Dennis Prager Asked This Question About Communism, and It Deserves an Answer

Dennis Prager celebrated his birthday on August 2, and all of us at Townhall wish our longtime friend and contributor a very happy birthday. In his honor, we’re taking a look back at some of Dennis’s work over the years — and, perhaps more importantly, at how remarkably relevant much of it remains today.

With the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), we need to take some time to fully appreciate and understand the history of communism, particularly its poverty, oppression, and mass murder. The DSA has said repeatedly that its end goal is full-blown communism in the United States of America. There’s little daylight between socialism and communism, of course, and even the DSA tacitly admits this by pointing toward communism as its ultimate destination. Socialism is merely the stepping stone they use to get there.

🚨 DSA National Leader David Jenkins Says the Quiet Part Out Loud: “Our Goal Is Communism”

You may have seen the recent New York Post piece on David Jenkins, the DSA mime leader who also holds national leadership. Since mimes are usually silent, it seemed worth letting people… pic.twitter.com/SxqyferacS

— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) April 13, 2026

This rebranding of socialism and communism is working, and both ideologies have increasing favorability ratings, especially among Americans too young to remember communism’s grasp on Russia and too ill-informed to understand history.

Meanwhile, the same Left that embraces socialism and communism as noble socioeconomic and political goals has no problem calling their political opponents Nazis and fascists. President Trump, we’ve been told repeatedly, is literally Adolf Hitler reincarnated. Republicans are the Nazis and agencies like ICE are the Gestapo. 

Dennis Prager, in his 2009 column, asked a very salient question that we need to think about today: “Why Doesn’t Communism Have As Bad a Name As Nazism?” and it’s worth revisiting his insights about socialists and communists:

Why is it that when people want to describe particularly evil individuals or regimes, they use the terms “Nazi” or “Fascist” but almost never “Communist?”

Given the amount the human suffering Communists have caused – 70 million killed in China, 20-30 million in the former Soviet Union, and almost one-third of all Cambodians; the decimation of Tibetan and Chinese culture; totalitarian enslavement of North Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russians; a generation deprived of human rights in Cuba; and much more — why is “Communist” so much less a term of revulsion than “Nazi?”

There are Mao Restaurants in major cities in the Western world. Can one imagine Hitler Restaurants? Che Guevara T-shirts are ubiquitous, yet there are no Heinrich Himmler T-shirts.

In a July speech at the College Democrats of America’s 2026 summer convention, the party’s unofficial spokesman Hasan Piker dressed like Mao Zedong and threatened an ideological purge of the Democrat Party. A couple of weeks later, he demanded “Marxist-Leninist” style punishment for those Democrats who do not fall in line.

The communists did plenty of that in the 20th century. During Stalin’s Great Terror of 1936-1938, hundreds of thousands more Russian communist party members were expelled, arrested, imprisoned, or executed. This includes 98 of the 139 members of the party’s leadership who were elected to the Central Committee in 1934. They were arrested and shot. From 1921 to 1936, “purges” expelled hundreds of thousands of members, and many of them were imprisoned or executed, too.

Prager then lays out the reasons why history looks with more revulsion on Nazism than Communism: Nazis killed few fellow Germans; their victims were Jews, Slavs, and members of other “non-Aryan” and “inferior” groups; Nazism based its practices and ideologies on “heinous sounding theories”; Germans have spent the decades since WWII exposing the evils of Nazism, taking responsibility for them, and trying to atone for the Third Reich; Nazism lost the war; and the atrocities of the Holocaust — a systematic extermination of every Jewish man, woman, and child was “unprecedented and unparalleled.”

Contrast that with communism, as Prager does. Communists largely murdered their own people. Mao killed about 70 million Chinese; Stalin murdered 30 million Russians. Communism, as flawed and depraved as it is, was at least based on egalitarian-sounding theories and intellectualism. Granted, that does not give cover or excuse to the 100 million-plus killed by communism, of course, but it explains why it did — and still does — appeal to the masses. Prager also notes that the Russians and the Chinese have not apologized for or distanced themselves from the horrors of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. A former KGB agent runs Russia today; Lenin’s body still lies in state in Moscow, and Russians deny Stalin’s holocaust. Mao remains revered in China and in DSA meeting halls. In WWII, at least, communism won, and as Prager notes, “the winners rewrite history.”

But the heart of Prager’s piece, and the problem facing us today is this: many remain ignorant of communist atrocities.

There is, simply put, widespread ignorance of communist atrocities compared to those of the Nazis. Whereas, both right and left loathe Nazism and teach its evil history, the Left dominates the teaching profession, and therefore almost no one teaches communist atrocities. As much as intellectuals on the Left may argue that they loathe Stalin or the North Korean regime, few on the Left loathe communism. As the French put it, “pas d’enemis a la gauche,” which in English means “no enemies on the Left.”

This is certainly true of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban communism. Check your local university’s courses and see how many classes are given on communist totalitarianism or mass murder compared to the number of classes about Nazism’s immoral record.

Prager sounded the alarm in 2009. Nearly 20 years later, we are watching a generation of Americans embrace the very ideology whose victims number in the tens of millions, while activists openly invoke Mao, call for Marxist-Leninist punishment, and speak of communism as an aspiration rather than the atrocity it is.

And communism’s greatest ally in America may not be committed communists, Twitch streamers, or the Democrat Party. It may be historical amnesia. An ideology responsible for staggering poverty, oppression, imprisonment, and death can only be rehabilitated when people no longer know what it did the last time its adherents were given power.

That is why Prager’s question still matters. We cannot change the horrors of the 20th century, but we can refuse to forget them. And we make certain the generations coming behind us understand exactly what communism promised, what it delivered, and why America must never give it the opportunity to do so again.

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