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Why doesn’t the hammer-and-sickle inspire the same instinctive revulsion as the swastika? Psychologist Jordan Peterson certainly thinks it should – and so should anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of 20th century history.
Both were the banners of totalitarian hell-states. Both preached the subordination of the individual to the collective. Both produced mountains of corpses and turned morality inside out. Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, rightly identified both Nazism and Communism as archetypal ‘closed societies’: tyrannies that demand total obedience and treat dissent as heresy. And instinctively “answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols”.
Yet one symbol is universally cursed while the other still gets a adoring pass on T-shirts, campus posters and the occasional Che Guevara beret.
Armed Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd – now St Petersburg – [109 years ago] and arrested ministers of Russia’s provisional government. They set in motion a chain of events that would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilisation.
For all the blatherskite about the abolition of private property and redistribution of wealth, the revolutionaries’ real goal was spiritual: to translate Marxist-Leninist ideology into utopian reality. For the first time, a state was created that was based explicitly on atheism and claimed infallibility. This was totally incompatible with Western civilization, which presumes the existence of a higher power over and above society and the state.
In a 1920 speech to the Komsomol, Lenin said that communists subordinate morality to the class struggle. Good was anything that destroyed “the old exploiting society” and helped to build a “new communist society.”
Martin Latsis, an official of the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, spelled out the operating manual in 1918: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class… Do not look for evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first question should be to what class does he belong… It is this that should determine his fate.”
Such convictions set the stage for decades of murder on an industrial scale. In the Soviet Union alone, no fewer than 20 million citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies. Add the communist regimes the Soviets midwifed in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, and the butcher’s bill reaches 100 million dead. That makes communism the greatest catastrophe in human history.
Yet the hammer-and-sickle never acquired the same pariah status as the swastika. Why?
Because the left spent decades insisting communism’s crimes were merely ‘excesses’ or the unfortunate by-product of noble intentions.
When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, Western intellectuals, influenced by the same lack of an ethical point of reference that led to Bolshevism in the first place, closed their eyes to the atrocities. When the killing became too obvious to deny, sympathizers excused what was happening because of the Soviets’ supposed noble intentions.
Western intellectuals, drunk on the same materialist poison that birthed Bolshevism, ignored the piles of corpses or simply lied that they didn’t exist. When the killing became too obvious to deny, they excused it because the Soviets were, after all, trying to build paradise. Capitalism was unjust; socialism would end that injustice; therefore socialism had to be supported unconditionally, just ignore all the bodies and the blighted lives.
The same intellectual rot persists today. The swastika is banned in many countries. The hammer-and-sickle is edgy protest chic. One is treated as the unique symbol of evil, the other still gets a respectful hearing in faculty lounges and newsrooms. Both systems hollowed out society’s moral core, degraded the individual and turned him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Both produced the ‘new man’, stripped of conscience, loyal only to the party.
The difference is simple: the Nazis lost the war.
The communists spent decades cloaking their crimes in the language of ‘social justice’ and ‘equality’. That linguistic camouflage still works. It allows otherwise decent people to treat one 20th-century totalitarian death cult as uniquely monstrous while giving the other a respectful nod or even nostalgic fondness.
We cannot afford the double standard. A civilisation that cannot bring itself to condemn communism with the same reflexive disgust it reserves for Nazism has already begun to lose its moral bearings. The Bolsheviks did not merely seize power in 1917. They proved that the greatest threat to liberty is not always the jackboot: sometimes it is the smiling commissar promising utopia while the bodies pile up.
One hundred years on, the lesson is as stark as it was in 1917: when ideology is placed above individual conscience and a higher moral law, the result is always the same. Mass graves and a hollowed-out society. The hammer-and-sickle should provoke the same instinctive revulsion as the swastika. Anything less is historical amnesia with a body count.
