No, I'm sorry.  I cannot turn the comments feature back on.  It is not to sensor discussion.  The site is trolled 24/7 with malicious coding.  That is due to the history of where this site came from and it just has to be this way for now.

As for my comments that came in last night about Communism and Lenin, life is not black or white.  No, I do not support the gun toting days of the Wild West.  Yes, I traveled for years offering our services to rural areas.  No, I do not support areas with no services.  Yes, services come from the concept of socialism.  Services are needed.  That does not mean murderous dictators should be embraced.  Lenin was responsible for the deaths of millions.  He was not better than Stalin.  Murderous dictators should never, ever be embraced.  That does not mean nor should it be grouped with no to services.  I live in a very high taxed area and I see results from services.  I've lived in areas with virtually no taxes and they have nothing.  I chose where to live. That does not mean I support Lenin.  Nor do I support anyone else that does.

Stéphane Courtois considers Communism and Nazism slightly different totalitarian systems. He claims that Communist regimes have killed "approximately 100 million people in contrast to the approximately 25 million victims of Nazis". Courtois claims that Nazi Germany's methods of mass extermination were adopted from Soviet methods. As an example, he cites Nazi state official Rudolf Höss who organized the infamous death camp in Auschwitz. According to Höss:

"The Reich Security Head Office issued to the commandants a full collection of reports concerning the Russian concentration camps. These described in great detail the conditions in, and organization of, the Russian camps, as supplied by former prisoners who had managed to escape. Great emphasis was placed on the fact that the Russians, by their massive employment of forced labor, had destroyed whole peoples."

Courtois argues that the Soviet genocides of peoples living in the Caucasus and exterminations of large social groups in Russia were not very much different from similar policies by Nazis. Both Communist and Nazi systems deemed "a part of humanity unworthy of existence. The difference is that the Communist model is based on the class system, the Nazi model on race and territory." Courtois stated that:

"The "genocide of a "class" may well be tantamount to the genocide of a "race" - the deliberate starvation of a child of a Ukrainian kulak as a result of the famine caused by Stalin's regime "is equal to" the starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto as a result of the famine caused by the Nazi regime."

He also added that "after 1945 the Jewish genocide became a byword for modern barbarism, the epitome of twentieth-century mass terror... more recently, a single-minded focus on the Jewish genocide in an attempt to characterize the Holocaust as a unique atrocity has also prevented the assessment of other episodes of comparable magnitude in the Communist world. After all, it seems scarcely plausible that the victors who had helped bring about the destruction of a genocidal apparatus might themselves have put the very same methods into practice. When faced with this paradox, people generally preferred to bury their heads in sand."