Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR: The Concept of "Moral Equivalence".

It is often believed that you can draw a strong moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin and assert that there was a double genocide perpetuated by both Hitler and Stalin. Even if their ideology was different there is it is believed a clear moral equivalence in the fact both Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR.

Yet the term "moral equivalence" has its problems when applied to claiming that the Communist and Fascist and Nazi totalitarian regimes were essentially the same or equivalent in murdering people on such a colossal scale.

However, it is better to see the twin totalitarianisms as morally comparable in many aspects of their functioning but very different when it came to the scale and ambitions of their mutually antagonistic ideologies.

Soviet Communism was democidal and not genocidal as was the Nazi regime which aimed to exterminate Jews in their entirety. Both regimes aimed to remove any potential check on their power and treated "enemies of the people" in similar ways.

Yet the Nazi regime was intentionally genocidal in a way that Stalin's USSR was not, as the USSR did not aim intentionally to extermine entire races simply because of their race, though Stalin did in effect transport hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Poles and Tatars to their deaths.

Morally the scale of the killing is comparable but not "equivalent" in the sense of being "roughly the same" since it is impossible to equate the number of deaths meted out by both regimes according to some moral criteria. This is the key problem with the notion of "moral equivalence".

The numbers killed were not equivalent as Stalin killed more people of all races than Hitler: he was non-discriminatory in that sense. Both regimes intended to murder as many people as it was thought to gain an empire but the Nazi extermination of the Jews went beyond what was merely "necessary".

Stalin had a certain paranoid logic for wanting to crush centres of nationalist opposition to the Red Empire whereas Hitler was always alert to exploiting that in his Drang Nach Osten, as he did in Ukraine and the Baltics when some nationalist colluded in the killing of Jews without direct supervision.

The techniques of both totalitarian regimes: nihilism, mass concentration camp systems etc were morally comparable. The danger of "moral equivalence" is that it can easily slide by default into the idea that supporting the Waffen SS and German war effort, as in Lithuania, was a "lesser evil".

Moreover, as malign as Soviet totalitarianism was even in the 1980s it is propaganda to assert that they were "equivalent" to the Nazi regime which lasted all of twelve years. It means that those asserting anti-Russian nationalism are not judged by the same criteria as Putin is in Russia.

Most empires have as their rationale the control of scarce and strategic raw materials. Killing or consenting to kill people who get in the way or control those resources for purposes of pure greed is a normal feature of human life. Ideologies are there to rationalise these rapacious impulses.

On a small scale, Lithuanians were happy to collude in murdering their Jewish neighbours if they could rationalise it according to the Jewish Bolshevik threat and thus ease their poverty at once by grabbing a flat or clothes they would have otherwise had to work for for many years.

The same trend occurred in Poland in World War Two, as documented in Jan T Gross' Neighbours, about the massacre of Jews in the Polish town of Jedwabne in 1941, and Fear, which deals with anti-semitism not only during the war but also even after Auschwitz.

Thecollective dis-ease even in 2010 at the knowledge that previous generations did this and that the installation of Soviet Republics did nothing to diminish the coveting of Jewish assets is one reason why this double genocide myth is there to cosset people from the truth.

There is nothing unusual in this. Israel has encouraged similar rapaciousness in Palestinian lands by referral to some "existential threat" and justified it with narratives of victimhood.

Coveting land and assets is normal behaviour and entirely human, though still repellent. Humans are just like this when they believe greed can be rationalised in a way that soothes the claims of the conscience because of the threat "they" pose to "us".

One reason liberal humanists such as Havel have refused to take on the double genocide myth is most likely because of a residual ethnocentric distaste for Russia, resentment that such "barbarians" control resources more civilised Central Europeans have a human right to.

That is, notto be held captive by Russian control of pipelines and bullied as Georgia was in 2008, a claim made by Western politicians and worthies just three years after the same people such as Havel supported the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 to grab its oil.

When liberals claim the Soviet Union was "morally equivalent" to Nazi Germany, they wish to portray Stalin's dictatorship as a Greater Russian phenomenon mingled with the nihilism of Communist ideology and not that it was an universalist Enlightenment project .

The barbarism of Stalin was created by Lenin's nihilistic revolution after 1917 and contempt for legal norms but it was in accordance with many aspects of the European Enlightenment and a distinct break with Old Russia in positing wholesale extermination as a necessary part of Progress.

A number of objections are usually made when criticising the double genocide concept,

Objection 1

..whilst far right nationalists do use the concept
of a moral equivalency between Hitler and Stalin as a tool for minimising the pure evil of Hitler and the Holocaust, many others have no such agenda. Nor have
we been misled. Some of us simply see the two as being roughly equivalent in evil and horror.

Objection 2

Morality is as much about effects as it is about intention. I doubt that those people dying in gulags in Siberia were thinking, "Well I'm going to die here, but at least it's not down to my ethnicity". People are people are people.

What people experienced in the Gulag is comparable to that of being in a Nazi concentration camp.

But that still does not mean they were equivalent, not least if a person was a Jew in Sobibor or Maidenek which where explicitly extermination camps on the frontline as the Wehrmacht advanced into Soviet territory quickly followed by Einsatzgruppen.

Ironically, it was precisely Auschwitz, the site set up as the totemic symbol of the Nazi concentration camp, that was not in fact purely an extermination centre but also a work camp for "politicals" and Poles, though it was often effectively a death camp too, just as were the Gulags.

True, at the time, it must be remembered, inmates were unlikely to have been thinking of whether life in a Nazi camp or Gulag was worse or better, though they must have thought what it was they had done that was wrong in many, if not most, cases.

Quite simply they had little or no knowledge to make the comparison.

The point, however, is this: the notion of "moral equivalence" is difficult to apply to death on such a scale if effects are mentioned and unrelated to intentions. For if this was the case, then British Imperialism can be seen as "morally equivalent" to Hitler's Third Reich or Stalin's Empire

It is, in my opinion, simply better to state that the USSR in its Stalinist period and Nazism were morally comparable in many aspects of their functioning but not "equivalent". The "equivalence" charge does make it possible by default not design to argue as far right Lithuanians do.

For if a small nation as Lithuania is faced with an "either-or" choice, then it can be argued that collaboration with the Waffen SS was a "lesser evil" as both Nazism and the Soviet Union were morally equivalent but, from a Lithuanian perspective, the Soviet Union more of a threat to "them".

Paradoxically, the charge of "moral equivalence" can be used to argue that if one just has to choose one side, it is natural to choose the one that was less of a threat in circumstances where survival overrode any normal moral considerations.

Yet, in fact, Stalin did not slate the entire Lithuanian nation to extermination as Hitler had the Jews. So by siding with the Nazis, Lithuanian nationalists made a choice that the Nazis were 'less immoral' than the Stalinists.

Willing collaboration with nationalist groups who killed Jews was not necessitated. It was still a choice.

The evidence is that in conditions where civilisation has broken down, some members of subject peoples as the Lithuanians were under the Nazis occupation after 1941 can often behave with equal evil and brutality as the occupiers.

To claim Lithuanians were thus subjected to genocide can be used to obfuscate the role of Lithuanians in the Holocaust.

Objection 3.

So in your eyes, the idea of a double-genocide is out-and-out "myth" ... because it was in fact Nazi genocide, and Baltic "democide".

Well isn't that distinction rather technical. And again you seem to be saying that killing thousands of people because of a devotion to a nationalistic or racial ideology (genocide) could never be compared to killing a 'possibly' similar number of people through political decision-making by a different creed.

It is clear that genocide and democide are comparable in actual effect but not "equivalent" as Lithuanians were not slated for wholesale extermination as the Jews across all of Eastern Europe were and thus the word "genocide" is thus wrong for obvious terminological reasons which can thus be interpreted by some to make emotive appeals.

Put simply, a genocide of Lithuanians would have meant that all Lithuanians were destined to be eradicated by Stalin. This was not so. The national "bourgeois" elite was removed and deported along with thousands of others who had committed no crime other than to get in the way of Stalin's annexation.

Those Lithuanians who died in the Gulag or in the torture chambers of the NKVD were killed by a totalitarian regime prepared to eliminate any person of any race who opposed Soviet i.e Stalin's power and so it best for that reason termed democide.

This is why it is not "equivalent", though the effects were just as horrendous in many cases where Jews died no less than those placed in Gulags, though those in Stalin's camps did have some hope that they would eventually survive whilst all Jews by being Jews were going to be exterminated as a matter of policy.

By terming Stalin's action democide and not genocide the victimhood narrative whereby the crimes of Lithuanian far right nationalist collaborators with the Nazis are rationalised can be avoided and confronted.

That can be done without drawing attention away from the enormity of the crimes committed by Stalin's USSR.