Politics

Disagree by scale

It's easy to say "communists have killed more people than the Nazis" because there are vastly more communist countries than there were nazi countries (one). Comparison by simple "death count" alone is not very useful though, because many attributions of deaths of communism include famines that had been recurring since before communist liberation (and were ended shortly after), and additionally many attributions of deaths of communism also include all soldiers involved in all conflicts, including the deaths of fascist soldiers who fought them.

Waving around a large number saying one gorillion have died so you must not seek liberatory ideology is childlike analysis fit only for reactionaries trying to find reasons that the world's free-est societies were bad, actually. Saying people died to free themselves so you should not try to be free is a thought terminating cliche meant to shut down further thought and discussion.

The fact is is that the Nazis believed in death as a requirement, they idolized war and treating the imperial core of their country the same that the imperial periphery was treated before.

Additionally, marxist-leninists believe in liberation. They established a union of republics in the most diverse region on the planet, that brought democracy both in the workplace and in government. It was not always perfect, even Deng said that Stalin was "70% Right and 30% Wrong". For an overview of the democratic structures of the soviet union see here. For a general overview of soviet history, featuring an academic SU scholar, and specifically how the diversity and democracy of the soviet people were respected (and sometimes disrespected) take a listen to this. For an overview of why the Black Book of Communism is unreliable as a source of communist "deaths" (as useful as that even is in the first place) enjoy this video here. <-- Most relevant to this discussion

All of what I've said too even totally discounts the communist revolution in China, which is it's own discussion altogether. Through even just a basic understanding of Chinese History, there is no comparison of the lives lost due to neglect of infrastructure and the people between CPC rule and KMT rule/Dynastic rule. The CPC has not always been perfect, but it has always strived towards extending democracy, food security, preservation of culture, and happiness to the lower classes of China.

tl;dr the most significant contributions of communist countries are finally ending recurring famines in their regions and to fighting fascist powers, both of which have themselves saved more lives than could ever be attributed towards deaths of their respective communist administrations.

I think reducing our moral discrimination between killers to a quantitative comparison of kill lists is a caricature of ethics. It is also kind of a pointless exercise since sparing lives is generally morally correct either way. But let's set aside how silly this is for the sake of argument.

First, only using a quantitative comparison of kills to assess which killer was more morally vicious assumes that human lives are fungible. But, I will not focus on this assumption, as it seems reasonable in effect for cases of people being killed rather than merely being left to die. Effectively we can treat any human life adversely, intentionally affected in some way ζ in relation to the aggregate affected in that same adverse, intentional way ζ as fungible with any other human life in that aggregate, once the aggregate amount reaches a threshold, due to reduced marginal effects of those lives. And I think killings in the millions is certainly already at, if not past, that threshold. This all may sound cold, but you're the one that decided to make this about morally comparing measures of kills. Anyway, its clear we can treat such lives as practically fungible as a result of the sheer amount of deaths by killing under consideration. So I'm fine with the assumption of fungible lives, or the commensurability of the different deaths by killing.

But the other assumption behind reducing our comparative moral assessment to a simple quantitative comparison of kills is that the way in which those human lives were killed or died fails to make a moral difference. I think questioning this assumption is crucial, particularly when we talk about deaths or killings that have resulted from a government or political administration.

The Nazi State in Germany created an institutional structure, a system, for "useful" managing of bodies whose moral worth they assessed based on bodily stigmata and eugenics. Not only that, but camp policies were crafted for specific kinds of humiliation and dehumanization meant to reinforce the sense of inferiority for those in the camps, or to reinforce the impression of ths inferiority of those at the camps for Germans working in them. There is also the cruelty of human experimentation. The German labor camps were thought of as a free source of bodies to supply production and research needs, and to eliminate what were seen as genetically pathological elements of society.

While Stalin had gulags, they selected camp prisoners based on petty crime (or alleged petty crime, as adjudication was probably neither fair nor well-done) and political affiliations. And while people died in those gulags or were killed, most of it was not part of an officially sanctioned program of death. There was no generalized eliminationist goal made explicit, let alone made part of camp policy. Killings were many times a matter of decree against particular individuals, especially if they were political prisoners. In fact, this is exactly how Stalinist purges (which are separate or independent of the camp system) occurred--through Stalin flexing his autocratic power in order to quell paranoia regarding plots against him or quell paranoia regarding plots meant to ideologically undermine the USSR. In addition, treatment of gulag prisoners was not rationalized based on a pathologized and objectified view of their bodies, even if they may indeed have been objectified and there was a quasi-medicalized psychological approach to political disagreement. This is because the USSR was primarily trying to indoctrinate prisoners, police political thought, and use the prison population as a source of slave labor. The slave labor part and, quite likely present, the power abuses of guards, is where the gulags overlap with the Nazi concentration camps, but the rest of the differences remain.

These differences are also what lead to differences in death rates for gulags v. camps: 11% of gulag prisoners died in or from the gulags, while 61% of Nazi camp prisoners died in or from the Nazi camps.^1,2,3^ Of course this ignores total absolute death counts within the USSR and Nazi Germany as a whole, consequent of each of those governments or regimes. I already mentioned Stalin's purges. But, my point is that regardless of the numbers, the intent behind and form of the killings are also a basis by which they can be compared in order to assess which was worse (which, again, is still a silly discussion when we know sparing lives is the right thing to do in either case). And focusing on the camps or gulags shows also how intent or form of death can influence death rates, which gives us a better sense of which, camps run by Soviet Russia or camps run by Nazi Germany, was deadlier. Now, we could compare fascist camps to other States like the USSR, but it would get complex quickly, as we can see the devil is in the (qualitative) details, and those States still differ qualitatively among themselves. Even if we focused exclusively on the numbers, it also would have to be percentage-wise or per-capita, anyway. Not the absolute amount of deaths or killings. This is because the number of explicitly fascist governments, and Nazi ones in particular, have been less in number than explicitly communist ones, and States vary in their domestic population numbers.

This approach of measuring the number of deaths or kills in communist States in order to evaluate communism is also reliant on a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Communism, the idea, as such is simply not the USSR, regardless of how much it (among other things) influenced the USSR. For the actions of States that self-identify as communist to discredit communism, you would need to make a more specific claim than "States that self-identify as communist are worse than ones that don't" that ties the worseness of those States that self-identify as communist, logically, to the idea of communism, or to particular practical difficulties that by rational necessity arise when implementing the idea of communism which make immorality such as killings or deaths from mismanagement/neglect inevitable.

1. https://www.britannica.com/place/Gulag
2. https://www.history.com/topics/russia/gulag
3. Wagner, Jens-Christian (2009). "Work and extermination in the concentration camps". Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories. Routledge. pp. 127–148. ISBN 978-1-135-26322-5.

Over what time period?

I think for the last 100 years this is more of a fact than a topic of debate =/

Pretty much all fascist parties pretend to be servants of the populace and end up murdering hella dissidents. The USSR and Nazi Germany were quite similar in that regard.

The Nazi party was only in power for a few years though =/