Vote for the most shameful atrocity!

Post Reply New Topic

I think that's because the Nazis had been defeated and the perpetrators of their crimes had been prosecuted before a world audience. Not so with Stalin's Great Purge, as Stalin died in bed on the winning side of WWII, and his accessories remained free and unpunished. Even the revelations of Stalin's crimes were gradual and slow in coming.

In America, the "most shameful" is the loser. So, it is the people that were massacred that would be the ones most shamed. Killing "barbaric" Indians is viewed as a triumph , not shame. Dropping bombs on Japan is viewed as glorious. Winning battles, winning wars , defeating thy enemy is viewed as pride, not shame. We even honor North and South winning civil war generals who won victories killing our own people.

So, from this perspective, you would look to see who put up the least resistance/ suffered the most horrifically (i.e., "the biggest loser"), and that would be the party with the most shame.

I don't think famine is as shameful as letting Nazi people torture you and burn you, so I pick the Nazi holocaust.

/\ Historically, the victor tries the loser. Don't hold your breath waiting for that to change.

It should be remembered that Stalin's purges were not just mass starvation, but also included Soviet concentration camps or gulags, in which political prisoners and hardened criminals of both sexes were housed together. It was not uncommon for the Soviet guards to organize rape gangs among the prisoners, if they hadn't done so already, then watched them "have fun" for their own sadistic amusement. These gulags could range from work camps to out and out murder factories - though even in the work camps, inmates literally died by the millions.

Even though its not on the list I would say Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward. He managed to kill 45 million people in only four years, that is quite an accomplishment! http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/m ... k=ibaf&q=m

I had thought that was conspicuously missing. Not to cast aspersions on the OP, as Mao's atrocities had taken place largely unnoticed by the world at large, and became known in full only several years after the fact.

The GLF hadn't occurred to me but I can think of reasons to not include it.

The sort of atrocity I had in mind would have been typically committed against people considered "different" by the perpetrator and either with the express purpose of extermination (Hitler) or full realization that large-scale loss of life would result (Trail of Tears).

Let's assume for sake of argument that Mao sincerely believed in the superiority of Communism as a way to organize society, then one can imagine that he expected his people to truly benefit from his efforts to bring about Communism as quickly as possible. Even if conceding that his motives were more cynical, it's still hard to imagine what he stood to gain by the deaths of millions of his fellow Chinese. Unless there is strong evidence that he targeted classes of people he believed opposed him (perhaps you all can enlighten us as I don't feel like researching the topic in depth at the moment.)

The atomic bombs where not terrible? not to mention dropping a second one when the first was probably more than enough.

Assuming you're talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those bombings were both necessary to bring about Japan's surrender. It was that or do it the old fashioned way with a land invasion and suffer higher losses, ours and theirs.

That.

And in poor judgment, and just dumb and inane.

why must we entertain this 'Oppression Olympics'? Peoples opinions on this matter are obviously going to be skewed because of their personal politics. There is no way to qualitively say that one atrocity is worse than another, and only cheapens the memories of the victims.