Also, the difference is that Nazism is most purely an ideology. An ideology of hate and genocide. Communism, in constrast, is merely a regime. Openly displaying nazi artifacts would be an expression of that hateful ideology (especially since it survives today). Displaying communist artifacts is closer to mere history. Just because they both killed people in itself doesn’t mean anything. Wars killed lots of people, but war memorabilia is also treated as mere history.
I think it just boils down to that point. One is an ideology, the other is not (and no, there’s nothing about the economic theory of communism that has anything to do with Stalinism!).
At any rate, the OP raises an interesting question. I haven’t been in Eastern Europe since just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Does one find these “Communist themed” night clubs in Russia and the countries of the former Eastern Block? If so, is this pervasive throughout the East? If not, is there something about the countries where these clubs are not found that tells us something? I’d be pretty surprised if, for instance, one would find these bars in Estonia or Lithuania.
Except for its small percentage of “strength through joy” images of maypoling schoolgirls, most Nazi imagery was intended to scare the world shitless.
In contrast, Soviet imagery has all those happy kids in red scarves and smiling babushkas driving tractors into the sunset.
It’s easier to cast the Soviet’s “come join us, we’re having a swell time in a worker’s paradise” as harmless kitsch than it is to do so with the Nazi’s calculated menace. The fact that the White Sea Canal excavation was just as horrible as Birkenau doesn’t enter into it, sadly enough.
I think Slithy has hit on it. There’s great irony to be had from the disconnect between the Constructivist images of the"worker’s paradise" and the very harsh reality that it sucked there and a lot of people were dying.
I posted this link to some Soviet posters the other day. If someone knows of a better resource, let me know. There are so many sellers it’s hard to sift through and find historical resources.
I remember having a conversation in German with an elderly German barber in 1990 who was cutting my hair on a U.S. Army base in Frankfurt am Main about how he felt about Germany’s past and the presence of so many U.S. troops in city like Frankfurt. His resonse was clear cut and simple: “Wir sind verteidigt.” (We were defeated.) In other words, he meant that the Allies’ victory in 1945 was the end-all and be-all of any discussion of who was wrong and who was right.
In that respect, many Germans feel that they are a conquered people, and even though they may think otherwise, the Nazis were the losers and bad guys, and are destined to be villified for eternity as a result.
However, there are two things that happened in the Cold War era that failed to cinch the decisive moral victory over communism and Stalin, that occurred with nazism and Hitler:
As a result of the misguided efforts of McCarthy, Americans became sympathetic to those not only misaligned by McCarthy, but also of anyone (whether rightly or wrongly) accused of being a communist; 2) The end of the Cold War failed to cinch a military victory over communism, and therefore failed to secure a moral victory over communism. That is why it is called the “collapse of communism”, whereas WW2 is seen as a “victory” over facism.
Military victories are required for moral victories?
Isn’t that rather backwards? Facism might conceivably be considered a valid system that was destroyed before it had a chance to prove itself, while the “communist” society of the USSR collapsed under its own weight.
it amazes me that so many of you employ the argument that the nazis were (are) vilified because they were so fond of genocide (as you have pointed out nazi germany had a hate on for jews and gypsies, and i’ll add catholics), while stalin just wiped out a bunch of people. did everyone forget that stalin had a hard on for killing jews, not to mention every ruler after him? what happened once the reds collapsed? every russian jews with the where-with-all to do it, fled russia. why? they were tired of being killed. why did my family leave the Ukraine? we were tired of being ripped off and starved! what am i trying to say here you wonder? i guess what i want to say is, why is it that we only remember the horrors of death camps and (rightly) condemn them while we seem to let stalin off the hook. this guy killed millions of his ‘people’ (jews, ukrainians, gypsies, and anyone else he didn’t personally know, and some he did), yet those damned krauts were the worst thing ever. give me a break. a shithead is a shithead no matter how you dress them.
Yes I agree. However, b/c the West had a marriage of convenience with Stalin during WW2 (which raises issues of the U.S. and England aiding and abetting Stalin’s regime), and because the West never achieved a decisive military victory over the shitheads your family escaped from, and b/c there still remains a severe lack of information – as well as considerable amounts of communist-generated disinformation – regarding the totality of Stalin’s activities, the ongoing discussion regarding the full extent of Stalin’s evils continues to this day, as so much of what Stalin did has either been under-publicized or is still unknown to the rest of the world, especially in the U.S.
Compare that with the Nazis, who were defeated militarily and who were publicly held responsible for the Holocaust, which, partly thanks to the Nazis’ compulsive record-keeping efforts, has been so-well documented and exposed to the rest of the world. As a result, any person foolhardy enough to argue in favor of Nazism or rush in defense of the Nazis would probably be committing social/academic/professional suicide, as well as being branded a neo-nazi apologist.
The nazi’s crimes were open, the soviets crimes have remained hidden to this day.
The west went to war against the Nazis with the help of the Soviets. That has a major factor in which side gets special treatment.
Westerners probably sympathize with Germans more than Russians. Germany is and was (when the Nazis took over) a developed country with the same history as most western countries while Russia was an undeveloped peasant country that was not technically part of europe.
The nazis lost the war. Whoever loses the war is more likely to be labeled the evil side IMO.
Could be the fact that the US had alot of problems with racism starting in the late 50’s and mass murder of jews struck a cord morre than a mass murder of peasants and Ukranians.
There was a time when open war with the USSR would quite possibly result in the destruction of human civilization. The US and other free countries where thus obliged to tolerate Stalinism, because they couldn’t destroy it and spit on its grave.
In an attempt to avoid global thermonuclear war we tried to sympathize with Soviets, and perhaps ended up forgiving too much. Now that communism’s gone, the sympathy generated to avoid war still remains.
