Both Nazis and Communists hate Jews. Only one is taught in schools.

This is what happens when we only mourn some victims of history.

artwork by Future of Jewish

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This is a guest essay by Erica Smith, a writer and advocate exploring history, education, and civic memory.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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I’ve spent years inside Holocaust archives.

Yet I keep meeting thoughtful people who condemn Nazism’s antisemitism, but wear Che-shirts and quote Mao without blinking. Why?

Why is the swastika taboo (as it should be), but the hammer and sickle can show up on t-shirts and protest signs? Why do we teach the Holocaust, but barely mention the gulags¹?

I’m morally confused. And that confusion matters, because when we only condemn some evils and not others, we distort what human dignity really means.

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Nobody needs convincing that Nazism was evil. It was built on racial supremacy, militarism, and authoritarian violence. It murdered 6 million Jews in the Holocaust and millions more in its march toward global war.

We remember these crimes because the world was forced to look. After 1945, the Allies occupied Germany. They opened the archives. They held the Nuremberg Trials. They made the world confront the horror directly.

Denazification became public policy. Holocaust denial became taboo. And the history was written, with the victims’ voices at the center.

Nazism lost the war. And then it lost the narrative.

Now compare that to communism.

The Soviet Union lasted longer, killed more people in absolute numbers, and spread farther. Stalin engineered a famine in Ukraine that starved 3-to-7 million people. Mao’s Great Leap Forward killed between 20 and 45 million. Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia executed up to 2 million people in just a few years.

And yet, to this day, communism is often defended as a noble idea that was simply implemented poorly.

Why was there no Nuremberg for Stalin? Why didn’t the world demand trials for the architects of the gulag? Why aren’t Mao’s victims named, mourned, remembered?

Nazism’s defeat exposed its evils. Communism’s longevity allowed it to rebrand.

Even more disturbing: Both ideologies targeted Jews. Fascism did it through race. Communism did it through class. But in both cases, Jewish people were painted as threats: elites, conspirators, traitors.

One form of antisemitism we teach as genocide. The other barely makes the curriculum.

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Fascism and communism are often treated as opposites. But they’re not.

They sit on the same authoritarian spectrum: built on ideological purity, forced conformity, and the search for enemies. For the Nazis, the enemy was racial: Jews as poison to the Aryan nation. For communists, the enemy was class-based: capitalists, intellectuals, dissidents — often Jews, again.

Yes, they had different justifications. But the outcomes converged: repression, fear, dehumanization, and mass death.

So when someone says, “That wasn’t real communism,” I want to ask: Was the Holodomor² not done right? Were the gulags not ideologically pure enough? Was Stalin just having a bad day?

Because every time we try it, it ends the same way.

We all know Nazism was antisemitic. But communism was too — just in quieter ways.

Stalin banned Hebrew. He shut down synagogues. He executed Jewish poets and thinkers in the Night of the Murdered Poets. He promoted the Doctors’ Plot, accusing Jewish physicians of conspiring to kill Soviet leaders. Soviet propaganda smeared Zionism as imperialism and equated Judaism with disloyalty.

But how often are these facts taught? Where are the memorials to the Jews who died in Soviet prisons or disappeared in purges?

Nazism racialized antisemitism. Communism weaponized it politically. Both erased Jewish identity. But only one is universally condemned.

Antisemitism is most dangerous when it stops looking like hatred. Not when it’s shouted by neo-Nazis or painted on swastikas, but when it’s spoken calmly by professors, pundits, or celebrities. When it hides behind terms like “justice,” “decolonization,” or “anti-elitism.” When it shows up in faculty resolutions, protest chants, or think pieces, without ever saying the word “Jew.”

That’s when it spreads. That’s when it’s hardest to name. And that’s when it does the most harm, because it sounds reasonable, even righteous, until it’s too late.

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Not all revolutions are the same.

The only reason Enlightenment and Marxist revolutions are grouped under the same word is because both rebuild government. But that’s where the similarities end.

Enlightenment revolutions, the American Revolution, the early French revolutionaries, and liberal movements in Europe were rooted in freedom of conscience and expression, individual rights, and limited government. They were messy, flawed, and sometimes hypocritical. But they were built on the idea that people matter, and that liberty should be defended.

Communist revolutions were something else entirely. Born of Marxist theory and twisted by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, they weren’t about limiting power; they were about centralizing it. These revolutions sought utopia through control, not freedom. They replaced monarchs with ideology and crowned the state as the new god.

In contrast, fascism didn’t rebuild the state; it absorbed and weaponized the one that already existed. It didn’t dream of remaking the world, just purifying and preserving the nation in its current form. That’s why fascism is classified as Right-wing: It didn’t overthrow structure, it enforced it with violence.

And here’s the pivot: Not until a revolution establishes how power is distributed, whether it respects individual autonomy or centralizes authority, do we reach the question of economics. Enlightenment revolutions leaned toward capitalism as a corollary of individual liberty.

But we’re watching that erode. Meanwhile, both socialist and fascist regimes rely on redistribution, just through different mechanisms. In both, the government, not the individual, controls the terms of participation.

This is also why monarchies, especially absolutist ones, can belong to the same authoritarian spectrum. It’s not the flag or title that defines tyranny. It’s the arrangement of power.

Here’s the truth no one wants to admit: Utopia always comes with a price. Liberal democracies, however flawed, are built on the idea of negotiated freedom; you give up certain rights (like theft or violence) in exchange for shared protection and order. But your soul remains your own.

Communist and fascist regimes demand total surrender. You’re not just obeying laws, you’re submitting your entire self to the state’s vision of the good. That’s why these systems can’t tolerate dissent, religion, or conscience. They don’t just govern behavior, they try to remake the human being.

And that’s how the dream of utopia becomes a nightmare.

Collective action isn’t the problem, but how it’s done is. Democracy is built on voluntary collective action: people gathering, voting, debating, disagreeing. Even the Jewish idea of a quorum (minyan) rests on presence, dialogue, and consent.

That’s not the same as authoritarian collectivism, where individuals are expected to surrender their conscience to the state. Healthy collective action protects rights, builds consensus, and respects difference. Authoritarian collectivism punishes dissent, drowns conscience, and turns people into tools.

So yes, community matters. But only when it starts from the truth that the individual matters too.

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This is the part that haunts me: Even after everything — after gulags, famines, purges — we still hear people defend the dream. “True communism hasn’t been tried,” they say. “It was just bad leadership.”

But it has been tried. Over and over again. It fails every time not because of sabotage or mismanagement, but because it’s structurally hostile to complexity, difference, and dissent. The dream is so clean, it erases people.

And still we return to it, again and again, as if this time, finally, it will end differently. You don’t need Stalin to repeat the pattern. You just need the instinct.

Today, communism doesn’t come in the form of red flags and gulags. It shows up as ideological conformity disguised as justice, language control labeled “progress,” censorship called “safety,” and class resentment framed as morality. This is soft totalitarianism, but the effect is the same: Dissent is punished, the collective is sacred, and once again, Jews are cast as suspicious, whether for being “too privileged,” “too Western,” or “too Zionist.”

It’s not communism in name, yet the instinct is there.

Even on the political Right, where support for Israel once served as a firewall against overt antisemitism, we now see cracks. Figures like Candace Owens flirt openly with conspiratorial language about Jewish influence, while Tucker Carlson (a former pillar of mainstream conservatism) has embraced narratives steeped in coded antisemitism. The shift isn’t always explicit. That’s what makes it dangerous. It disguises old hatred in new rhetoric, allowing it to pass as critique rather than what it is: a rebranded prejudice.

This isn’t coming from the fringes. We expect antisemitism from Nick Fuentes. We expect it from obscure Far-Left collectives chanting for intifada. But now it’s coming from respected institutions and public figures — from Ivy League universities to blue-check influencers, from popular commentators to faculty members.

That’s when antisemitism becomes most dangerous: not when it rages, but when it persuades.

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Rwanda had tribunals. South Africa had truth commissions. Kosovo had international courts.

But where was the reckoning for communism’s crimes? For the Jewish poets shot in Moscow? For the children starved in Ukraine? For the believers disappeared for refusing the cult of the state?

We only seem to mourn certain victims. And history stays distorted until we mourn all of them.

Hence, I am morally confused. I don’t understand why we condemn Nazism’s antisemitism but excuse communism’s. I don’t understand why we hold tribunals for fascists and write dissertations about Marxists. I don’t understand how a system that murdered millions can still be called “idealistic.”

Most of all, I don’t understand why the Jews purged in Moscow aren’t mourned the same way as the Jews gassed in Auschwitz. They deserve it. History deserves it. And we deserve it — if we want to learn anything from what came before.

Because, when we forget what happened, or excuse it as an “implementation error,” we don’t escape the past. We recreate it.

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1. A system of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the early 1950s during Joseph Stalin’s rule

2. The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian Famine, was a mass famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians.