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PARTISAN REVIEW
ophy at the University of Budapest and a fonner member of the Hungar–
ian Parliament. One of his books,
Tribal Concepts,
will shortly appear in
English. He will speak about "A Recent Gennan Nationalism."
Paul Hollander:
I want to raise the question of why - in comparison
to the abundance and intensity of the emotions and moral outrage
aroused by Nazism - Communist systems and their misdeeds have stimu–
lated relatively little moral energy and outrage in the West at any time.
It
is a long-standing asymmetry in moral sentiment that calls for explana–
tion especially when the demise of most Communist states provides not
only new opportunities for unobstructed infonnation gathering but also
for an historical postmortem of these systems and their moral record.
When most Communist states at last joined Nazi Gennany among
the great defunct tyrannies of modern history a new relevance and ur–
gency arose regarding the question posed above: Why the revulsion oc–
casioned by their savagery has been relatively mild and muted in compari–
son to the attention paid to the Nazi regime and its inhumanities? Why
have the other great moral outrages of modern times, and the political
systems associated with them, not become the subject of similar, if not
identical, moral revulsion and condemnation?
A comparative moral assessment must take into account not merely
the political violence these systems inflicted on various groups, or the
external aggression they initiated but also the quantity and quality of re–
pression, regimentation, deprivation and non-lethal human rights viola–
tions they engaged in, as well as the character of their domestic .social–
political arrangements and institutions. Such a reassessment also requires
comparison of the levels of mendacity these systems promoted and insti–
tutionalized.
Moreover these assessments should not be limited to Nazi Gennany
and the Soviet Union. The latter has not been the only Communist sys–
tem, nor the most enduring, nor necessarily the most repressive. Other
Communist states as well, notably China under Mao, Cuba, Ethiopia,
the now extinct East European dependencies of the U.S.S.R., North
Korea, and Vietnam, all shared a sufficient number of characteristics to
allow reference to them as "Communist." They all were, or still are,
one-party systems, governed by parties regarding themselves as Commu–
nist; they legitimated themselves by some version of Marxism-Leninism
and controlled much of the economy of the countries in question; many
promoted the grotesque public worship of their supreme leader.
Putting aside the comparative magnitude of mass murders for the
moment, domestic political arrangements in major Communist countries
