its admonitory subtext: that socialists of whatever stripe cannot be trusted to resist their ever-present demons on the far left (those popular fronts were no accident after all)." Malia writes that by reducing politics and ideology to anthropology, it "assure[s] us that contrary to Hannah Arendt, the 'Nazi/Soviet similarities' are insufficient to make denunciation a specifically 'totalitarian' phenomenon." He criticizes this argument by stating that "the difference between Nazi/Communist systems and Western ones is 'not qualitative but quantitative.' By implication, therefore, singling out Communist and Nazi terror in order to equate them becomes Cold War slander—the ideological subtext, as it happens, of twenty-five years of 'revisionist,' social-reductionist Sovietology." He further criticizes it by making the point that "this fact-for-fact's sake approach suggests that there is nothing specifically Communist about Communist terror—and, it would seem, nothing particularly Nazi about Nazi terror either." He states that "the bloody Soviet experiment is banalized in one great gray anthropological blur; and the Soviet Union is transmogrified into just another country in just another age, neither more nor less evil than any other regime going", and dismisses this as "obviously nonsense." For Malia, "the problem of moral judgment" is "inseparable from any real understanding of the past" and "from being human." Moral equivalence Malia asks "What of the moral equivalence of Communism and Nazism?" Malia writes that "[a]fter fifty years of debate, it is clear that no matter what the hard facts are, degrees of totalitarian evil will be measured as much in terms of present politics as in terms of past realities" and that "we will always encounter a double standard as long as there exist a left and a right", which he "roughly define[s] as the priority of compassionate egalitarianism for the one, and as the primacy of prudential order for the other." Malia states that "[s]ince neither principle can be applied absolutely without destroying society, the modern world lives in perpetual tension between the irresistible pressure for equality and the functional necessity of hierarchy." For Malia, it is "this syndrome" which "gives the permanent qualitative advantage to Communism over Nazism in any evaluation of their quantitative atrocities. For the Communist projects, in origin, claimed commitment to universalistic and egalitarian goals, whereas the Nazi projects offered only unabashed national egoism", causing their practices to be "comparable" and their "moral auras" to be "antithetical." According to this argument, "[a] moral man can have 'no