Progress or Paganism

Anne Applebaum in her Pulitzer Prize winning book Gulag: A History contrasts the horror and revulsion most intellectuals felt for Naziism as compared with the comparative indifference they exhibited to Stalin's tyranny, which arguably resulted in more victims than Hitler's evil. Ms. Applebaum doesn't speculate as to why this is the case (Introduction, xix), but I have my ideas.

Communism was attractive to western intellectuals because it seemed to represent the culmination of the secular progress of the Enlightenment, and was viewed as a fulfillment of Christian eschatology, shorn of its other-worldly emphasis. Naziism, to the contrary, was a throwback to paganism pure and simple. Morris Berman, in Coming to our Senses, at p. 258, cites the work of the Austrian writer Guido von List (1848 - 1919), who argued that Germany needed to return to a pure paganism emphasizing the volkisch life and a true religion of pagan sun worship. Hitler was exposed to these ideas in his youth and the Nazii movement embodied many of them. Martin Bormann, Hitler's deputy after Rudolph Hess "flew the coop" wrote, "The National Socialist and the Christian outlooks are incompatible. Our National Socialist philosophy stands far higher than the conception of Christianity . . . If in the future our youth hears nothing about Christianity, whose teaching is much lower than ours, Christianity will disappear of itself." (Quoted from Joe J. Heydecker and Johannes Leeb, The Nuremberg Trial, p. 243 (World Publishing Co. 1958)).

Each of these ideologies, really false religions, caused millions of deaths. So shouldn't we be leery of new "liberation" movements that claim to see reality more clearly than Judeo-Christianity?