Just my two cents - I never lived in the Soviet Union, or Cambodia, but have visited them. I know many people who did.
I won’t say one was worse than the other, but at least in the Soviet Union and East Germany, these people were still under the influence of Christian/Western civilization. Of course the communist ideologues grasped this, hated it, and suppressed it - but the masses still operated unwittingly according to a millenia of this imperceptible influence in their cultural DNA.
There were no such limitations in the Chinese or Cambodian tyrannies.
I have to agree entirely. I think it is also a reason many military people looked at the European front in WWII versus the Pacific front, and saw an obvious disparity in the conduct and cruelty of the war.
Everyone likes to say “oh, people are people” and there is truth in that, but it is also true that it is easier to relate to people who ostensibly share the same God (the same God on the Wehrmacht belt buckle “Gott mit uns” (God is with us) and who observe Christmas, sing the same carols in different languages, etc. than it is to relate to people who worshiped their ancestors instead of God.