When I was a chick of 19 working at the New Musical Express, I took a stroll one day down Carnaby Street, our main thoroughfare, with our receptionist and my then close friend, the 22-year-old Danny Baker. After some minutes of mocking the tourist-trap windows, we became transfixed by an item in one such boutique. "NAZIS - POLAND TOUR 1938" sticks in the mind still, and around this T-shirt, swastikas swirled, serene.

I stopped and pointed. I grabbed Danny's arm, and whirled him round to look. I remember to this day what he said: "Fuck, no..." We went into the shop. An Asian man was behind the counter. "Excuse me, mate, but do you know what you've got in your window?"

"You want the swastika?"

"No! No, I don't want fucking swastika!" Being a devotee of Rock Against Racism, I was thinking we might just leave, and tugged at Danny's sleeve. "Dan..."

"Look, mate," Danny had his hands in the window display by now, "it's a fucking swastika ! You can't do that! It's just not on! Maybe you don't know. You can't do that here! " He began to dismantle the display, at which point the shopkeeper started to help him. By this time I was, pathetically, cringing in the corner, almost in tears: despite the leather and the sneering, I was obviously English to the core and highly embarrassable, and this was about as far from a quiet day's window-shopping as it got.

I sometimes wonder how this scene would play in the political climate today, 20 years on, when hysteria matters more than history: would we be youthful idealists, or brutish white proles harassing a decent Asian shopkeeper? No doubt some professional multiculturalist would jump up and down, explaining that the swastika was an ancient Hindu symbol of peace - though I don't know how this would tie in with the invasion of Poland.

When the window had been rearranged to Danny's liking, we went back to the office. After the excitations of punk, the NME was just starting to be desperate then, not to say desperate to prove its anti- Nazi credentials, and someone overheard us talking about what had happened. Excruciatingly, it went straight into the paper, turning what had been a private Special Moment into a monstrous pose.

No one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of your average music paper reader, and sure enough there were letters aplenty in response. About 90% had a common theme, namely: "Would these fashionable young people have reacted so dramatically to the sale of communist insignia? If not, why not, considering that communism has killed more people than fascism?" The answer, of course, was no. If we'd have seen a display of even halfway-decent communist insignia, we'd have rushed inside. The one thing anyone, regardless of their political orientation, ever wanted when a friend went to the USSR was a bag of dinky medals. (I can hear the doubters and sneerers muttering that that's all there was to bring back as a gift from the Soviet Union, but I'll ignore them.) Besides, after two years spent explaining to our slightly backward art-school punk compadres that it wasn't nice to wear swastikas, we felt no guilt in sporting a discreet cameo of Vladimir Ilyich.

The answer is still, of course, no. Charles Murray, answering the letters, summed it up brilliantly by pointing out that while fascist uniforms and insignia were sexual fetishes, communist ones - though more beautiful and though worn by the victorious - were not. Fascists are secretly pleased and sexually excited by the cruelty their cause has inflicted; we, and I still use that word proudly, are mortified beyond all alibis, but still have to drag ourselves away from staring into the abyss because we simply see no other long-term alternative to creating a just world.

The recent visit of the Chinese president, and his position vis-à-vis "General" Pinochet (love that camp old title! Pretty good for a guy whose idea of battle was dropping unarmed civilians out of helicopters), not to mention the idea of a day to commemorate the Holocaust, has got the usual group of seat-sniffers carping on about there being no difference between communism and fascism. About 1% of people may be genuinely sincere when they say this, but the great majority are, it must be said, Nazi-loving sickos seeking to cloak their greater crimes in the greater number of communist ones. It is right to jail Pinochet while talking to Jiang, and it is right to remember the crimes of the Nazis with a special revulsion.

To put it brutally, communists may have killed more people than fascists, but we're still not as bad. Communism commits evil when it goes wrong; fascism commits evil when all goes to plan. No one, not even Stalin, ever became a communist in order to do evil, whereas that's the whole point in becoming a fascist.

I've noticed, too, that people who throw around the number of deaths under Stalin and Mao as if that was the final word on the matter tend to throw up their hands in horror if anyone suggests that the millions who have died in the name of religion serve as witnesses to the fact that it is inherently evil. You could even, following the same piles-of-corpses logic, make a case for the family being inherently evil, on the grounds that some 80% of killings take place in it.

But no one would dream of claiming that . Communism alone is slandered as nothing more than the sum of its deaths. Indeed, if you were serious about evaluating the evil of a regime by the number of deaths it caused, you'd have to say the British Empire was worse than the Nazis. Which I don't for a moment believe.

When we feel more revulsion for the smaller crimes of fascism, we are not being illogical but recognising that a philosophy that is noble but that sometimes goes horribly wrong is still superior to one based on cruelty and inequality. Communism, like Christianity, is a willingness of the heart as much as anything else; a desire for a better world that is easy to mock but hard to live without. Fascism is about killing people.

At the end of the day, any moderate democrat who pours equal scorn on both extremes had probably best not look too hard into the mirror. Because, while we can quantify the deaths caused by both communism and fascism, we will never know how many deaths have been the result of capitalism; of nothing more noble than a rich man wanting to be even richer, and sacrificing the health and lives of millions of workers to achieve this. Don't even try to count how many people capitalism has killed, because not only will you not know where to begin, but also it will never end.