A few days ago I wrote a post questioning if war on Hitler caused the Holocaust. A holocaust denier, someone by the name of Bradley Smith, commented. I allowed him one comment. He has subsequently commented and I have deleted it. I almost never do that. But I will not allow Holocaust denial on my property, even though I believe anyone who wants to deny the Holocaust may do so on his own property.

That said, I am about to accuse most Jews of holocaust denial, most human beings actually, so buckle up. Be aware that the holocaust denial of Jews is not capitalized, which is actually part of the problem.

First, why does Holocaust denial, Capital H, exist? From what I encountered of Smith, he seems to be a stupid person, objectively. I would guess, with no proof, that most Holocaust deniers have low IQ’s and are generally dumb. The argument for denying a documented historical fact as documented as the Holocaust is, is like denying any mass-witnessed event, like World War 1, or the Civil War, or September 11, or the existence of Thomas Jefferson.

Smith asked me if I “know anyone who died at Majdanek”. The question is nonsense. Do I know anyone who died in September 11? No. So maybe it’s a conspiracy and the videos are doctored and everyone is lying to me and the Twin Towers are still standing, cloaked by a Klingon Bird of Prey hovering over New York City. It’s possible. Maybe Manhattan doesn’t exist either. Do I know anyone who lives in Manhattan? Sure. But maybe they’re fake figments of my imagination. You get the point.

Any argument by Holocaust deniers could easily be repeated to deny any event in human history and place you in a Cartesian solipsism where you can confirm nothing but your own existence. On that rubric, nothing ever happened or ever does happen. So why do these people insist on harping on such a demonstrably stupid non-theory?

Let me ask you this question, especially if you’re Jewish. How many Jews did Soviet Communism kill? Lenin, Stalin, Malenkov, Krushchev? How many Christians?

There is no historically authoritative number of how many Jews. And that is the disgusting problem. But the total number of people is something between 12 and 20 million. The uncertainty regarding how many people Stalin slaughtered is wider than the actual number of Jews that Hitler slaughtered. It is between 2 and 3 times what Hitler did. In the same way that Hitler did, with death camps and systematic destruction, man woman and child with no mercy. If we add Mao Zedung in it, who admittedly didn’t kill many Jews simply because he didn’t have access to them, then the total is up to 55 million.

55 million! Communism killed nearly 10 times as many people as Nazis killed Jews!

And Mao has his great apologists too! In the Obama Administration! Chinese holocaust deniers all!

Do we want to add Pol Pot, the leader of communism in Cambodia, who murdered one third of the entire population of Cambodia through forced labor and starvation? One third, sounds familiar. Like the one third of all Jews murdered by Hitler.

The scary thing is that the deaths caused by Communism were just “innocent forced restructuring of the economy”. Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot all deciding that they wanted to change the division of labor on a dime. Because they know what’s best. That’s how you murder millions most efficiently. Auschwitz had nothing on Mao. The more you put the economy under State control, the more people will necessarily die. Because politicians do not know how to organize an economy and get resources where they need to be. Only the price system can possibly do that. If the division of labor breaks down, millions die. And they did.

The real reason that nobody really knows how many Jews Lenin and Stalin killed and why the mindblowing numbers Mao killed have only come out recently in 2010 is that the United States allied with Stalin to defeat Hitler, and with China to defeat Japan. The US government was directly complicit in the Stalinist genocides, handing over hundreds of thousands of people directly to to Stalin after Yalta and Potsdam.

Some Jews see Stalin as a liberator of Hitler’s death camps and are reluctant to criticize. If it were the other way around, if the US allied with Hitler to defeat the Soviets, I doubt the figure 6 million would be known or repeated with any authoritativeness.

There are other reasons, too. The USSR voted for partition in 1948, thinking that Israel would be a communist satellite because leading Zionists were socialists. So some Jews forgive Stalin for being worse than Hitler.

Marx and Trotsky (Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein) were Jews (Marx had a Jewish father), evil Jews, and many prominent Jews still have communist leanings.

Soviet holocaust denial has shades. There are people who just don’t know anything about it. There are others who have heard figures, but ignore them. Worse, there are those people, Jews included, who believe in total government control of the economy, self avowed students of Trotsky, who himself believed in forced slave labor to get the proletariat obedient to the communist cause. (This is the very thing that caused 45 million deaths in China under Mao.) An apologist for slave labor based on skin color is called a disgusting racist, and for good reason. What about an apologist for slave labor based on class strata? That’s excusable, or even enlightened.

Then there are the bona fide Soviet holocaust deniers, the Left academics and Jews like Paul Samuelson and others who downplay Stalin’s evil just like Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas downplays Hitler’s, and still do praise the Soviet Union for its great human experiment, regretting that it failed. Imagine if I praised Hitler for his “human experiment” regretting that it failed. My God.

Stalinist and Maoist holocaust denial goes something like this: “They were only trying to help by restructuring the economy. We can’t blame them for what happened, and it’s exaggerated anyway.”

Well, Hitler was only trying to help by purifying the human race and getting rid of the Jews. He had world’s best interests at heart. Sure.

Hitlerian Holocaust deniers are generally on the “Right”. They deny it because Hitler was on the “Right” and don’t want to own up to what happened. Stalin was on the “Left” and Stalinist holocaust deniers are generally on the “Left”. So the Left denies what Stalin did just as the Right denies what Hitler did. But only Hitlerian Holocaust deniers are considered outcasts. Stalinist holocaust deniers are considered academic thinkers, perhaps a little “loopy”, but never demonized like Hitlerian Holocaust deniers. And Maoist holocaust deniers are proudly parading nude in the White House. The fact that Left and Right are the same as evidenced by the very names of Nazism (National Socialism) and the United Soviet Socialist Republics, means nothing to deniers on either side. Left and Right both believe in government control over human beings. The Right believes in control to achieve a master race utopia. The Left, in control to achieve a master class utopia. What is the difference?

If you’re a Jew I want you to say these next five sentences out loud, because they are true, and hard to say if you were brought up on Holocaust-centered Judaism.

1. Stalin was worse than Hitler, and killed at least twice as many people.
2. Mao was MUCH worse than Hitler, and killed nearly eight times as many people.
3. The communist holocaust was worse than Hitler’s Holocaust.
4. Communism is worse than Nazism.
5. Hiter’s Holocaust was not unique.

I never go out of shul during Yizkor. I stay in, even though both my parents are alive, thank God. I say Yizkor for my grandparents and give tzedaka in their memory. But when everyone comes back in and says אל מלא רחמים for our six million that were murdered by Nazis, I say another one for the 55 million murdered by Communists.

I say it because I am a Jew and I am morally responsible for the world. I say it because nobody else will. I will give Tzedaka in their memory and pray for an elevation of their souls, because no other Jew will. I am alone, but I will remember. I say it because I am sorry to be related to anyone who excuses Stalin or praises the Soviet Union or Mao Zedung. It sickens me even more than the idiots like Bradley Smith. Because Bradley Smith might be stupid, but Paul Samuelson and other Jewish apologists for the Soviet Union and Mao are not stupid. They are evil.

Holocaust deniers with a capital H exist for the same reason that Stalinist holocaust deniers exist. Because they are trying to defend an evil ideology. But for Hitlerian Holocaust deniers, there is more reason to deny it. Because the world, influenced by powerful Jews with a political agenda, is absolutely obsessed with Holocaust commemoration. People are beaten over the head with it to oblivion, especially Germans, implying that if they forget it for a second, they will turn into exterminationists again on a dime.

The degree to which the West is obsessed with the Holocaust, totally forgetting about the Soviet or Maoist holocausts, sickens people like Bradley Smith and David Irving, and whoever else is in their camp. So instead of berating the world for its Nazi Holocaust obsession to the exclusion of other genocides, they go the incredibly stupid route and try to deny that the event ever happened. It’s a sort of psychosis induced by the global psychosis over Nazis. If you hit someone over the head enough times, the stupid ones can go crazy and say stupid things.

I urge everyone, before they go screaming at Holocaust deniers, to look in the mirror and do some teshuva (repentance). And maybe, this Yizkor on Yom Kippur, say an אל מלא רחמים for the victims, at least the Jewish victims, of Lenin and Stalin. I will be saying one for all 55 million victims of Communism, as well as the 6 million plus victims of Nazism, Jews and gentiles.

Hitler’s Holocaust should be remembered and commemorated by Jews. It is a Jewish issue, and that’s it. If non Jews want to also commemorate it, good, fine. But there should be absolutely no government involvement in Holocaust education. And if there is, all holocausts should be covered equally in proportion to the amount of people murdered in each, and it should be explained that government is the cause of all holocausts, every single one of them.

Let me add one final, important thought. People, especially Jews, see Holocaust commemoration as of paramount importance because if you forget history, it will repeat itself. We remember the Holocaust with the mantra “never again”. I will say that the danger of another Communist-type holocaust caused by overzealous government regulators trying to “innocently restructure the economy” because they are so wise and are trying to create a socialist utopia is much more likely than a repeat of a Nazi-type Holocaust where a bunch of racists try to create a master race by killing everyone else.

When a politician says he wants to restructure the economy, we should all shiver. Because another Holocaust could be at the world’s doorstep if he gets his way.

Here are some closing lines from Great Wars and Great Leaders, a book I just finished today, as Rosh HaShana 5776 closed out.

The most notorious of the camps was Kolyma, in eastern Siberia —in actuality, a system of camps four times the size of France. There the death rate may have been as high as 50 per cent per year and the number of deaths was probably on the order of 3,000,000. It goes on and on. In 1940 there was Katyn and the murder of the Polish officers; in 1952, the leaders of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union were liquidated en masse—both drops in the bucket for Stalin. During the Purges there were probably about 7,000,000 arrests, and one out of every ten arrested was executed.

A decade ago, Ernst Nolte, then of the Free University of Berlin, ignited the Historikerstreit, or dispute of historians, and became the target of a campaign of defamation led by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, by asking: “Didn’t the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ come before Auschwitz? Wasn’t the ‘class murder’ of the Bolsheviks the logical and factual presupposition of the ‘race murder’ of the National Socialists?” These are still good questions. In fact, Stalinist—and Maoist—offenses, while acknowledged, are generally downplayed and have achieved nothing remotely approaching the publicity of the Nazi massacre of the Jews. In the United States, it is possible for a person who keeps abreast of the news media to encounter references to the Holocaust virtually every day of his life. Yet who has heard of Kolyma, where more people were done to death than the present official count for Auschwitz? The figures for the victims of Maoist rule that are starting to come out of China suggest a total in the range of tens of millions. Do these facts even make a dent in public consciousness?

Pointing to Communist crimes is not meant to “trivialize” the destruction of European Jewry, nor can it do so. The massacre of the Jews was one of the worst things that ever happened. But even supposing that it was the worst thing that ever happened, couldn’t some arrangement be worked out whereby Communist mass-murders are mentioned once for every ten times (or hundred times?) the Holocaust is brought up? Perhaps also, if we must have publicly- financed museums commemorating the foreign victims of foreign regimes, some memorial to the victims of Communism might be considered, not on the Mall itself, of course, but maybe in a low rent area of Washington?