Last year I wrote about Timothy Snyder’s monumental Bloodlands, the history of the carnage wreaked across central Europe by the C20’s two twin collectivist totalitarianisms, Communism and Nazism.

I warned against Left collectivist apologists for Stalin such as Slavoj Zizek:

We dare not underestimate the danger which people like Zizek represent. In themselves they are moral and political nano-particles. Their true significance lies in the fact that they are spores carrying totalitarian DNA, floating hither and thither through the once balmy but now increasingly stale air of post-modern Europe, waiting to land on some new, fertile soil and start to grow again

Indeed, in some respects the supporters of the EU in its current form show that they agree with this analysis. They justify their opposition to fundamental reform  by warning implicitly or explicitly that without the European Union as it is, Europe would slump back into open conflict and paranoia.

Part of the objection to Bloodlands came from assorted Leftists who bewailed the very notion that Snyder somehow equated Communism with Nazism, thereby calling into question the validity of the ‘anti-fascist’ struggle.

Professor Snyder has written another piece tackling the issue more or less head-on: Hitler vs Stalin: Who Was Worse? 

But is he afraid of what he finds? Thus:

Large numbers matter because they are an accumulation of small numbers: that is, precious individual lives. Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers.

The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did.

That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations.

What is that stray ‘disconcertingly’ adverb all about? What is disconcerting and to whom about the fact of communist massacres carried out for national socialist reasons?

The sheer scale of the madness – and its varying motivations – is still hard to grasp:

Beyond the numbers killed remains the question of intent. Most of the Soviet killing took place in times of peace, and was related more or less distantly to an ideologically-informed vision of modernization. Germany bears the chief responsibility for the war, and killed civilians almost exclusively in connection with the practice of racial imperialism.

Germany invaded the Soviet Union with elaborate colonization plans. Thirty million Soviet citizens were to starve, and tens of millions more were to be shot, deported, enslaved, or assimilated. Such plans, though unfulfilled, provided the rationale for the bloodiest occupation in the history of the world. 

So Stalin’s killings were quasi-rational (ideologically-informed vision of modernization) whereas Hitler’s killings were all about a more abstract (insane?) vision of racial imperialism. How would these issues be looked at in a court of law?

I wrote about this in August 2009, but it’s good stuff so let’s repeat some of it now:

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.

Snyder pokes about uneasily in the intellectual rubble of our efforts to put our post-WW2 heads round all this:

During the cold war, it was sometimes hard for Americans to see clearly the particular evils of Nazis and Soviets. Hitler had brought about a Holocaust: but Germans were now our allies. Stalin too had killed millions of people: but the some of the worst episodes, taking place as they had before the war, had already been downplayed in wartime US propaganda, when we were on the same side.

We formed an alliance with Stalin right at the end of the most murderous years of Stalinism, and then allied with a West German state a few years after the Holocaust. It was perhaps not surprising that in this intellectual environment a certain compromise position about the evils of Hitler and Stalin—that both, in effect, were worse—emerged and became the conventional wisdom.

Really? Surely the conventional wisdom was and is that Hitler was by far the worse. Hence the fact that Nazi memorabilia are eschewed by decent people, whereas shiny Communist memorabilia are sold as desirable collectors’ items in smart London salons.

Snyder concludes on another tentative note:

It was a war that Hitler wanted, and so German responsibility must predominate; but in the event it began with a German-Soviet alliance and a cooperative invasion of Poland in 1939. Somewhere near the Stalinist ledger must belong the thirty million or more Chinese starved during the Great Leap Forward, as Mao followed Stalin’s model of collectivization.

The special quality of Nazi racism is not diluted by the historical observation that Stalin’s motivations were sometimes national or ethnic. The pool of evil simply grows deeper…

Given that the Nazis and the Stalinists tended to kill in the same places, in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, and given that they were, at different times, rivals, allies, and enemies, we must take seriously the possibility (sic) that some (sic) of the death and destruction wrought in the lands between was their mutual responsibility.

A bizarre, disappointing way to put it! As if someone is seriously asserting that there is any doubt on the matter?

Back to Common Law. If two killers conspire to kill and steal on a vast scale, the fact that the killing gets out of control or goes beyond what they planned or leads to them falling out and fighting each other is neither here nor there. They are both equally guilty of launching a criminal enterprise and share equal responsibility for anything which occurred as a result. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact falls squarely into that category.

So, which of these murdering monsters was in fact ‘worse’?

Let those who wish to argue about that do so. But let’s not lose sight of the key issue. That they and the ideologies they each represented were both murdering monsters.

In any case, Stalinism/communism has proved to be more pernicious. It is still not possible today in Europe to muster the common resolve to put aside a tiny fraction of EU taxpayers’ money to pay for a programme to find and unearth all the mass graves of communism’s WW2 and post-WW2 victims and help identify the bodies using DNA tracing.

I have raised this issue personally with William Hague. Some other EU foreign ministers are interested. Let’s see if we can get some action at long last.

Because if honouring the massed European victims of European killers is not an EU ‘strategic priority’, what is?