That’s a question I’ve often asked, too. Why do so many academics harbor this lingering wistfulness about Communism? Academics join the rest of us in rightly condemning Nazis and Naziism for all of their well-documented horrors. Like us, they recoil with disgust at the idea that there are neo-Nazis and a cult of Hitler.

But when it comes to atrocities, the Nazis are Saul to Communism’s David ? “Saul has slain his thousands / And David his ten thousands.” So why aren’t those academics similarly outraged and disgusted by Communism? Why is Soviet revisionism still ongoing? Why is Castro revered, and Hugo Chavez, too? Why is Ch? a cult symbol? Why, as I asked at the beginning of my review of Dar?o Fern?ndez-Morera’s American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas, do

American intellectuals continue to believe and seek to further Marxist ideas in this country ? despite witnessing the spectacular failures of Marxism in Russia, East Germany, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and even Albania and Nicaragua; despite seeing Marxist practitioners (often their peers) in other countries quickly resorting to tyranny and terrorism to implement their ideas; despite the overthrow of Marxist regimes by citizens who had lived for generations under the regimes (counter to the Marxist idea that the culture itself is responsible for shaping the ideas of its citizens)[?]

Maybe it’s because the Communists supposedly had “good intentions” ? New Soviet men, transcending capitalism and all that ? whereas the Nazis had that race-purifying agenda. We tend to forget that the Soviets had their own race-based purges (although they were quickly engulfed by their many other purges). The following is from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Book One of The Gulag Archipelago:

As early as the early twenties [1920s], waves [of prisoners] appeared that were purely national in character ? at first not very large in proportion to the populations of the homelands, especially by Russian yardsticks: Mussavatists from Azerbaijan; Dashnaks from Armenia; Georgian Mensheviks; and Turkmenian Basmachi, who were resisting the establishment of Soviet power in Central Asia. …

Within the overall wave of those from formerly occupied areas, there followed, one after another, the quick and compact waves of the nationalities which had transgressed. … What had happened to the Germans at the beginning of the war now happened to these nationalities: they were exiled solely on the basis of blood. …

What to do? I think what’s needed to drive this similarity between Communism and Naziism home is a new taxonomy of Communism. Communists are “International Socialists”; Nazis are “National Socialists.” In fact, the derivation of the word “Nazi” is from the sounds in “Nationalsozialistische.”

Therefore, I propose calling Communists the InterNazis. A bit cumbersome, perhaps, but the connotation is a lot closer to the truth (even if it still understates the greater menace Communism presented to the world).