Anti-Climacus

Now, the commentary: why don't we take Stalin as seriously as we take Hitler? I think there's a lot to be said for a good amount of the Left-- including myself, for a long, long time-- being unwilling to take the historical record seriously precisely because we put so much of our intellectual credibility into backing some form of socialism. It would be hard for those of us who are putatively moral to do so if we took seriously the fact that every attempt to insitute socialism on a grand scale has always been a disaster, and, in the hands of Stalin, was a particular atrocity against mankind. Certainly, there's no shortage of vitriol against capitalist, free-market systems, and some of it with good reason, but that shouldn't excuse shoddy intellectualism and the defense of murderers. So there must be something more at work.

Hitler is easy to vilify because he did something that cannot even have the pretense of being right: he sought the total extermination of the Jews (even today's anti-Semities have more sense than to declare the similarity of their goals to that of Hitler, the same though they may be). Stalin's apologists could at least give him a noble aim. Hmm... something to think about.