By Nikos Mottas
On 7 November 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump proclaimed the week of 2–8 November as “Anti-Communism Week”, inviting the American people to “honor the victims of communism” and to remember the “devastation caused by one of history’s most destructive ideologies.”
But this proclamation is not a moral gesture — it is an ideological weapon. It revives the same Cold War rhetoric that once justified imperialist wars, fascist coups, and the persecution of workers, intellectuals, and freedom-fighters across the world. Behind Trump’s pompous words stands the oldest lie of the capitalist order: that communism, not capitalism, is the source of human suffering.
Capitalism has built its empire upon inequality, exploitation, and the commodification of human life. It has enslaved entire continents, drowned nations in blood for profit, and continues to devastate the planet in the name of “growth.” The “free world” that Trump celebrates is, in truth, the world of wage-slavery, poverty, and war.
Communism, on the other hand, is not an ideology of destruction — it is the historical response of the oppressed. It was born from the trenches of class struggle, from the yearning of humankind to live without masters, exploitation, and hunger. To criminalize communism is to criminalize the dream of justice itself.
Trump’s proclamation echoes a grotesque and long-debunked propaganda line — the so-called “100 million deaths of communism.” This figure, endlessly recycled by Western institutions and right-wing think tanks, originates from the 1997 book The Black Book of Communism — a despicable work funded, promoted, and distorted by anti-communist political forces. Even some of its own contributors later denounced the way it inflated numbers, equated war casualties with deliberate killings, and counted every famine, epidemic, or wartime death as a “communist crime.”
By that same absurd logic, one could ascribe to capitalism the countless victims of colonialism, imperialist wars, child labour, hunger, and preventable disease — hundreds of millions more than any fabricated “communist toll.” The “100 million” figure is not history; it is a weapon of ideology, designed to bury the memory of socialist achievements: literacy, healthcare, equality, and anti-fascist resistance.
Let us be clear: the greatest crime of the 20th century was not communism — it was capitalism’s unbroken rule of profit over people.
Trump’s proclamation is not about “honoring victims.” It is about reaffirming capitalist power. The anti-communist crusade has always served one purpose — to defend the privileges of the few against the awakening of the many. It was anti-communism that justified the bombs on Vietnam, the dictatorships in Latin America, the massacres in Indonesia, and today’s endless wars and sanctions.
The same ruling class that exploits workers at home and plunders nations abroad now dares to present itself as the moral guardian of “freedom.” Their freedom is the freedom to exploit; their democracy is the democracy of billionaires; their morality is hypocrisy polished into propaganda.
If we are to speak of victims, let us count honestly. Let us count the children who die of hunger in a world of abundance, the workers crushed by corporate greed, the peoples destroyed by imperialist wars, the planet poisoned for profit. These are the victims of capitalism. Their blood cries not for “Anti-Communism Week” — but for a lifetime of struggle against capitalism, for an unending fight until the chains of exploitation are broken once and for all.
Communism, on the other hand, is not an ideology of destruction — it is the historical response of the oppressed. It was born from the trenches of class struggle, from the yearning of humankind to live without masters, exploitation, and hunger. To criminalize communism is to criminalize the dream of justice itself.
Trump’s proclamation echoes a grotesque and long-debunked propaganda line — the so-called “100 million deaths of communism.” This figure, endlessly recycled by Western institutions and right-wing think tanks, originates from the 1997 book The Black Book of Communism — a despicable work funded, promoted, and distorted by anti-communist political forces. Even some of its own contributors later denounced the way it inflated numbers, equated war casualties with deliberate killings, and counted every famine, epidemic, or wartime death as a “communist crime.”
By that same absurd logic, one could ascribe to capitalism the countless victims of colonialism, imperialist wars, child labour, hunger, and preventable disease — hundreds of millions more than any fabricated “communist toll.” The “100 million” figure is not history; it is a weapon of ideology, designed to bury the memory of socialist achievements: literacy, healthcare, equality, and anti-fascist resistance.
Let us be clear: the greatest crime of the 20th century was not communism — it was capitalism’s unbroken rule of profit over people.
Trump’s proclamation is not about “honoring victims.” It is about reaffirming capitalist power. The anti-communist crusade has always served one purpose — to defend the privileges of the few against the awakening of the many. It was anti-communism that justified the bombs on Vietnam, the dictatorships in Latin America, the massacres in Indonesia, and today’s endless wars and sanctions.
The same ruling class that exploits workers at home and plunders nations abroad now dares to present itself as the moral guardian of “freedom.” Their freedom is the freedom to exploit; their democracy is the democracy of billionaires; their morality is hypocrisy polished into propaganda.
If we are to speak of victims, let us count honestly. Let us count the children who die of hunger in a world of abundance, the workers crushed by corporate greed, the peoples destroyed by imperialist wars, the planet poisoned for profit. These are the victims of capitalism. Their blood cries not for “Anti-Communism Week” — but for a lifetime of struggle against capitalism, for an unending fight until the chains of exploitation are broken once and for all.
The truth remains simple and indestructible: they hate communism because they fear justice.
Trump’s decree is not a proclamation of remembrance; it is a proclamation of fear — fear of a world without exploitation, fear of the red flag that once made tyrants tremble, fear of humanity reclaiming its future.
So let the capitalists have their “Anti-Communism Week.” The workers of the world will have history — and history will not absolve them.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
