Thread by @rosendo_joe

Quotes from Domenico Losurdo's book "STALIN: THE HISTORY AND CRITIQUE OF A BLACK LEGEND" will be placed in this thread - along with comments on it

Thomas Mann quote "To place Russian communism and Nazi-fascism on the same moral place, in the measure that both are totalitarian, is superficial at best, fascism at worst...."

In the 90s, I recall US General Schwarzkopf doing a long segment on national TV just to pedlde the claim of Stalin's massive incompetence regarding threat posed by Hitler - a view echoed in Kruschev's "Serect Report".

Losurdo's refutation in Chpt 1 is absolutely devastating

Stalin was allegedly caught by surprise by Nazi invasion & Russia was woefully unprepared. Hence the death toll on Russia (& early Nazi success) far greater than it needed to be- all cuz Stalin was crazy enough to trust Hitler. Wrong

Lasurdo mined the notes of top Nazi officials that confirm how ready and well equipped the Red Army was for the nvasion. Huge preparations had been made for years. By day 10 of the invasion Nazi officials started to clue in to that reality

As for the exact timing of Nazi invasion it commonly depicted as being obvious from Nazi buildup on Russia’s border & from warnings to Stalin from British intel. But Brits were also spreading shit Stalin knew was false

AND Nazis were NOT being that obvious about their intentions. Only a month before the invasion, the British thought it was a bluff, & Nazi officials were happy with their efforts to suggest it was a bluff aimed at coercing increased Russian raw mat'l exports to Germany

Chpt 2: The Bolsheviks: From Ideological Conflict to Civil War:

“In 1921 and 1922, literally tens of thousands of Bolshevik workers ripped up their membership cards, so disgusted by the NEP they had renamed it the New Extortion of the Proletariat."

"...the impression that it’s not specific aspects of the economic reality that are looked at with distrust or indignation, but that very reality as a whole. It’s necessary not to lose sight of the millenarian expectations that characterize revolution for the lower strata..."

"Stalin makes use of the principle of peaceful
coexistence between countries with different social systems...guaranteed the Soviet Union the right to independence in a world that was hostile and militarily stronger, in the eyes of Trotsky appeared to be a betrayal..."

"...a position that Trotsky stresses still in 1940: it would have been better not to have started the war against Finland, but once started, it should have been “seen through until the end, that is, until the sovietization of Finland"

"Trotsky mocks―”the solemn rehabilitation of the family” takes place at the same time that money becomes respected again; “the family is reborn at the same time in which the coercive role of the ruble is reaffirmed" "

"...1936, Stalin criticizes those who want “to prohibit the holding of religious ceremonies” and “deprive clergymen of their right to vote."182 And again Trotsky intervenes to denounce that unacceptable retreat..."

"In the first years of Soviet Russia, more so than with Stalin, the anti-”bureaucratic” polemic primarily attacks Lenin and even Trotsky, ..... noticeable changes in the following years...the approval of the constitution of 1936 alone represents a radical change..."

"Stalin shows indecision and contradiction, likely driven by the necessity of moving with caution through a
political minefield, where any deviation with respect to the classic thesis of the state’s withering away
would expose him to the accusation of betrayal"

"If we don’t want to be held prisoners to the caricatures of Stalin drawn by Trotsky and Khrushchev ... it’s necessary not to lose sight of the fact
that the events that began in October 1917 are marked by three civil wars"

"The first war saw the confrontation between the revolution on one side, and the coalition of its enemies on the other, supported by capitalist powers committed to containing the Bolshevik contagion by any means
possible"

"The second war is more or less the collectivization of agriculture, which is driven by a revolution from above or from afar, despite in part being driven by the peasantry from below. The third is that which divided the Bolshevik leadership group"

Probably quoting too much so I'll just comment that Losurdo effectively refutes the idea that Stalin should be caricatured as as mad with paranoia as Kurschev did the in the "Secret Report". Lasurdo is about as effectively as he was erfuting the charge of incompetence in Chpt 1

"The entirety of these convoluted and tragic conflicts
vanish in the differing accounts, described first by Trotsky and later by Khrushchev, that tell simple
fables and construct a monster who at his mere touch transforms gold into blood and dirt"

After invasion of USSR "the leader of the Third Reich’s propaganda services is even more pleased: “now we are using three clandestine radio stations in Russia: the first is Trotskyist, the second separatist, the third Russian-nationalist, all are critical of the Stalinist regime"

"While the flames of the Second World War burn ever higher...Trotsky...making..statements that are anything but reassuring. Let’s see a few of them: “Soviet patriotism can’t be separated from the irreconcilable struggle against the Stalinist clique” (June 8th, 1940)"

“...the need to topple the bureaucracy [in power in
Russia] through a revolutionary uprising by the workers” (September 25th, 1939); “Stalin and the oligarchy led by him represent the principal danger to the Soviet Union” (April 13th, 1940)"

"It is quite understandable that the 'bureaucracy' or the 'oligarchy', branded as the 'principal enemy', is
convinced that the opposition, if not at the direct service of the enemy, is in any case ready from the
start to follow-up its actions"

Chpt 3. Between the Twentieth Century and The Longue Durée, from the History of Marxism to the History of Russia: the Origins of "Stalinism"

Lasurdo says that Marx, commenting on Russia in 1859, argued that "if the nobility continues to oppose the emancipation of the peasantry, a grand revolution will break out; and from it will arise a “reign of terror by these halfAsiatic serfs, unequaled in history." "

1859 Marx essay: "the reign of terror of these half-Asiatic serfs will be something unequaled in history; but it will be the second turning point in Russian history, and finally place real and general civilization in the place of that sham and show introduced by Peter the Great"

Looked up the 1859 Marx essay online to give a more extensive quote than Losurdo provided. Point is that even astute observers from afar could see a revolution coming in Russia for a very long time

hiaw.org/defcon6/works/…

".. ferocious repression that’s used to confront the
revolution of 1905...orders “the governors to ‘immediately proceed to the execution’ of the rebels, and to burn and level the villages where the disturbances originate from."...“military courts”,
“collective punishment”,..."

After February Revolution of 1917 "Soon shaken is the myth of a country that, after the overthrow of autocracy, would happily proceed in the direction of liberalism and democracy. It’s a myth encouraged by Churchill who, to justify his interventionist policy..."

Churchill "accuses the Bolsheviks―sustained by 'German gold'―of having violently overthrown the 'Russian Republic' and the 'Russian parliament' " in the October 1917 revolution in which the Bolsheviiks seized power but Churchill himself had to know that was bullshit.

Churchill "knew very well that between February and October London had continually supported coup attempts that sought to restore the tsarist autocracy or impose a military dictatorship. It’s Kerensky himself who points out that “ BUT Losurdo adds...

However, from his exile in the United States, the Menshevik leader [Kerensky] never gives up cultivating this myth in question, accusing the Bolsheviks of a double treason, against the homeland and against the 'recently born Russian democracy.' "

Losurdo then cites sources describing a horrifying level of revenge violence & atrocities agaist military & other elitees assoicated with Tsarist government that took after the Feb 1917 revolution and BEFORE the October 1917 Bolshevik takeover

Also Before October a crisis in food production in the countryside had already led Kerenky's liberal ministes to advocate the "requisition" food from the countryside by "force of arms"
So in stepped the Bolsheviks to restore a collasping state

Losurdo says "An irony of history, the state was restored by a party that worked for and desired the final extinction of the state!"
But conditions were very dire, & reprisals agaist tthe Boslhevik restoration of the state was often horrific

Losurdo cites hostorian saying "We’re dealing with a terrible, vengeful war against the communist regime. Thousands of Bolsheviks were brutally killed. Many of them victims of horrible (and symbolic) torture.
Ears, tongues and eyes ripped out; limbs, heads and genitals cut off"

And the anti-government atrocities often targetd Jews as well as Bolsheviks.

"because it was a matter of vengeance, it took on forms not only brutal, but also purely destructive" - describes lootng, vandalism, destruction of agricultural machinery, elite homes, chuches, schools, artwork

The Bolsheviks began establishing collective farms in 1920 out of necessity, not just ideology. Male peasant hostility often driven by fears Bolshiviks came to "collectivize" their wives & daughters. "Abolish the nuclear family" ideas & rhetoric obvioulsy did damage

“the final report of an inquiry done in 1920 by the Jewish Agency in Soviet Russia speaks of ‘over one hundred and fifty thousand documented deaths’ and nearly three hundred thousand presumed victims, including the dead and injured."

Losurdo says 1914-1937 is "Second Times of Troubles" similar to Russia's "Time of Troubles" in 17th century that ended with Peter the Great in power. The 2nd "ends with Stalin’s consolidation of power and the industrialization and ...preparation for the approaching war"

"Over the long duration of the Second “Time of Troubles”, the role played by ideology is beyond
question...not just a matter of Bolshevik ideology. We
have seen the millenarian hopes that accompanied the fall of the tsarist autocracy, ...the theme of the betrayed revolution..."

"The outraged cries caused by defrauded and betrayed millenarian hopes are met in turn by declarations of victory in the bourgeois camp for the fact that, with the introduction of NEP, even Lenin―so the argument
goes―sees himself obligated to turn his back on Marx and socialism"

Anyone who has clsely follow critiques of Chavismo in #Venezuela from diverse people should recognize the dynamic Losurdo describes in the quote I just tweeted.

"...adversaries and enemies of the October Revolution were ready to celebrate its failure every time plans were drawn up to move on from the phase of millenarian expectations, to the less enthusiastic but more realistic phase of building a new society"

"All of this could only strengthen the already existing tendency in the Bolshevik party, itself a consequence of the spiritual climate whipped up by the war, in favor of radicalizing the utopian themes found in Marx’s thinking"

"Kollontai calls upon communists to cultivate a universal sense of responsibility; moving past, even with regard to children, the distinction between 'yours' and 'mine', struggling alongside others for that which is common to
all, for that which is 'ours.' "

"... according to Lenin, Kollontai’s theory was
'anti-social.' But while they appreciate it in relation to the family question, the Bolshevik leaders tend to forget
the unity of the universal and the particular when confronting the national question"

"Third International starts from the assumption that a single party of the international proletariat is called upon to achieve the universal emancipation of humanity, without getting confused by “so-called ‘national interests’”

"Soon after, the Third International goes through a difficult learning process that would lead to Dimitrov’s report before its Seventh Congress in 1935, which denounces any kind of “national nihilism” as dangerous."

But Trotsky stuck with it

Lasurdo says "It would be easy to use against Trotsky his own argument from the polemic against Kollontai [who wanted abolition of nuclear family]" Losurdo notes that Tsarist Russian elite were very unpatriotic - & also reactionary. One cld say the same of Latin American elite

Losurdo describes Stalin in 1931 speech saying "In the past we had no nation, nor could we have one” and then focussing the speech on (compared to world wide revolution) mudane tasks of building Russia's productve, tech & scientific capacity

"It’s interesting to see the way Trotsky, in the middle of the 1930s, casts aside his wise critiques of Kollontai and mocks Stalin’s rehabilitation of the family"

"We can think of the distrust or the hostility with which Rosa Luxemburg generally viewed nationalist movements,"

Losurdo notes she critized Boshelvik autharitarism but also implted them to "to crush with an iron fist any nationalist tendencies”

"Luxemburg also strongly criticizes the Bolsheviks
for their “petty-bourgeois” agrarian reform, which conceded land to the peasantry"

Losurdo mentions Hegel a lot in this chapter which sent me running to Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy to brush up. BR sums up Hegel's "Absolute Idea" as "thought thinking about itself" & comapres t to Aristotle's conception of God. Whoa. Let's get back to Russia

Russell again: "[Hegel's] Absolute Idea is pure thought thinking about pure thought. This is all the God does throughout the ages - truly a Professor's God"

Russell: "The whole, in all its complexity, is called by Hegel 'the Absolute'. The Abosulte is Spiritual." Others had similar views but Hegel , according to BR, put extra emphasis on two things:

1) "that the nature of Reality can be deduced fomr the sole consideration that it cannot be self-contradictory"
2) "the triatic movement called the 'dialectic' " which Marx found useful & important

And Hegel also incorporated the dialectic into a theory of history - that states (Hegel loved the German state) evolve to higher levels

Russell was my 1rst intellectual hero many decades ago, but today I see a western imperial bias in him that I didn't back then. For example, in his summary of Hegel, Russell caually asserts that the USA was a "society without extreme poverty"
Say what?
www2.census.gov/programs-surve…

Not clear if Russell referred only to 1946 (when History of Western Philosophy came out, but it was an absurd thing to say even if referring only to that year, never mind any period before that in US history. And he says this as he bashes Hegel (justly) forGerman state worship

That said, I believe Russell saying that the theoretical underpinnings of Hegel's philosophy - as far as nature of truth/reality go - was based on faulty logic. But that's not same thing as Hegel's theory of history, which cld be useful even if theoretical foundations were shaky

Russell spent much of his life tormented by his realization that the theoretical foundations of mathematics were shaky. His Principia Matematica was attenmpt to put himself at ease, but he admitted to have failed in his ultimate goal even if he was proud of soem of its findings

And in Engineering I was taught Newtonian physics, cuz it works well enough, without worrying about it being superceded by Theory of Relativity. So Russell says of Hegel that his theory of history was "interesting" BUT

"...it required, if it was to be made plausible, some distortion of facts and considerable ignorance. Hegel, like Marx and Spengler after him, possessed both these qualifications" But nobody knows all history, & all of us have blind spots about histories we shld know, as BR did

Marx's theory of history (historical materiaism) differed from Hegel in substituting states with classes: "a blend of Hegel and British economists" said BR in the same book, and also conceded that "it contains very important elements of truth" though he still did not accept it

I addition to Russell's book I also consulted my friend @frederickbmills about Hegel. This essay of Fred's has the following passage that refers to Hegel (screenshot below)
orinocotribune.com/dussel-now-the…

So with that disgresson about Hegel out of the way, Lasurdo cites Hegel's general observations about various revolutions in history (as Lenin did) remarking on the tension between "univeraslist" aspirations they generate & atttion to the everyday "particular" after the suceed

"Stalin, thanks also to his concrete experience in government, seriously committed himself to the learning process through which, according to Hegel’s teachings, the leadership group of a grand revolution is forced
to pass through"

Stalin saw "emptiness of the millenarian expectations for the disappearance of the state, nations, markets, and money" and in some quarters even the sruvival of the family is a sign of "contamination" of Marxist ideals

Chapter 4. The Complex and Contradictory Course of the Stalin Era

Lasurdo: "It seems evident that, at least starting from 1937, and starting with the outbreak of the Great Terror, the dictatorship of the party gives way to autocracy [of Stalin]"

in mid-1920s”having survived the severe crisis represented by foreign intervention and civil war, NEP has achieved significant results: not only is there no autocracy, but despite the communist party’s continued dictatorship, ...power tends to become more ‘liberal.’ “

“The centrality of economic development, and therefore of competence, makes the party monopoly less rigid:”

“...November 1925, the treaty of Locarno ...Drawing France and Germany closer together…thus formalizing the USSR’s isolation...Months later, the coup d’état in Poland marks Pilsudski's rise…hopes to take Ukraine from the USSR in order to make it a subaltern and loyal ally”

“The following year…Great Britain cuts off commercial and diplomatic relations with the USSR…in Warsaw the Soviet ambassador is assassinated by a white Russian émigré…in Leningrad there’s an explosion at the headquarters of the communist party.”

“At this point, ... chief of staff of the armed forces, …demands a rapid modernization of the military…presses for similar measures in agriculture...guaranteeing a regular food supply for the frontline…the policy shift in 1929 isn’t the result of Stalin’s impulsiveness,...”

“Having survived the 'Saint Bartholomew’s night' that was the forced collectivization of agriculture, with the terrible social and human costs that come with it, the political relaxation that we previously encountered appears to reemerge”

And it "…provokes a fierce polemic by Trotsky, who identifies in it 'Stalin’s liberalism',…” But Lasurdo notes that Stalin has defeated the threat to food supply posed by Kulak resistance & "has no interest in further exacerbating the political and social conflict"

“It’s the drive to rapidly industrialize which compels him to seek the promotion of 'non-party' elements to management posts...not possible to promote industrial and technological development without... material incentives for the training of workers and specialized technicians"

THUS "conditions mature for the outbreak of the third civil war, the one that will decimate the very ranks of the Bolsheviks. “

Trotsky denounces “concessions to the peasantry, to their interests and their petty-bourgeois tendencies." & a alleges “new processes of class stratification"

& calls USSR entry into League of Nations as yet another betrayal.

"In the three decades of Soviet history led by Stalin, the principal aspect is not the transition from dictatorship of the party to autocracy, but more precisely the repeated attempts to transition from the state of emergency to a state of relative normality”

“…this series of failures [to achieve normality] finally results in the arrival of autocracy, exercised by a leader who’s the object of a genuine cult of personality…”

Lasurdo reminds us that with strife & repression under Stalin there were also huge gains unattainable before 1917. In 1932 "a young American diplomat, destined later to become famous as the advocate for soviet containment, namely George Kennan, sends a cable to Washington..."

Kennan's cable, sent from Riga, speaks of "certain part of the youth” "“extremely enthusiastic and happy, as can only occur among human beings completely dedicated to tasks that have no relation to their personal lives” "an unlimited selfconfidence"

Lasurdo adds "Of course, here Kennan is more familiar with the reality in the cities (where, despite the
contradictions, the changes had, in fact, aroused the enthusiasm of a large part of the youth,
intellectuals, and industrial workers)"

Losurdo then get’s into a long discussion/refutation of exaggerations re. prison conditions under Stalin and does so quoting extensively from fanatical anti-communist & warmonger Anne Applebaum

“…1937 witnesses a brutal turn [in prison conditions]. While the third civil war rages and increasingly ominous clouds gather on the international horizon, the fifth column, real or assumed, becomes the objective of an increasingly obsessive hunt”

"...the detainee is no longer a potential 'comrade', it’s then prohibited to refer to them as such; they are now called 'citizen'...potentially an enemy of the people. Is it from this moment on that the Soviet concentration camp is driven by homicidal intent?"

"That is how the American researcher repeatedly cited here [Applebaum] thinks, but yet again her research refutes her: “In the 1940s, in theory the KVC of each camp had an instructor, a small library, and a ‘circular’ where theatrical performances and concerts were organized, .."

'as well as political conferences and debates.' "There’s more. While Hitler’s war of annihilation rages on ...'time and money' are generously invested to strengthen and improve 'the propaganda, manifestos, and the political indoctrination meetings' for the prisoners:"

"Within the records of the Gulag administration alone, there are hundreds and hundreds of documents testifying to the intensive work of the Cultural-Educational Department."

"In the first quarter of 1943, for example, at the height of the war, frantic telegrams were sent back and forth from the camps to Moscow, as camp commanders desperately tried to procure musical instruments for their prisoners"

“Certainly, with the start of Hitler’s invasion, the detainees experience the dramatic consequences of the shortages, but that has nothing to do with the emergence of homicidal intention”

ASIDE
[Compare COVID death rate in USA inside & outside prisons]
publichealth.jhu.edu/2020/covid-19-…

Impressive how much Lasurdo cites Anne Applebaum and uses her own research against her.

Anyway, onto a sub section of chpt4 entitled "Tsarist Siberia, Liberal Britain’s 'Siberia', and the Soviet Gulag"

“ Should we compare, or directly associate, the Soviet Gulag with the Nazi Konzentrationslager? It’s a question that could be answered with another: why limit the comparison between just these two realities? "

"...With respect to the 'Irish dissidents', ...'between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they had their official Siberia in Australia',..." which at least up until 1868 consumed 'representatives of nearly all the existing radical movements in Great-Britain.' "

"That’s in relation to repression. But ...necessary not to lose sight of the economic function of liberal Britain’s 'Siberia.'...diminished to the degree that labor came in, first with black slaves, ...the Chinese and Indian coolies, as well as other colonial peoples"

"The British 'Siberia' is no less cruel than the Tsarist one. On this 'totalitarian society', which is built in Australia while at the same time an extermination of the Aborigines is carried out, ..."

"On the other side of the Atlantic, Franklin D. Roosevelt orders citizens of Japanese origin, including women and children, to be interned in concentration camps. However, the United States is clearly in a more favorable geopolitical situation than the Soviet Union"

"...after the battle of Midway, no longer could one speak of military and security concerns. Yet the Americans of Japanese origin continued to be confined...freedom is only completely obtained in the middle of 1946, nearly a year after the end of the war"

"Even slower is the return home of Latin American citizens of Japanese origin deported to the United States from thirteen Latin American countries. Only in 1948 were the last ones freed from the “internment camp”―or concentration camp―in Crystal City, Texas"

"Even if one sought to start from the basis of the exceptional scale and severity of the Soviet Gulag, the principal problem still remains unresolved: It’s always necessary to distinguish the role of ideology from the role of the objective conditions..."

" ...(the exceptional gravity of the threat and the general hardship that characterized the USSR)"

From 1918 – 1934 “Soviet power is confronted by terrorism (a phenomenon with a long history in Russia) and it fears the infiltration of the state apparatus at all levels by an opposition determined to topple from power the 'usurpers' and 'traitors.' "

"In other words, only with the arrival of autocracy does Soviet power achieve full control over its territory and the state apparatus; and the terror is, firstly, a response to an unprecedented, acute and long lasting crisis…”

"The awareness of the growing threat of the war, and the obsessive hunt of a fifth column that’s broadly spread out and well hidden, this generalized fear and hysteria transform the assemblies in the factories, labor unions and party into a 'war of all against all.' "

"Sometimes, it’s Stalin and his closest collaborators who see themselves forced to intervene to contain and concentrate this rage, warning against the tendency to find traitors and saboteurs everywhere, and thus destroying party and labor union organizations"

"...the Second World War...threatens to inflict on the country and nation as a whole an even more gigantic catastrophe: the annihilation and enslavement clearly described in Mein Kampf"

"And the terror arises during an industrialization in forced stages that aims to save the country and the nation, during which the large scale and ferocious repression combines with real processes of emancipation..."

"(the massive expansion of education and culture, the remarkable upward social mobility, the emergence of the welfare state, the tumultuous and contradictory protagonism of social classes until that time condemned to a completely subaltern status)"

"Hitler comes to power with an explicit program of war and territorial expansion...Nazi Germany’s expansionism also aims at reasserting across the globe the supremacy of the white and Aryan race, and to take up and radicalize the colonial tradition, applying it to Eastern Europe"

"... the path is laid to treat the inferior races of Eastern Europe following the example of what happened to the Native Americans, that they must be exterminated to make room for the German settlers, and also to be slaves in the service of the white and Aryan master race"

"The war unleashed by Hitler in Eastern Europe represents the new and even more brutal form of the slave trade. Captured and exploited in masse, the enslaved Untermenschen …conditions similar to those of blacks (in the Caribbean) to whom...the Führer explicitly compares them"

"...prisoner in the Gulag is a potential “comrade” obligated to participate in particularly hard conditions in the strengthening of production inside the country
...prisoner in the Nazi Lager is firstly an Untermensch, forever marked by their nationality or racial degeneration"

"...to find a precise analogy for the Konzentrationslager, it’s necessary to bring in the concentrationary universe that profoundly marked the colonial tradition (in whose wake Hitler explicitly intended to place himself) "

"We are also forced to think of Nazism when we read the forms in which the 'Canadian Holocaust' (or the 'final solution to our indigenous question') was perpetrated. The 'Commission for the Truth about the Canadian Genocide' speaks of 'death camps'..."

"...of 'men, women and children' who are 'deliberately exterminated', of a 'system whose objective is to destroy the greatest part possible of the native people through sickness, deportation, and murder itself.' "

"To achieve this, the champions of white supremacy don’t hesitate in hurting 'innocent children', who die 'from beatings and torture, or after having been deliberately exposed to tuberculosis and other illnesses'; others go on to suffer forced sterilization..."

"In this case as well, one may assume that righteous indignation may have overstated the case; yet it remains evident that we are faced with practices identical or similar to those in force in the Third Reich"

"Let’s move on now to the Southern United States….Between 1877 and 1880, during the construction of the railroads of Greenwood and Augusta, 'nearly 45%' of the forced laborers die there, 'and they were youths in the prime of their lives.' "

"Another statistic can be cited from the same time period: 'In the first two years in which Alabama rented out its prisoners, nearly 20% died. In the following year the mortality rate jumped to 35%. In the fourth year nearly 45% died….' "

"even substantially inflating the official numbers, it seems difficult to approach the mortality rate [in Gulags at start of 1930s] we’ve just seen among African American inmates…"

"...one essential point: in the Southern United States, black prisoners suffer horrible living and working conditions and die en masse during peacetime; the state of emergency doesn’t play any role, and concern with production is also either marginal or totally absent..."

"...eminent American historians who compare the prison system we just saw with the 'prison camps of Nazi Germany.' And it’s no coincidence that the medical experiments―done to Untermenschen in Nazi Germany―in the United States have been carried out using blacks as guinea pigs"

"...imperialist and colonialist Germany conducted their medical experiments in Africa at the expense of Africans; during this activity two doctors distinguish themselves and later become the teachers of Joseph Mengele"

Note how Losurdo doesn't downplay what the Nazi's were BUT clearly links them to lonstanding western imperial practices & assumptions. He does not caricature Nazis as one-time freaks who appeared out of nowhere

For more of that kind of analysis , see @RodericDay 's "Really Existing Fascism" essay
redsails.org/really-existin…

"[The Nazi] project would have yet devoured an infinite number of more victims, if it had not been defeated by an opposing project, based on the recognition not only of existential rights, but also the cultural and national rights of the natives"

"the Bolshevik party as a whole, and especially Stalin, commit themselves to a “new and fascinating experiment in governing a multiethnic State”