HOW CAN WE "RECONCILE" COMMUNIST AND NAZI LEGACIES?
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take it for a peace-loving nation. By contrast the Soviet Union could
plausibly claim, after the losses of World War II, that it was eager to
maintain peace. Moreover Soviet and other Communist expansion was
somewhat more subtle. Soviet (and other Communist) troops did not as
often and as blatantly storm across national borders as those of Nazi
Germany (though they did so at times) . Much of the Soviet empire was
less a result of naked conquest than a by-product of World War II and
the Soviet pursuit of German troops through Eastern Europe .
It
is interesting to speculate whether Western attitudes toward Nazi
Germany would have resembled those toward the Soviet Union if Ger–
many had had nuclear weapons. As may be recalled, during much of the
Cold War Western peace activists strenuously argued that criticism of the
Soviet system endangered peace, that nuclear war was the ultimate evil
("better red than dead"), that what mattered were the similarities be–
tween ordinary Americans and Soviet people; that in any event due to
our collective sins (racism, neo-colonialism, sexism, and so on) we in the
West were not entitled to take a morally superior, judgmental position
regarding the Soviet Union or other Communist states.
The wartime alliance between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. was an–
other source of favorable attitudes toward the Soviet Union, leading at
the time to suppression of negative information about Soviet domestic
political practices. Among the explanations of the differences it should
also be noted that many survivors of the Holocaust settled in the United
States and by their very presence contributed to the moral climate here
discussed, whereas fewer survivors of the Soviet camps made it to these
shores. They may have been less articulate or interested in making their
experiences known, and there may have been less interest in them. We
don't see television programs involving Communist Russia or China, but
we see many about Nazi Germany. There has been no initiative so far to
build a museum to the victims of Communism, in Washington D .C. or
anywhere else in this country.
Despite the opening up of the former Soviet Union (and other
Communist countries), interest in the moral reassessment of Communist
atrocities in the West remains minimal. The least attention has been paid
to the questions of moral outrage, to why it has been so limited and so
neutralized even when Communist systems are no longer idealized or
grossly misrepresented - either in scholarly writings or in the mass media.
Perhaps only when the insights of Isaiah Berlin become more widely
appreciated will it be possible to reduce if not close the gap between the
attitudes here discussed. Berlin wrote several decades ago , "The two
great liberating political movements of the ninteenth century were . ..
humanitarian individualism and romantic nationalism. . . . These two
