The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices

by Dubiel,Helmut; Dubiel,Helmut

• ISBN13: 9780714683959
• ISBN10: 0714683957
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2004-06-15
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This book compares the genocide perpetrated by both Nazism and Communism. Both political systems were evil yet, when compared, they lose some of their power to shock. The book considers: the different receptions given to Nazism and Communism; whether people can behave "rationally" in contexts of great wickedness; whether the Communist or Nazi worldview was more "rational" the relationship between post-war memories and history; and how atrocities are remembered by society and how intellectuals construct them. The editors argue that these twentieth-century evils invite comparison if only because of their traumatic effects and that we have an obligation to understand what happened and an obligation to understand how we have dealt with it.

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Preface	vii
Introduction	1	(6)
Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin
PART I: APPROACHES
1 Nazism-Communism: Delineating the Comparison	7	(18)
Martin Malia
2 The Uses and Abuses of Comparison	25	(10)
Tzvetan Todorov
3 Worstward Ho: On Comparing Totalitarianisms	35	(38)
Irving Wohlfarth
4 Imagining the Absolute: Mapping Western Conceptions of Evil	73	(12)
Steven E. Aschheim
5 Remembrance and Knowledge: Nationalism and Stalinism in Comparative Discourse	85	(13)
Dan Diner
6 Comparative Evil: Degrees, Numbers and the Problem of Measure	98	(11)
Berel Lang
PART II: FRAMES OF COMPARISON
7 The Institutional Frame: Totalitarianism, Extermination and the State	109	(16)
Sigrid Meuschel
8 Asian Communist Regimes: The Other Experience of the Extreme	125	(12)
Jean-Louis Margolin
9 A Lesser Evil? Italian Fascism in/and the Totalitarian Equation	137	(17)
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
10 On the Moral Blindness of Communism	154	(15)
Steven Lukes
PART III: LEGACIES
11 Totalitarian Attempts, Anti-Totalitarian Networks: Thoughts on the Taboo of Comparison	169	(13)
Ulrike Ackermann
12 If Hitler Invaded Hell: Distinguishing between Nazism and Communism during World War II, the Cold War and since the Fall of European Communism	182	(14)
Jeffrey Herf
13 The Memory of Crime and the Formation of Identity	196	(15)
Gabriel Motzkin
14 Mirror-Writing of a Good Life?	211	(11)
Helmut Dubiel
Notes on Contributors	222	(3)
Index	225