Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

seen above, after careful scrutiny the verdict of many historians is
that the two regimes are essentially different despite certain similarities.
The problem thus is not with the comparison per se, but with how
comparisons are conducted and for what purposes. Too often, instead
of being informed by up-to-date theoretical and methodological
perspectives in the field, recent comparative works on
fascism and communism reverted uncritically to a Cold-War definition
of totalitarianism, as if it has not been superseded. Moreover,
in the post-communist political context, the politicized Cold-War
concept of totalitarianism was transformed into a major tool of
political propaganda meant to settle scores and to eliminate enemies
from the political scene. The comparison between fascism
and communism thus served as a form of anti-communism, of
demonizing the recent past by associating it with Nazism, the
greatest evil in history.
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