HOW CAN WE "RECONCILE" COMMUNIST AND NAZI LEGACIES?
587
tion , and even the needs of the economy. After all , slave labor was badly
needed to carry out the great construction projects of these societies,
and if mortality rates were high, these regrettable sacrifices were exacted
to accomplish worthy objectives.
Such arguments were sometimes made without any embarrassment.
Upton Sinclair wrote in 1938 about the victims of the famines and col–
lectivization in the Soviet Union: "They drove rich peasants off the land
and sent them to work in lumber camps and on railroads. Maybe it cost
a million lives - maybe . . . five million - but you cannot think intelli–
gently about millions it might have cost if the changes had not been
made.. . . There has never been in human history great social change
without killing."
Also important for an understanding of the variation in moral re–
sponses is the fact that although the mass murders of Communist systems
consumed far more human beings than the Holocaust (the Chinese, So–
viet, and Cambodian regimes together easily account for approximately
one hundred million lives), these killings were not explicitly genocidal in
design , though they might have been in their consequences. There was
no single ethnic group targeted for total elimination; the victims were
drawn from virtually every social stratum and ethnic group. (An interest–
ing similarity in the patterns of victimization is that homosexuals were
persecuted not only in Nazi Germany but in China and Cuba as well.)
In Nazi Germany the state set up highly productive extermination
plants with no less of a goal than the total elimination of the Jewish
population of Europe, perhaps some day of the whole world. It was a
carefully planned, highly organized, premeditated operation that had
spectacular results. Never before had so many people been killed so effi–
ciently in such a short period of time. The unique , and uniquely repug–
nant qualities of the Nazi mass murders were also inseparable from the
attributes and resources of an industrial society; the gas chambers and cre–
matoria were the fruits of modernity and applied science. In turn
modernity has been increasingly resented and rejected by Western elites;
insofar as the mass murders of Nazism and modern industrial society
could be linked, this too has fueled and prolonged a more impassioned
moral indignation regarding the victims of Nazism compared to those of
Communism.
To the extent that the Communist mass murders were confronted by
those on the Western left, they were made morally more tolerable by
viewing them as (regrettable) means to glorious and desirable ends.
Nazism had no such ends. Legitimizers of Communist violence were in–
terested only in the ends and knew little of the means, nor were they ea–
ger to learn about them. Sartre provided the most ambitious (and
