I've started reading Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend
Whenever I start reading a book I end up losing hours of my life in the footnotes, old mate Thomas wasn't perfect, but he certainly had some banging quips about nazis.
Those who, as the crisis of the Grand Alliance unfolded, had begun to compare Stalin’s Soviet Union with Hitler’s Germany, were harshly rebuked by Thomas Mann. What characterized the Third Reich was the “racial megalomania” of the self-styled “master race,” who had implemented a “diabolical policy of depopulation,” and even before that was the eradication of culture of the conquered. Hitler had thus adhered to Nietzsche’s maxim: “if one wants slaves, then one is a fool if one educates them to be masters.” Directly opposite was the orientation of “Russian socialism” which, by massively spreading education and culture, had shown that it did not want “slaves,” but “thinking people” and therefore, to be in spite of everything on the “path towards freedom.” It was, then, unacceptable to compare the two regimes. On the contrary, those who argued in this way could be suspected of complicity with fascism, which they also claimed to want to condemn:
To place Russian communism and Nazi-fascism on the same moral plane, in that both would be totalitarian, is superficial at best, fascism at worst. Whoever insists on this equation may well consider himself a democrat, in truth and in the bottom of his heart he is in fact already a fascist, and certainly only in a hypocritical and insincere way will he fight fascism, while reserving all his hatred for communism.”
from pages 4-5 of the above
