Different starting points, same destination

It is foolish to equate communism and Nazism. To start with, the numbers of victims are not the same. Communist regimes have killed far more people than the Nazis did. This is because the madness of Nazism did not last very long, whereas some communist totalitarian regimes have chalked up many decades in power.

The two systems, like many apologists of the Soviet regime like to argue, had different starting points. However, this was of little comfort to the mothers who lost their children during the Holodomor, Ukraine's man-made famine that killed at least 7 million people in 1932 and 1933, during the communist transformation of the Soviet republic.

The Great Leap Forward, another bright socioeconomic plan implemented in the People's Republic of China between 1958 and 1962, cost around 45 million lives. According to Dutch historian Frank Dikotter, who has probably dug...