But why, WHY is it, that everyone thinks that someone must necessarily be PERSONALLY involved, to have intense reactions to murder and genocide????

Obviously, you don't. But in years of experience, I have learned that an unusually high emotional response to a subject usually has something underneath it. (I made one guess at it--that you were involved with the academic community. It was wrong.)

This does not invalidate your response, or mean that the response has no basis in fact. But knowing these things helps everyone to understand the conversation. I would discuss cancer differently with a person who had lost family members that way, than I would with someone who never knew anyone with cancer. That's just human communication. It doesn't change any of the facts about cancer, or anything else. And it doesn't imply paternalism, or "walking on eggshells."

Objectively speaking, it is true that deliberately constructed camps and engines specifically designed to exterminate and dispose of an entire class of people may indeed represent a higher level of depravity than just sending people to camps in Siberia to die, shooting them in mass firing squads, or arranging a deliberate famine for an entire region.

The difference, in my opinion, is that the former philosophy is not currently being taught to children in schools, or accepted as part of the norm in political discourse or representative political bodies. The latter philosophy is.

Announcing that you are a Nazi will get you drummed out of a university, or most representative government bodies around the world. Announcing that you are a Marxist often gets no more official response than announcing that you are a redhead. The history of the obscenities of the Third Reich are common knowledge. Not one person in fifty seems to know what Stalin did.

This doesn't make Marxism "worse" than Nazism.

But it does, IMO, make Marxism more of a current danger to society than Nazism. Maybe my personal experiences at universities has something to do with that, too.