Mark Steyn on Budd Schulberg:

As a 20-year-old Dartmouth student, Schulberg visited the Soviet Union and was shown its artistic glories. He fell in love with the theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Stanislavski’s wayward disciple. Meyerhold loved the older stylized dramatic forms—commedia dell’arte, pantomime—and refused to confine himself to Socialist Realism. So in 1939 Stalin had him arrested, tortured and his wife murdered. He was shot by firing squad in February 1940.

How about that? Executed over a difference of opinion about a directing style…

Even today, we continue to draw a distinction between Nazism and Communism—between the bad evil and the good evil, the evil that’s philosophically sound, admirably progressive and just ran into one or two problems on the ground, like a great movie idea that went off course in development.

I have written previously here about the Two Vampires, Nazism and Communism, which – and not by some chance – were closely related:

There is a form of ‘European Identity based squarely on a profound Stalin-inspired ‘law of the excluded middle’ attempt to cast any objection to Communism as ‘essentially’ support for Fascism. This Vast Lie has been remarkably successful down the decades, and still gives all sorts of cover to extremist collectivist viewpoints of different shapes and sizes.

Here is a classic explanation of why these two ideologies have so much in common.

My very final telegram from Warsaw to the FCO was called the Final Submission. It talked at some length about the unrelenting psychological pressure on the West emanating from Moscow and echoed by Leftist forces round the planet to overlook communist crimes.

Such as those of Vasili Blokhin, the most prolific murderer in human history among whose many victims were 7000 Poles shot one by one in the Katyn massacre|:

Blokhin initially decided on an ambitious quota of 300 executions per night, and engineered an efficient system in which the prisoners were individually led to a small antechamber—which had been painted red and was known as the "Leninist room"—for a brief and cursory positive identification, before being handcuffed and led into the execution room next door. The room was specially designed with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a log wall for the prisoners to stand against.

Blokhin—outfitted in a leather butcher’s apron, cap, and shoulder-length gloves to protect his uniform, then pushed the prisoner against the log wall and shot him once in the base of the skull with a German Walther Model 2.25 ACP pistol…

His count of 7,000 shot in 28 days remains one of the most organized and protracted mass murders by a single individual on record.

Sigh.

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.