exactly how many people got killed by them.

I think that is a rather infantile way of looking at history and political ideology. Rather this was about which ones we should fear the most in western democracies.

You don’t calculate the danger of a communist or nazi takeover by looking purely at their historical death statistics. Who should society prepare for and fear? A highly unlikely new Stalin or a probable Hitler?

The case I was making was that a variant of Nazism/Fascism has a much higher chance of “success” in our democracies than a Stalin/Mao style communism.

Violent communism only ever had success in underdeveloped, poor undemocratic nations. While Fascism/Nazism repeatedly succeeded in gaining power in developed and often democratic nations.

My conclusion is thus: Unless you are a rich person in an undemocratic and poor country, you should not worry about communism.

You should not lose your mind because people such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jeremy Corbyn are gaining influence and power. In fact freaking out about socialism is a good way of giving the upper hand to Fascists.