Judging Nazism and Communism

National Interest, The, Fall, 2002 by Martin Malia

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This fact grounds what is perhaps the most frequently drawn moral distinction between the two regimes: the claim that no matter how criminal Communism became, it was inspired initially by "good intentions" and humanistic universalism (in Le Monde's high style: the contrast is between la face lumineuse of Communism and its face tenebreuse). Nazism, on the other hand, was never motivated by anything but national egotism, racism, and conquest. (Of course, it is these associations that explain the already-noted double standard for judging crimes that are in effect comparable.) Thus such a strong anti-communist as Raymond Aron had at one time advanced what is now a standard argument: Nazism must be judged worse than Communism since it practiced extermination as an end in itself while the latter did so as a means to some other political or economic end. (28)

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This popular Western distinction, however, may be contrasted with the opinion of such East Europeans as Vasilii Grossman, Aleksander Wat, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, all of whom had direct experience of both Nazism and Communism and all of whom held the two to be comparably criminal. (29) The crux of their judgment is that Communist mass murder remains mass murder whatever its ideological inspiration; indeed, they suggest that crimes against humanity committed in the name of humanity are in a sense more perverse than the blatant criminality of Nazism. This view arises from the insidious nature of the Soviet "Lie." A colloquial Soviet term for "the system" made famous by Solzhenitsyn, the Lie denotes the fatal contradiction of a universalism driven, not by charity, fellow feeling or natural Reason, but by the ideological principle of "class war", or more exactly pseudo-class war. And of course, the Soviet "building of socialism" was not a genuine social contest but a political struggle in which the redeemer cl ass (that is, its ideological substitute, the party) was destined to eliminate all exploiting classes (namely, anyone resisting party policies). So, as Solzhenitsyn put it, "in the twentieth century ideology made possible evil on a scale of millions." (30)

THESE TWO antithetical moral judgments point to a moral of their own: that our efforts to frame value distinctions between Nazism and Communism will continue to seesaw back and forth with the contrasting magnetisms of the Right-Left polarity. Nor will this cease to be true even as the historiographies of the two movements approach each other in empirical grounding and analytical sophistication.

Nevertheless, achieving that rapprochement remains the precondition for all serious comparison. And for this, the first priority is to overcome the pitiful lag a half-century has put between the historiographies of Stalinism and Nazism. Consider the distance the latter has traveled. No one talks any longer about "finance capital" or "proletarianized lower middle classes" as basic causes of Nazism. Instead, among our most recent authorities, Ian Kershaw highlights Hitler's "charismatic" Fuhrerprinzip and Michael Burleigh the "political religion" of Aryan racial supremacy. Nor is anyone allowed to be value-free; rather, moral judgment is de rigueur and crime is called by its proper name. Rightly so, for moral judgments are indeed intrinsic to all historical understanding.

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Judging Nazism and Communism

National Interest, The, Fall, 2002 by Martin Malia

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