If it's not Jews it's not genocide

"To equate Soviet and Nazi crimes is dishonest and historically false", writes Jonathan Freedland in CiF. "Why has this poisonous idea taken such deep root?"

His argument is that equating the mass murders of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with those of the rival National Socialist empire in some way dilutes the particular awfulness of the latter.

And the particular awfulness of the latter is that it sought to exterminate Freedland's people. He appears to be arguing that racially selective genocide committed by the Nazis was qualitatively worse than the vastly greater number of people killed in the name of international socialism.

Nope - mass murder is mass murder. The only reason why social and political groups are not included in the UN's 1948 definition of genocide was because the mass murderer Joseph Stalin's representatives insisted that it be limited to "national, ethnic, racial or religious groups".

Even so, the definition includes "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part". Sounds like the gulag to me.

So, to the contrary, to fail to equate Soviet and Nazi crimes is dishonest and historically false.