To an intelligentsia steeped in Hegel, communism represented a progression to the universal, fascism a regression to the particular. The crimes of the Bolsheviks could be justified on the grounds that they served a progressive cause, whereas those of the fascists were without excuse. Even today, few people accept that communism and fascism share an equality of guilt. The Holocaust has been etched into popular consciousness, whereas Stalin's crimes remain obscure. His wickedness was more subtle, more artistic, than the straightforward brutality of Hitler.
Evil is always most insidious when it masquerades as the highest good.
Lucifer was the fairest of the angels. Furet's is very much the view from the Left Bank. The influences that propelled the Paris intelligentsia towards Moscow were more or less absent in England. Unschooled in Hegelian metaphysics and jealous of their liberties, English thinkers were as inclined to equate communism and fascism as to contrast them. This permutation of loyalties would have seemed bizarre in France, where the opposition between left and right was more important than that between liberal and totalitarian.