'The Dictators': Engineers of Death
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/26/books/review/26MINERL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
By STEVEN MERRITT MINER
Published: December 26, 2004
IN the immediate aftermath of World War II, scholars, led by Hannah
Arendt, routinely compared the Nazi and Soviet regimes, labeling them
both as ''totalitarian.'' Reacting against this school, a generation of
revisionist historians has argued that it is unfair to tar the Soviet
Union with the Nazi brush. For all its failings, they claim, the
Communist government was distinctly different from Nazi Germany and,
they say, it brought positive benefits to the Soviet population. In the
United States, and in much of the world, Nazism rightly has served the
function of a moral absolute zero -- a standard for evil -- but the
Soviet Union brought literacy, urbanization, hygiene and international
standing to a country that in 1917 was overwhelmingly backward.
Stalin
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Hitler
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