The New York Times this morning has a piece on next month’s high school graduation exams in Italy. 20th Century totalitarianism is amongst the topics to be considered and some are complaining that, relatively speaking, it concentrates too much on Communism. The Times notes “Communism is blamed for the executions of about 100 million people, five times greater than the killings attributed in the exam to Nazism. In the wording of the topic, it takes one sentence to denigrate Fascism. It takes four to vilify Communism.”

Well, although the word ‘executions’ is inaccurate (many of the deaths were caused by famine or harsh treatment in the concentration camps), it probably is fair to say that the tally of direct victims (that total excludes casualties of war and the famine that followed the Russian civil war) of Communism reached around 100 million. Equally, it’s true that the number of those murdered by the Nazis was quite a bit lower (they were ‘only’ free to indulge their capacity for carnage over 12 years, a fraction of the time that Communism had to indulge its own slaughterhouse instincts). 20 million does look too few, however, (it must, for example, exclude those killed in combat), and thus it implicitly fails to recognize the Third Reich’s responsibility for the war in the first place.

As for the number of sentences dedicated to Fascism over Communism, that seems about right. For all its faults and crimes (particularly, of course, in Italy), Fascism was a less virulent phenomenon than Communism or Nazism. That doesn’t excuse it for a moment, but it would explain why less attention should be paid to it in the context of a topic devoted to 20th Century totalitarianism and terror.

But all this is to miss the larger point – trying to decide which out of Nazism and Communism was worse is a pointless exercise. Both philosophies were morally repulsive and a disgrace to humanity, both caused tens of millions of deaths (all too often in circumstances of grotesque cruelty) and both were responsible for the devastation of tens of millions more lives. Understanding them is essential. Trying to judge between them adds nothing.

That said, there has been a marked tendency to understate the evil of Communism (you can see an echo of this in this piece’s reference to the (invaluable) Black Book of Communism as “harshly negative,” adjectives that would be unlikely to be used to describe a book on the crimes of National Socialism), and to the extent that the Italian education authorities are trying to redress this imbalance so much the better.

Judging by the comments of one high school teacher cited in the article, there’s a lot to do. “I teach my students that of course Communism must be seen in a negative light, but the goal of Nazism was to kill people, and the goal of Communism was to unite them.”

That’s far too simplistic – both movements were, in a sense, Utopian, but these were ‘Utopias’ that were always going to be a constructed on a hecatomb. Both philosophies relied on the elimination of ‘undesirables’. The difference was that the Nazis defined these by race and the Communists by class. The similarity, alas, was that millions died.