Cathy Young says that we continue to maintain a double standard when it comes to judging Hitler versus Stalin. Uncle Joe's fans remain unrepentent. And as long as they do, why should we grant them any moral authority?

Unfortunately, there's a very simple reason why Hitler and Stalin are judged differently: Hitler attacked the West, and Stalin didn't; and the West wound up in a (temporary) alliance of convenience with Stalin.

If that was the only reason, Jay, then the Soviet effort to reclaim Berlin would get a LOT more attention.

I think that a lot of it has to do w/ intellectuals, who, whether we like to admit or not, mold a great deal of perception.

Intellectuals LIKED the Soviet Union. "I have seen the future and it works!" was one famous quote. The fact of the matter is that Soviet Communism (followed by Chinese Communism, Cuban Communism, Vietnamese Communism, etc.) were all supposed to be about "lifting up the people" and the rest. It was about "the New Soviet Man," who would be selfless and all-sacrificing. And, somehow, this is attractive to a certain mindset.

See Paul Hollander's "Political Pilgrims" for a dissection of this kind of mentality.

>> Unfortunately, there's a very simple reason why Hitler and Stalin are judged differently: Hitler attacked the West, and Stalin didn't

I think that it's more accurate to say that Hitler attacked (some of the) "beautiful people" while almost of Stalin's victims were "ugly".

One can kill scads of ugly people and few will give a damn, and most of them are doing so for consistency. However, kill the wrong person, and it's curtains (unless you're "better", and then it gets interesting).

By the 1930s, Nazism's ideology of race was an atavism. By contrast, socialism recovered its lost face from having failed to prevent WWI, and was once again vanguarding the masses. Communism's victims were simply offered up on a more resplendent altar, is all.

And yes, Stalin attacked the West. He did it with subversion, not panzers and stukas. The career of agent-of-influence Willi Munzenberg is instructive. Also find the memoir by Stalin's secretary, Boris Bazhanov, who defected in the Twenties and spilled the beans on Stalin's very early aggressive plans against the West.

Andy Freeman adds a crucial detail. The Russian Civil War killed more people than World War I (and nearly as many as died on the Eastern Front in World War II), but it didn't happen in the West, so it was ignored. As was Stalin generally, until he became our ally. Then he was "Uncle Joe."

Hey, you've got to understand that there's a big difference between Hitler and Stalin...One was an anti-Semitic dictator who killed millions of people and invaded Poland in 1939, and the other was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945.