It is a common — and deservedly so — complaint around these parts that Communism gets something of a free pass for its atrocities and systemized horror while Nazism does not. I don’t know any conservatives who aren’t perfectly comfortable demonizing, stigmatizing and otherwise de-legitimizing Nazism but we tend to object to the idea that Communism should be treated as somehow hip or cool or a mistake-that-went wrong. Anne Applebaum in recent years has led the charge on this front.
Very rarely do you find a good attempt to respond to it from the left. I really thought this might be the best short rebuttal attempted so far (Link via Arts and Letters Daily). I think I was right until about two-thirds the way through where it then falls off a cliff.
Slavoj Zizek offers some very interesting insights and opinions on the fundamental differences between Communism and Fascism. For example, he writes:
Till now, to put it straightforwardly, Stalinism hasn’t been rejected in the same way as Nazism. We are fully aware of its monstrous aspects, but still find Ostalgie acceptable: you can make Goodbye Lenin!, but Goodbye Hitler! is unthinkable. Why? To take another example: in Germany, many CDs featuring old East German Revolutionary and Party songs, from ‘Stalin, Freund, Genosse’ to ‘Die Partei hat immer Recht’, are easy to find. You would have to look rather harder for a collection of Nazi songs. Even at this anecdotal level, the difference between the Nazi and Stalinist universes is clear, just as it is when we recall that in the Stalinist show trials, the accused had publicly to confess his crimes and give an account of how he came to commit them, whereas the Nazis would never have required a Jew to confess that he was involved in a Jewish plot against the German nation. The reason is clear. Stalinism conceived itself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, according to which, truth being accessible to any rational man, no matter how depraved, everyone must be regarded as responsible for his crimes. But for the Nazis the guilt of the Jews was a fact of their biological constitution: there was no need to prove they were guilty, since they were guilty by virtue of being Jews.
But after an interesting discussion about this and other things he throws in this conclusion:
It is here that one has to make a choice. The ‘pure’ [European] liberal attitude towards Leftist and Rightist ‘totalitarianism’ – that they are both bad, based on the intolerance of political and other differences, the rejection of democratic and humanist values etc – is a priori false. It is necessary to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally ‘worse’ than Communism. The alternative, the notion that it is even possible to compare rationally the two totalitarianisms, tends to produce the conclusion – explicit or implicit – that Fascism was the lesser evil, an understandable reaction to the Communist threat. When, in September 2003, Silvio Berlusconi provoked a violent outcry with his observation that Mussolini, unlike Hitler, Stalin or Saddam Hussein, never killed anyone, the true scandal was that, far from being an expression of Berlusconi’s idiosyncrasy, his statement was part of an ongoing project to change the terms of a postwar European identity hitherto based on anti-Fascist unity. That is the proper context in which to understand the European conservatives’ call for the prohibition of Communist symbols.
Two problems with this conclusion. First, he shouldn’t have thrown Mussolini into this discussion at the end because it reveals his real agenda. Scholars are deeply split on the question of whether Italian Fascism and Nazism were really the same phenomena at all. To chuck Mussolini in there so glibly as a morally equivalent stand-in for Hitler is sleight-of-hand. Second, while Berlusconi was exaggerating, he was not lying (you can only exaggerate the truth). Mussolini wasn’t a mass-murderer, let alone a genocidal dictator like Stalin, Hitler or Hussein.
Which brings us to the final point. By saying Berlusconi’s “true scandal” was telling the truth, more or less, we can see where the author is really coming from. Zizek offered no evidence or even really any discussion at all to support his conclusion that there’s an effort to undermine an identity rooted in Europe’s “anti-Fascist unity.” (How strong can that identity be if Europeans are so soft on the heirs to real Fascism today, but hold their oompah dances in the street to protest posters of George W. Bush in a Hitler mustache?). Instead he simply says we must choose which perspective is better based on the consequences of the choice. In this case, Zizek thinks losing the organizing myth of European anti-Fascism is to great a sacrifice. In other words, he thinks the “true” scandal of Berlusconi’s statements was that Berlusconi uttered them at all, not that they were or were not true. This, itself, is a show trial mentality. To denounce the truth for the political consequences the truth will bring is a pretty good description of the original Communist version of political correctness.
Anyway, the piece is worth reading, even after it goes off the rails.