You might want to read this article, Tom. It discusses a new book, ''Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million.''

From the article:

"Amis concedes that regardless of overall body counts, Nazism's purposeful, systematic extermination of human beings based solely on their ethnicity was more evil and repugnant than Communism's more haphazard slaughter. But this tiny moral differential between the two regimes does not justify the vast gap in general awareness of their crimes - or the stark double standard in their public judgment.

Thus, Amis notes that at a 1999 public event in London, Hitchens's joking remark about his Communist past was received with affectionate laughter; a similar casual reference to one's past as a Nazi sympathizer would be unthinkable.

There is an even more striking example of this double standard that Amis does not mention. In 1996, a firestorm erupted over the scheduled publication of a biography of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels by British Holocaust revisionist David Irving. After vehement protests, the publisher, St. Martin's Press, withdrew the book.

Around the same time, the Yale University Press published ''Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941,'' by Miami (Ohio) University professor Robert Thurston, who argued that the death toll of Stalin's terror had been greatly exaggerated.

Thurston also asserted that Stalin never planned to rule by terror, he just reacted to events and let things spin out of control - ironically, much the same argument Irving makes about the Nazi murder of the Jews."