The atrocious Communist past

It bothers me a lot when people at Faux News simply toss around the word Communist when they disagree with Obama's policies.  Criticize for all you want, but do not casually use that Commie word because it then absolutely minimizes the extreme atrocities that occurred in the Soviet, Chinese, Albanian, and other flavors.
As a high schooler I read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipalego and for a while I had a tough time even believing there could be horrible labor camps out there somewhere in Siberia for people who merely thought differently from what the official party line was.  It was way too outlandish for me to imagine them being real.  But they were.  As much as the Nazi concentration camps were real.
In an op-ed,  Professor Paul Hollander--who managed to flee Hungary--writes:

There is little public awareness of the large-scale atrocities, killings and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially compared with awareness of the Holocaust and Nazism (which led to to far fewer deaths). The number of documentaries, feature films or television programs about communist societies is minuscule compared with those on Nazi Germany and/or the Holocaust, and few universities offer courses on the remaining or former communist states. For most Americans, communism and its various incarnations remained an abstraction. ...
...  Political violence under communism had an idealistic origin and a cleansing, purifying objective. Those persecuted and killed were defined as politically and morally corrupt and a danger to a superior social system. The Marxist doctrine of class struggle provided ideological support for mass murder. People were persecuted not for what they did but for belonging to social categories that made them suspect.

Here is to hoping that Communism would never, ever, again be back in vogue.