The New Utopia

In the context of Terry Eagleton's LRB attack on the career and actions of Pope John Paul II, Pearsall Helms has an interesting post on the similarities and differences between Fascism and Communism:

The lessons of Auschwitz are not difficult to comprehend: guard against bigotry and work to protect the weakest people and groups. What are the lessons of Kolyma, though? This is why I find Communism as it actually exists infinitely more depressing than Fascism. Fascism began with terrible, monstrous intentions, and fulfilled them and in the process merely showed that people will commit horrible crimes for primitive tribal purposes. Communism set out with beautiful intentions, and transformed most places it took hold of into vast necropolises. If this is what happens when people try to build a new utopia, what does it say about us as humans if this, virtually without fail, seems to be the result of a revolutionary striving for change?