August 23 of every year is Black Ribbon Day. It is the anniversary of the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, whereby Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin conspired to divide large parts of eastern Europe between their twin tyrannies.

It is a day when the victims of Russian Communism and German Nazism are commemorated together.

Beyond a certain point, it becomes difficult to distinguish degrees of tyranny and cruelty. National Socialism and International Socialism are equally evil totalitarian systems. Both have  destroyed hundreds of millions of lives, wrecked them, wasted them, killed them. If the Nazi concentration camps weigh heavier than the Soviet gulags in the scales of judgment, the balance of evil is restored by the fact that the Soviet oppression lasted much longer then the Nazi persecutions: 70 years as against 12 years.

Rex Murphy writes (in part) at the National Post:

We have various darkling lodestars of modern inhumanity, the grimmest manifestation of the ferocity of evil … being the Hitlerian inferno. There is only a single qualification to be placed on that eruption: that it was unique, that it so completely fulfilled the concept of what is utterly and irredeemably detestable that … [it] is universally repellant. …

So can nothing be compared to Hitler’s Germany?

Yes. Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

Anything that is happening now?

We can, alas, compare North Korea. Does its starvations and repressions not elicit recall of China’s gruesome Maoist Cultural Revolution? Or the drear miseries and state sadism of Stalin — the king of famine and the gulags? Who cannot still weep for Cambodia’s days under Pol Pot’s communist Khmer Rouge — an interlude of torture, death and determined savagery that earns a place in the same theatre of depravity as North Korea.

There are more. The communist islets of Eastern Europe during the Cold War. East Germany itself with its Stasi, a whole country spying on itself. That fragment of a bankrupt ideology we know as Cuba under the Castros. Che Guevara, a sapling in the same huge dark wood.

Yet throughout the Western world, Communism gets a pass!

The salient difference between all of these and the Hitlerian nightmare is that the latter was a plague that choked on itself: while communism — all its horrors confirmed with every repetition or variant of the model — is epidemical.

Communism has powers of replication that defy its own history. Despite the world of tears that follow its every instalment, it inexplicably does not excite in parts of the world — that must know better — a repulsion equivalent to that which greets Nazism.

That is a shameful state of affairs. And there is another ideology comparable to both Nazism and Communism, which, like Communism, enjoys a good press in the free world: Islam.

Nazism, Communism, Islam. All three would rule the world. All three are doctrinally murderous. All three, when in power, torture people of all ages. All three designate certain classes of people as worthy only of being enslaved and killed.

All three are equally foul.

(Hat-tip to Cogito for the Rex Murphy article which gives a heart-rending picture of North Korea. Read it all here.)