I know people downvote mind-killers. But is it really a mind-killer to say that Stalin and the Soviet system under him was not clearly better than Hitler?

• Aggression against other Sovereign states in the hopes of territorial gain (sometimes with revanchist justification)
• Confinement relocation and extermination of inconvenient ethnic and ideological groups

Frack considering Stalin was only beat by death from organizing a Pogrom on a massive scale because of his paranoia, and that Atheist Jews no longer where a powerful faction in the Soviet Union circa 1930 to 1950 and that Jews tended to be a bit better off than was appropriate in the age of forced egalitarianism (and disdain for the bourgeois and hunts for kulaks), its not that clear that if say Communists had beaten the Nazis in the struggle for power in Weimar Germany there wouldn't have been a Shoah anyway.

Communism overall has been historically a pretty terrible system.

Pol Pot became leader of Cambodia in mid-1975. During his time in power, Pol Pot imposed a version of agrarian socialism, forcing urban dwellers to relocate to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labor projects, toward a goal of "restarting civilization" in a "Year Zero". The combined effects of forced labour, malnutrition, poor medical care and executions resulted in the deaths of approximately 21% of the Cambodian population.[5]

Mao's China and North Korea are also data points. The only time Communism was a sort of ok system to live in (NEP period of the Soviet Union, China after Deng, Tito's Yugoslavia) is when it didn't really follow its ideology and allowed some economic freedom. And even then it was clearly totalitarian when it came to intellectual liberty (see the use of psychiatric institutions and sluggish schizophrenia as a diagnosis of dissidents or the constant witch hunt for wreckers and contra-revolutionaries).

If one considers National Socialism to be a kind of Fascism (which I don't think it is, I think its distinct ideologically) then one could also add at this point that its arguable that mellow watered down Fascist regimes actually come out looking better than mellow watered down Communist regimes of the same era (1945-1990).

I give people who claim that those people that their brand of Communism would never turn out like that a fair hearing if they don't seem kooky or clearly irrational, but the same would be true if I ever met a NeoNazi who fit the criteria claiming the same of his political brand. .

I treat the Che guevara T-shirt on a college freshman the same I would treat a child who scribbles swastika graffiti but has no idea what the symbol stands for today. I wouldn't consider it a crime or even blame them for it, but I would try and convey that the he is normalizing symbolism that carries a message he may not endorse.