Excellent point from a reader:

Jonah,
I think Zizek “falls off a cliff” a lot sooner than two-thirds of the way through his piece. Zizek points to the Stalinist show-trials’ insistence on a trumped-up showing of “crimes” as the Communists’ one Enlightenment-rooted saving grace. But the show-trials were not Stalinism’s only abomination, or even the major one. Marxism has never had any problem in eliminating whole classes of undesirables, such as in the liquidation of the kulaks. There was never a showing that any of the millions shot or starved had actively opposed the Soviet state; their membership in an “enemy” class was all the Party needed to murder them. I don’t see how this is any different from the Nazis’ wholesale murder of the classes they perceived as enemies.

Me: I can see how it’s different to murder based on class rather than ethnicity, I just don’t see how it’s “better.”