 grain of ethics from beginning to end”. Theoretically, he explained, “it subordinates the ethical standpoint to the principle of causality, in the practice it reduces to the class struggle.”47 Thus, in a lecture delivered in Moscow in 1919, Lenin also argued that that “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is ruled, won, and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.”48 Indeed, as Tismaneanu points out:
“Communism in its Leninist version (and, one must recognize, this has been the only successful application of the original dogma) was from the very outset inimical to the values of individual rights and human freedom. In spite of its overblown rhetoric about emancipation from oppression and necessity, the leap into the kingdom of freedom announced by the founding fathers turned out to be actually an experiment in ideologically driven unbound social engineering. The very idea of an independent judiciary was rejected as ‘rotten liberalism’. The party defined what was legal and what was not: as in Hitler’s Germany, where the heinous 1936 Nuremberg trials were a legal fiction dictated by Nazi racial obsessions, Bolshevism from the very outset subordinated justice to party interests. For Lenin, dictatorship of the proletariat was rule by force and unrestricted by any law. The class enemy had to be weeded out, destroyed, smashed without any sign of mercy.”49
Marx believed not only in the evolution of the races and societies but also that history was invariably on his side. So it was easy for him to consider his political adversaries reactionaries, who deserved no legal right and protection but instead severe punishment for retarding the march of humanity.50 Marxist theory therefore denies that anything can be properly called right unless it advances socialism. In such a manner a radical ideology can be applied with the same catastrophic results that occur when radical ideas are applied to racial issues. From the standpoint of Realpolitik, therefore, it is quite possible to suggest that the class genocide conducted by Marxist-oriented regimes bears striking resemblances with the race genocide of Nazi Germany (figure 3). According to Stéphane Courtois, the editor of a seminal book on the subject,
“In Communism there exists a socio-political eugenics, a form of social Darwinism … . As master of the knowledge of the evolution of social species, Lenin decided who should disappear by virtue of having been condemned to the dustbin of history. From the moment that a decision had been made on a ‘scientific’ basis … that the bourgeoisie represented a stage of humanity that had been surpassed, its liquidation as a class and the liquidation of the individuals who actually or supposedly belonged to it could be justified.”51
In his famous book Démocratie et Totalitarisme, the late French political philosopher Raymond Aron discussed ideas that inspire both Marxist-oriented regimes and Hitler’s National Socialism. In one case, he said, the final result is the labour camp, in the other it is the gas chamber. As Aron pointed out, the destruction of the kulaks during the collectivization campaigns in the former Soviet Union was unquestionably analogous to the Nazi genocidal policies against ethnic groups who were deemed to be racially inferior. In fact, as Tismaneanu explains:
“The most important point that needs to be made is that both regimes [Nazism and Communism] are genocidal. Analytical distinctions between them are certainly important … but the commonality in terms of complete contempt for the ‘bourgeois’ rule of law, human rights, and the universality of humankind regardless of spurious race and class distinctions is in my view beyond doubt …
As the first Commissar of Justice Isaac Steinberg in the Soviet Union so candidly put it in 1920, even though the revolution was over, the terror would have to continue, because, in his opinion, this was an intrinsic feature of every Marxist regime.
“The persecution and extermination of the Jews was as much a conse