Isn’t offending communists the whole point?
Plans for a monument on Parliament Hill to honour the estimated 100 million or so innocent men, women and children killed at the hands of Communist regimes around the world, on the other hand, have hit a snag, with the NCC worried that a “Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarian Communism” risks giving offence to communists. … [S]everal members expressed concern the name was too provocative, and should be revised to eliminate any mention of communism.
“I was unsettled by this name, and other members of the committee agreed with me,” Hélène Grand-Maître, one commission member, said at the public approval hearing. “We should make sure that we are politically correct in this designation…. I feel this name should be changed.”
Clearly, we have a little ways to go in changing historical consciousness on this one.
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Rebecca adds: We need to learn a lesson from the English. Just as they label terrorism carried out by Muslims in the name of Islam to be “anti-Islamic activity,” since Islam is a Religion of Peace, we should recognize that Communism is fine – it’s just never been implemented properly, so its victims actually died because of anti-Communist activity. Isn’t it obvious?
Competitive suffering is a bit of a mug’s game; it doesn’t do anybody any good to argue over which atrocity was greater, and usually such discussion has very ugly undercurrents. I remain baffled, though, that civilized people who would (rightly) recoil in disgust if someone wore a baseball cap with a swastika or the SS insignia think a red star hat, or Che shirt, is just fine. I would never minimize the sheer evil of Nazism, but it’s extinct today, while the offshoots of Communism are alive and well and causing death and persecution to this day.
by 
The atrocities of Communist regimes are the secular utopianist’s skeleton in the closet. Many people are ill-informed about things that were done in the USSR, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. I don’t know if the 100 million figure is valid, since it includes the deaths of people who died of starvation due to the unintended effects of bad policies, but the numbers killed in the various purges still rival the loss-of-life in many wars. That they all happened within the last 100 years is also something everyone ought to know about.
Matthew N.: “… since it includes the deaths of people who died of starvation due to the unintended effects of bad policies …”
A very credible argument can be made, if you’re talking about the Holodomor, that mass starvation was very much an intended effect.