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While I can agree that killing a million people, thus wiping out an entire ethnicity, is worse than killing a more random sample of a million people, not resulting in wiping any ethnicity out (or when it does, it is by mere chance), but arguing that the latter is not genocidal strikes me as a "well, ackshully it's called 'ephebophilia'" level take.
It's not, because one could also argue that "capitalism is genocidal" if we accept those standards. Communism is bad because it impoverishes people and requires brutal oppression to sustain. But going beyond that, for example counting WW2 dead from both sides as "victims of communism", does disservice to good arguments.
Communism is just not a genocidal ideology in the way that Nazism is.
As others say, you're at best making a semantic argument. I would also like to argue that communism is indeed more genocidal than Nazism.
"Damn everybody other than my ethic in-group" is not that impractical of a life project, it can even be argued that it's simply natural human inclination driven to extreme. "Damn inequality and hierarchy", on the other hand, is at odds with the very bedrock of reality. Hence the disparity in the body count of these two worldviews.
You can run out of undesirable racial groups to kill, but you absolutely cannot run out of your betters. Communist project is completed when the last proletarian shoots the last kulak in the head. Perfect communism in not possible in practice, much like a perfect circle must remain in the realm of platonic forms, but you can still go quite far - current world record of communism belongs to Pol Pot with up to a third of Cambodia's population dead
Not really. Let's say that I am a pro-X ethnic nationalist. Once I kill everyone who is obviously not X, I then suddenly realize that actually a bunch of people who I previously thought were X are actually degenerate lower versions of X, perhaps ones hybridized with non-X blood. How had I been so blind before? Of course, to purify X I must destroy these degenerate forms, especially the ones who have resources I want to appropriate. And once I have wiped those out, for the good of the blood and the future of X, I must find and eradicate those members of X who do not represent the true ideal of X blood. This will help bring about the true X society of the future. And so on.
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I think you're missing my point. I'm conceding that it's not genocidal, but my point is that it's effectively arguing over semantics.
Bingo. This is actually the relevant issue, far more then the material poverty it causes (although arguably one stems from the other). The part that you missed is that the ideology provides justification for said brutal oppression. Without it, I could file it under utopian-but-suicidal ideas like "abolish the police" or "open borders", it is the "all means are justified on the way towards our glorious future" bit that makes the ideology monstrous, even if it is not technically "genocidal".
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