ABSTRACT
When we ask whether it is Communism or Nazism that must be judged the greater evil, what exactly should we compare in order to frame an answer? The usual procedure is to contrast inventories of horror: numbers of victims, means and circumstances of their deaths, types of concentration camps. Yet how do we make the transition from the raw facts of atrocity to a judgment of their moral meaning? Just why, for example, is the industrialized extermination mounted by Hitler more ‘evil’ than the ‘pharaonic technology’ employed by Stalin and Mao Zedong?1 It would be an error to suppose there can exist a simple or direct answer to such a question. Rather, this greatest of vexed issues handed down from the twentieth century must be approached on three inter-related levels: moral, political and historical.
