Jonathan Freedland keeps popping up in the Guardian on the subject of the dishonesty and falsehood of equating Soviet and Nazi crimes.

Here he was in October last year.

And now again today:

For one thing, the equation of Nazi and communist crimes rarely entails an honest account of the former.

Odd that here Nazi gets a Capital N whereas communist gets only a modest c. Plus, of course, in the Guardian that equation rarely entails an honest account of the latter.

This latest Freedland piece takes some odious examples of history-rewriting in Lithuania to try to establish this phoney syllogism:

  • some Lithuanians dishonestly play down Lithuanians’ role in historical atrocities and assert that Nazi and Communist crimes were equivalent
  • all Lithuanian dishonesty invites us to question the motives of people who equate Nazi and Communist crimes
  • therefore it is false and dishonest for anyone to equate Nazi and Communist crimes

The embarrassingly impoverished moral logic here is really striking.

I repeat what I said in August last year, as I think it nails this issue once and for ever:

It all boils down to a simple question.

Nazism’s collectivist death cult was, if you like, essentially irrational if not mad, but with manic method in the madness. All that raving about blood and Jews and maggots, combined with Germanic efficiency in rounding up so many Jews and Romas and Poles and others and then destroying them.

Stalinism’s collectivist death cult by contrast was ultra rational. It was based on the idea that the end (Scientific Socialism) justified any means and in any case was inevitable as the communist Wheel of History rotated. Bourgeois and other opponents simply ‘had’ to be eliminated.

Surely an intelligent deliberate murderer is more morally guilty than a crazy one?

Put it this way.

Imagine that Hitler and Stalin had been captured at the end of WW2 and put on trial for their crimes.

Hitler’s lawyers might have been able to mount some sort of defence argument based on Insanity – that he was so crazed by that in any sense that mattered he should not be regarded as legally responsible for his actions.

Stalin surely could not claim that. The record of his iniquity and his countless justifications of it and the documentation describing it would all show that he knew exactly what he was doing and meant to to do it.

So, yes, any normal person has to ‘equate’ Nazism and Communism and find nothing of any true significance to distinguish them.

If anything the very nihilistic ‘rationality’ of Communism makes it even worse.

A conclusion terrifying to today’s Marxists-Lite such as Slavoj Zizek, who makes his position clear:

  • Fascism has to be proclaimed to be fundamentally worse than Communism
  • since the alternative is to see Fascism as a natural reaction to the Communist threat and therefore somehow a lesser evil.
  • Which is bad since it weakens a "postwar European identity hitherto based on anti-Fascist unity"  

Indeed. A postwar Europe based on the biggest of all Stalinist Big Lies.

Truth will out.