Communism or Fascism

Here is an interesting article by Zizek. An old topic, really, and it simply rehearses the old leftist problem of how to oppose totalitarian ideologies without adopting (at least implicitly) their own. Kind of a pointless academic problem really, but I thought this passage pretty interesting:

Till now, to put it straightforwardly, Stalinism hasn’t been rejected in the same way as Nazism. We are fully aware of its monstrous aspects, but still find Ostalgie acceptable: you can make Goodbye Lenin!, but Goodbye Hitler! is unthinkable. Why? To take another example: in Germany, many CDs featuring old East German Revolutionary and Party songs, from ‘Stalin, Freund, Genosse’ to ‘Die Partei hat immer Recht’, are easy to find. You would have to look rather harder for a collection of Nazi songs. Even at this anecdotal level, the difference between the Nazi and Stalinist universes is clear, just as it is when we recall that in the Stalinist show trials, the accused had publicly to confess his crimes and give an account of how he came to commit them, whereas the Nazis would never have required a Jew to confess that he was involved in a Jewish plot against the German nation. The reason is clear. Stalinism conceived itself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, according to which, truth being accessible to any rational man, no matter how depraved, everyone must be regarded as responsible for his crimes. But for the Nazis the guilt of the Jews was a fact of their biological constitution: there was no need to prove they were guilty, since they were guilty by virtue of being Jews.

He goes on. What I think bothers me about these discussions, at bottom, is the need to pick the "the incomparable evil of the 20th century." The idea must be that if we can pick the most evil ideology then somehow we can have a solid moral foundation to stand on: we're against that. Absolute good is just replaced by absolute evil, but it's just a negative version of the same foundational belief. I'm also not sure I can buy the idea that Stalinism was the perversion of an "authentic" revolution while Fascism was from the beginning a perversion of one. Only a doctrinaire Marxist, a strict materialist, would be able to distinquish that sharply between racial and class antagonisms. I'm not prepared to do that, nor can I see any real basis for doing so that doesn't depend a priori on a flawed materialist theoretical position. This article seems like a last gasp to defend a worn-out totalizing ideology.