As somebody who intimately saw on my closest ones and everybody else various horrible things that communism does to society and every single individual in it, and how the legacy of it can't be shed easily even after decades and multiple generations, you don't need to demonize communism a slightest bit .
Just point out well known facts, in balanced manner, and that's more than enough.
After a lifetime of being on the boot end of capitalism, I don't think communist systems are special in being full of horrors. I don't think the particular system humans use to justify those horrors is the issue.
You don't think... well experiencing both systems would give you much better opinions to compare rather than just thinking about it. Unfortunately I had, and my opinions are clear.
You can see it yourself if you look closely enough, go to let's say Vienna, and then go to Bratislava or further east. Even after 34 years. I don't mean financial aspect of difference, I mean everything else that makes healthy society thriving.
In capitalism, you always have freedom of thinking, traveling, freedom to not have a job for example. You can bash it as much as you prefer, and its leaders. Your parents won't be put in gulag or uranium mines for 10 years because of that. My friend, you frankly have no idea what you write about...
This kind of whataboutery is an ignorant and insulting to people who’ve actually had to live through the horrors of communism, which are on a different order of magnitude to the horrors of capitalism, bad as they might be.
I have yet to see a single example of a horror done under any modern human system that wasn't done under every system before and next to it. If I'm ignorant, it's a failure to persuade on the part of people who have a special hatred of communism.
Sure, tell that to the relatives of the 4 million Ukrainians who died during Stalin's farming reforms, to the 2 million Chinese who died during the Cultural Revolution, or to the 2 million Cambodian victims under Pol Pot.
I could rattle off a list with similar numbers for capitalism (or proportional numbers for older systems), too. This does not persuade anyone who isn't already in the choir that your pet gripe is special.
Humans do horrible stuff to each other in the name of ideology. Systems are just one of the ways they rationalize it.
Just point out well known facts, in balanced manner, and that's more than enough.