A case of two standards.

I have always been in favor of trying the torturers, the secret policemen, and the informers who made Communism last as long as it did, the same way we tried Nazi war criminals. Justice should be seen to be done, or else a new lot of scoundrels will think they can get away with it. Even more urgently, we need to put on trial the Western liberals who aided and abetted them. These trials could be broadcast in the form of a program on CNN or C-SPAN, perhaps called Show Trial, with those pronounced guilty being offered a one-way ticket to North Korea. Otherwise, we shall forevermore have to live with endless effusions of hypocrisy such as those which Western liberals emitted in reaction to the new conservative government in Italy.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the Left raised howls of rage at media magnate Silvio Berlusconi's inclusion in his new government of five ministers belonging to the National Alliance. Naturally, "neo-fascists" in government for the first time since the war makes a good story.

Also, journalists do not, on the whole, approve when one of their own crosses into the opposite camp and becomes a politician. In Berlusconi's case it is not just one of their own crossing the line, but one of their bosses, so the hostility was guaranteed from the start. There are, moreover, legitimate questions as to how Berlusconi can convince voters that he has erected a Chinese wall between his premiership and his financial interests.

But instead of giving the new prime minister time to sort out the issues and to present his program, Berlusconi's opponents have launched a moral crusade. President Mitterrand went on French television to express his displeasure and concern. The deputy chairman of the German SPD called the inclusion of National Alliance ministers a "disgrace for Italy and for Europe." Belgium's deputy prime minister announced that "for moral reasons" Belgian ministers will not associate with National Alliance ministers. At that proud tower of political wisdom in the modern world, the European Parliament in Strasbourg, angry leftwing deputies vowed never to sit down or deal with the Italian "neofascists."

If jackboots were thumping up and down the streets of Rome, there would indeed be cause for concern. However, on my recent visit, cashmere jackets were more in evidence than brown shirts. The Italians themselves seem equally untroubled. In a recent poll, 60 per cent said that National Alliance participation in government posed no threat to democracy. Italy's president has also rejected the insults and reaffirmed that the new government will unquestionably respect Italy's alliances, treaties, and borders. But if there is no threat to Italian democracy or to the international order, then what is it that fires the Left's moral crusaders?

After all, the political heirs of totalitarian regimes have been taking power on average once every six months for the last couple of years. When Poland's Social Democrats (the re-named Communist Party) took power after the general election in September 1993, the word from the State Department, the Foreign Office, liberal politicians, and most of the press was that there is no cause for concern because these people are "reformed." Members of the same German SPD that condemns Italy's "neo-fascists" actually helped to elect Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz - a Pole who was once a Communist presidential candidate and who is the son of a 1950s Stalinist torturer - as the chairman of the human-rights commission of the Council of Europe. The recent Socialist Party landslide in Hungary has likewise been greeted with equanimity, even though the party's chairman led the traitorous local thugs who helped the Soviet Army suppress the Hungarian uprising in 1956.

U.S. journalism reflects the same priorities. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post have among them devoted more than 3,300 words to reports warning of the dangerous consequences of the Italian Center/Right victory. Several reports linked the new government with the crimes of the Mussolini years; others were devoted to fretting over whether the rightists had successfully shed their fascist past.

By contrast the same newspapers made no negative references to Communists' regaining power in Poland and Lithuania - and gave only 370 words to concerns about the restoration of Communist power in Hungary. And at that, the anxiety was concentrated on the party leader's personal record rather than the historic record of the Hungarian Communist Party. Indeed, a Times editorial expressly reassured its readers that "the resurrection of Hungary's Communists need not cause alarm."

This contrasting treatment is particularly instructive since the National Alliance is a junior partner in Italy's new government, whereas Hungary's former Communists enjoy an absolute majority in Parliament and could form a government without any partners at all. A second instructive contrast: the New York Times, leaving nothing to chance, pointed out that Mussolini had not in fact made the trains run on time; but the same newspaper claimed, absurdly, that Erich Honecker had "brought prosperity" to East Germany.

A final contrast sums up the media's attitudes: phrases like "a resurgence of fascism" have occurred 48 times in the three newspapers since just before the Berlusconi victory. There were no phrases like "a resurgence of communism" in the stories on Poland, Hungary, and Lithuania.

Could we possibly be dealing here with something of a double standard? Political heirs of one totalitarian movement are suspect even after half a century of purgatory and even though they were children (or not yet born) when their antecedents were in power. On the other hand, the political heirs of another totalitarian movement are acceptable within a few years, even when they personally wielded undemocratic power.

As usual, the difference in treatment seeps into the language. Men who made their careers under Khrushchev and Brezhnev are "former" or "reformed" Communists, which suggests that they have repented of their bad old ways and turned over a new leaf. Men who cannot even remember Mussolini, on the other hand, are "neo"-fascists - which faintly insinuates a desire to restore fascism, even when the party's leaders stress that they regard fascism as a distant memory.

It is not worth trying to compare the respective nastinesses of the two totalitarianisms. Suffice it to say that, whether by body count or by hostility to human freedoms, they were worthy of each other. What is interesting is why Western liberals and left-wingers have still not grasped this simple truth. Why do they greet the resurgence of one totalitarian tradition with indifference and the shadow of the other with rage and indignation?

Some reasons are obvious: the fascist powers lost the war, and their criminality was fully exposed and judged by the victors; while the Soviet Union not only was the democracies' ally, but actually inspired the enthusiasm of such icons of the Left as FDR. As Paul Hollander pointed out recently in these pages, even when we discover new evidence of Soviet genocide, such as the mass graves in Byelorussia containing 200,000 corpses, Western liberals in the media and government quite literally don't want to know.

For modern liberals have the same ideological roots as the Communists. Even today, though discarded in practice, nationalization and state control over the economy are still in the platform of, for example, the British Labour Party. Most of the European Left chose democracy rather than revolution and thereby veered away from the Bolsheviks, but these were schisms within the Marxist church rather than different faiths. No wonder that the prodigal sons are now being welcomed back with open arms. The Left does not want to see the former Communists condemned any more than it wishes to be reminded of its own intellectual collaboration with the Soviet Union, its enthusiasms for peace movements, convergence theories, Che Guevara, or Hanoi Jane. At bottom, the Left's affair with the Soviet Union also tells us something sad about human nature: provided you lie big enough, millions of clever fools will be taken in. And rather than admit it, they will continue to excuse the regimes that lied.

On reflection, North Korea is too good for them.

Mr. Sikorski. NR's roving correspondent, wrote about the Afghanistan war in his book The Dust of the Saints.