I am quite familiar with the existence and accuracy of Godwin's Law. That is, the reality that the longer an online conversation or public debate goes, the probability that one party will make an Adolf Hitler or Nazi comparison increases exponentially.
Still, teaching high school students each year about the Holocaust and the monstrous evil Hitler personified, I don't think I will ever get used to seeing supposedly sophisticated individuals make intellectually offensive jabs like this:
It is beyond grotesque to mention in the same breath (or tweet) those who are working to protect children from exposure to sexually explicit drag performances and those who ushered women and children into gas showers and the crematoria.
The truth is Nazism is an ideology so ethically bankrupt that it truly has no rival in history, save one. The swastika has but one legitimate parallel on the scale of moral degeneracy, and it's the hammer and sickle. Only in communism/socialism do Hitler comparisons even seem reasonable, and not only because both were virulently anti-capitalism.
Hitler's butchery and systematic liquidation of people, as horrific as it was, actually pales in comparison to the unmarked graves and killing fields of communist/socialist madmen throughout the last century.
Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong both ran circles around the Führer, with "Chairman Mao" holding particular distinction as the world's worst. It is estimated that his reign of horror precipitated the deaths of anywhere between 40 and 100 million innocent Chinese people… and you know it is bad when the numbers are so great, the slaughter so complete, that it is impossible to quantify with any precision how many perished.
Despicable tales of starvation and cannibalism will forever define the central planning nightmare that was Mao's "Great Leap Forward." As explained by the Mises Institute:
Peasants were grouped into groups of thousands and forced to share all things. All groups were to be economically self-sufficient. Production goals were raised ever higher.
People were moved by the hundreds of thousands from where production was high to where it was low, as a means of boosting production. They were moved too from agriculture to industry. There was a massive campaign to collect tools and transform them into industrial skill. As a means of showing hope for the future, collectives were encouraged to have huge banquets and eat everything, especially meat. This was a way of showing one's belief that the next year's harvest would be even more bountiful.
Mao even went so far as to plan how farmers were to plant seeds. And his brilliant strategy managed to destroy crop levels to unprecedentedly low levels. By 1957 mass starvation was everywhere and when 1960 arrived, China's death rate had soared from 15% to a mind-boggling 68%.
Here's the testimony of one of Mao's Red Guard soldiers, Wei Jingsheng:
We walked along beside the village... Before my eyes, among the weeds, rose up one of the scenes I had been told about, one of the banquets at which the families had swapped children in order to eat them. I could see the worried faces of the families as they chewed the flesh of other people's children. The children who were chasing butterflies in a nearby field seemed to be the reincarnation of the children devoured by their parents. I felt sorry for the children but not as sorry as I felt for their parents. What had made them swallow that human flesh, amidst the tears and grief of others — flesh that they would never have imagined tasting, even in their worst nightmares?
Sure, if points were being awarded for good, or at least morally neutral intentions, a much stronger case can be made for Mao's central planning catastrophe than Hitler's Final Solution. At least we could solace ourselves with the blissful hope that Mao was just a dunce who had no idea what the consequences of his actions would be. But better intentions don't change the catastrophic results which speak for themselves.
And that's precisely why those in our society who consistently put lipstick on Marx and Lenin's pig should be relegated to the radical fringe of public dialogue. Groups like this:
As long as you equate "human flourishing" with starvation and "boundless creativity" with eating your neighbor's kids instead of your own, then these modern Maoists are really on to something.
But for the sane among us, this is the way:
