We Teach the Victims of Fascism Without Scare Quotes. Why Not the Victims of Communism?

A new Tennessee law requires 45 minutes of high school instruction on how people suffered under communist regimes. The Scene's coverage put "threat" in scare quotes and led with a teacher calling it "a solution looking for a problem." Around 100 million dead would like a word.

Read the Scene's own lede and watch the framing do its quiet work. A law requiring students to learn "how victims suffered under communist regimes, including through poverty, starvation, migration, systemized lethal violence, and suppression of speech" is introduced as a story about the "threat" of an ideology, with the word threat placed inside scare quotes, as though the threat were a Republican opinion rather than a body count. The piece then hands its framing to a teacher who calls the requirement "a solution looking for a problem."

Hold that phrase up to the light. A solution looking for a problem. The problem is the largest pile of corpses any political idea produced in the twentieth century, and it is not close.

The number the scare quotes are hiding

The crimes of communism are not a partisan talking point. They are among the most thoroughly documented events in modern history.

• The Black Book of Communism, compiled by scholars working in post-Soviet archives, puts the twentieth-century death toll near 100 million. Other serious estimates range from the tens of millions higher, depending on what you count. The debate is about the size of the catastrophe, not whether it happened.
• Mao's Great Leap Forward caused the largest or second-largest famine in human history, with deaths estimated between 15 and 55 million, most of them in three years.
• The Holodomor starved millions of Ukrainians on purpose. The Khmer Rouge killed roughly a quarter of Cambodia's population. The Gulag, the purges, the boat people, the wall with the guards facing inward. This is the record.

You cannot call the requirement to teach this "a solution looking for a problem" unless you have decided in advance that the problem does not count. Which is, itself, the problem.

The test the framing fails

Here is the simplest way to see the double standard. Swap the ideology and reread the sentence.

Imagine a Tennessee paper covering a new requirement to teach how people suffered under fascism, and imagine it putting the word "threat" in scare quotes, leading with a teacher who called Holocaust instruction "a solution looking for a problem," and quoting a historians' group warning that the lesson was "highly politicized." It would never happen, and it should never happen, because teaching the crimes of Nazism with moral clarity is simply understood to be education, not politics. No one frames it as a partisan stunt. No one needs to.

Communism killed more people than fascism did, over more decades, in more countries. Yet a requirement to teach its victims gets the skeptical trend-piece treatment, the arch punctuation, the sources lined up to suggest the whole thing is a manufactured culture-war errand. The asymmetry is the story. One set of victims gets remembered without an argument. The other set has to clear a bar of suspicion first.

The one fair point, and where it stops

There is exactly one legitimate complaint in the article, and it has nothing to do with whether the history should be taught. The Hume-Fogg teacher who noted that educators plan lessons months ahead and got this dropped on them with little notice and no finalized materials is right about that. Teachers deserve lead time and real lesson plans, and the state should give them both. That is a genuine implementation gripe, and it is worth fixing.

But notice that it is an argument about the calendar, not about the content. "Give us the materials earlier" is not "this should not be taught." The Scene took a scheduling complaint and let it stand in for a substantive objection, because the substantive objection, said plainly, would sound like what it is: an argument against teaching students that communism killed. Nobody wants to say that out loud, so the discomfort gets laundered through logistics and punctuation.

Where the line actually is

To be clear about what this defense does and does not cover, because the article reaches for Florida and the reach matters. Tennessee's law, by its own text, is about how victims suffered: poverty, starvation, forced migration, lethal violence, suppression of speech. That is history, and it is owed to students.

Florida's standards, which the Scene cites at the end, reportedly go further, into framing civil-rights organizations as targets of communist "infiltration" and treating "McCarthyism" as unfair to anti-communists. That is a different and worse thing. Rehabilitating McCarthy or smearing the civil rights movement as a communist front is not teaching history, it is grinding an axe, and it deserves criticism. The distinction is not hard: teach that the Gulag happened, do not teach that Martin Luther King was a Soviet asset. A publication that wanted to make that distinction could have led with it. This one blurred the two together, so that Tennessee's straightforward "teach the victims" requirement inherits the guilt of Florida's overreach by association.

Why it matters

What you can do

Read the Scene's piece, and count two things: the number of words spent suggesting the requirement is unnecessary or political, and the number of communism's actual victims it names. Then ask why a story about a law to remember the dead managed to quote everyone except them. The history is not controversial. The reluctance to teach it is the only remarkable thing in the room.