Communism's murderous idealism helped lead to its end

While greatly concerned with communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans actually knew little about it and little is said here today about the unraveling of the Soviet empire. The media's fleeting attention to the momentous events of the late 1980s and early 1990s matched their earlier indifference to communist systems. There is little public awareness of the large-scale atrocities, killings and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially compared with awareness of the Holocaust and Nazism, which led to far fewer deaths. The number of documentaries, films or television programs about communist societies is minuscule compared with those on Nazi Germany or the Holocaust, and few universities offer courses on the remaining or former communist states. For most Americans, communism and its various incarnations remained an abstraction.

The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology. There is far more physical evidence and information about the Nazi mass murders, which were highly premeditated and repugnant, whereas many victims of communist systems were killed not by advanced industrial techniques but by lethal living conditions in their places of detention.

Communist systems ranged from tiny Albania to gigantic China; from highly industrialized Eastern European countries to underdeveloped African ones. They had in common a reliance on Marxism-Leninism as their source of legitimacy, the one-party system, control over the economy and media, and a huge political police force. They also shared an ostensible commitment to creating a morally superior human being: the socialist or communist man.

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