Why are other dictators judged less harshly than Hitler?

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chris1989
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27 Jan 2023, 2:39 pm

Many would argue that other leaders in history such as Stalin and Mao caused millions more deaths than Hitler but unlike him they were given state funerals after they died. The only other leader I can think of that is universally hated is probably Pol Pot and even he unlike Hitler has a grave but it's just a mound of earth where he was cremated and a roof covering the mound. By the way I'm not at all suggesting that Hitler should have a grave, because he never should. He brought nothing to the world except death and destruction.



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27 Jan 2023, 3:45 pm

1. Communism promises equality and freedom for all, the devolves into fascism once the state decides its tired of giving stuff away. National Socialism starts with hyper-fascism - enemies of the state and those too incompetent to serve it must be destroyed down to a genetic level. People are more willing to forgive failed attempts at peace over affirming violence.

2. Hitler lost. As bad as Stalin and Mao were, at least their country didn't collapse. To signal against Hitler is, to a degree, pull oneself up by pushing another down.

3. Personality. Stalin and Mao were comparitively neurotypical. If Hitler were alive today, I think he'd get a double diagnosis of autism and narcissism - a tendency to be antisocial, treat things more like objects, and think you're better than others. Not nice, normal, fun to be around, or appropiate for the position of responsibility he was at. Men like Genghis Khan have some nobility behind their brutality. Hard to find positives about Hitler.



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27 Jan 2023, 6:06 pm

PenPen wrote:
1. Communism promises equality and freedom for all, the devolves into fascism once the state decides its tired of giving stuff away. National Socialism starts with hyper-fascism - enemies of the state and those too incompetent to serve it must be destroyed down to a genetic level. People are more willing to forgive failed attempts at peace over affirming violence.

2. Hitler lost. As bad as Stalin and Mao were, at least their country didn't collapse. To signal against Hitler is, to a degree, pull oneself up by pushing another down.

3. Personality. Stalin and Mao were comparitively neurotypical. If Hitler were alive today, I think he'd get a double diagnosis of autism and narcissism - a tendency to be antisocial, treat things more like objects, and think you're better than others. Not nice, normal, fun to be around, or appropiate for the position of responsibility he was at. Men like Genghis Khan have some nobility behind their brutality. Hard to find positives about Hitler.


IDK if I agree with #3, but I'm dittos on #2.

I disagree on #3 because Hitler was an expert on playing the part of a charismatic leader and had a team within the party who built him and coached him. It's easy to look at Hitler and imagine him acting within a vacuum. But in the end, even Hitler had to answer to his own.

It's really not easy to understand WHY Hitler failed when Stalin succeeded. Communism and National Socialism have so much in common at their core. The biggest thing they have in common is that government cannot be held responsible for its own actions so long as the "wrong people," i.e. NOT the oppressed minority, is in control. Both Germany and Russia were controlled by an aristocratic hegemony. Germany's hegemony was replaced by a weak republic that made too many concessions once Hitler and the former ruling class elite were deposed. There was a global economic recession that made reparations impossible for the German people to bear.

Think of it just like any other time individuals go into debt, like maybe losing a lawsuit. Suppose you break a contract. You have no assets, no personal property, etc. They drag you into a court, prove that you owe the money, and demand you pay damages. Exactly what is a judge supposed to do? He can order you to pay, but with what?

Germany was in a similar kind of position after the First World War. But by the time Hitler appeared on the scene, Germany was in a better position to negotiate war debts. Much of it could have been reduced or canceled as it was, honestly, unreasonable. Hitler simply declared that the debt was invalid and there was nothing the West could do about it.

Hitler was in a strong position at that point. The people loved him. He was able to sell the idea that Germany's predicament was not Germany's fault, that the war could have been won had the ruling class not been stabbed in the back by Jewish financiers at the expense of the empire.

So in Hitler's view, the "other" who was Germany's enemy were the Jews. Of course, if you know your history, you'll know it was racist ideas that forced Jews into the world of banking in the first place (Christians are not supposed to loan each other money at interest. Only those dirty, greedy Jews can do that). Ok, it's slightly more convoluted than that, but you get my point. Finding someone else to blame was one of the first steps in unifying the German people into a collective.

For the Soviets, it was the ruling class itself and living in a stratified society that allowed oppression to happen. Wealthy aristocrats owned the means of production and prevented upwards mobility from the workers and peasants. The "other" wasn't a dirty race of sub-human half-breeds. It was the aristocratic, elite hegemony. All of Russia were together in a violent overthrow of an oppressive minority and replace the hegemony with a new, liberal, academic elite. An unfortunate consequence of replacing a hegemony is the creation of a new one, despite the new hegemony being drawn from working-class academics. And in the case of Stalin, the reality of oppression was worse than with the Romanovs.

Their commonalities are that they are both collectivist regimes who can't accept any accountability for their own actions.

So what are the differences, and why did Stalin survive?

Lenin/Stalin knew they could never rebuild the Russian empire without their former territories in agreement with them against Romanov domestic policy. Lenin had to sell communism to Russia's satellite states, and they were buying. Lenin and Stalin never had to invade anyone. And the "other" (Romanovs) had already been eliminated. So all that was left was to unite and agree to an economic plan that would isolate the Soviets from the West.

Hitler, otoh, sold his plan exclusively to the German people without regard for any dangers his policies would pose to other ethnic groups. You want that house? You want that land? It was stolen by those dirty slavs, Jews, gypsies, or what have you. So just take it back. It's already yours, anyway. Why NOT invade Poland? What are the Polish people to us? The only real foreign policy that Hitler won on was the Anschluss with Austria, and in that case the ruling class elites were pretty much all on board with Hitler's plan. No, this wasn't cool with all Austrians, but it helped that Hitler's policies benefited Austrians as German-speaking people. That made it difficult to want to fight what would have been an impossible war, anyway. Hitler's failures weren't with domestic policy--Germans who were aware of Hitler's extermination plan to rid Germany of Jews didn't have enough problem with his domestic policy to oppose him. You can't say it was a national fear of Hitler that silenced the population, either, because Hitler rose to power by using the voting process to get party members into positions of power. National Socialism was a popular movement. Hitler failed not because of domestic policy, but foreign policy.

And that's where the invasion of Poland tipped the balance away from Hitler. The Third Reich is only one country with barely nominal support from Fascist Italy. Invading Poland and then picking on poor, little ol' Russia opened Germany up to war on too many fronts. There was the eastern front, the western front, French resistance, the war in North Africa, and U-Boats off the coast of the USA. Exactly what hope did Hitler expect to have fighting everyone else?

War, of course, is a hallmark of collectivism. For Hitler, it was a literal war with his neighbors for the glory of the Reich. For Russia, the war is entirely idealogical. It's an internal struggle. Another commonality between National Socialism and Communism is perpetual struggle and perpetual oppression. With Hitler, he, Germany, and the German people were the victims. Hitler's death embodies this in that he would not survive in a world without National Socialism. Poor guy. If it hadn't been for those other mean, Jew-loving people, the Third Reich would have lasted a thousand years. And for Hitler, it went so much deeper than that. If the German people were so weak that they couldn't win the war, they didn't deserve National Socialism or Hitler. They weren't worthy of it. It was best to let the German people themselves be completely destroyed. Hitler turning on his own people was his penultimate failure. But here's the thing: National Socialism didn't simply start a war that eventually MIGHT have been won. National Socialism DEPENDED on war. There had to be struggle. There had to be victims. There had to be oppressors. The war was never meant to end. What happened in Germany was Hitler ran out of soldiers to throw at the enemy.

In Russia, the war is internal. Communism doesn't succeed in the Soviet Union because there are still too many greedy capitalist elements around. Stalin's purges worked to sow fear, which solidified his control over the people. But it was more the way he did it that kept him in power. If you are a regional governor somewhere and you manage to hold your head above water by taking bribes or paying off potential enemies and keeping things quiet, Stalin isn't going to care. He's aware of what you're doing because he's the head of a police state. They know everything no matter how hard you try to hide it. So as long as you seem to have the support of people in your province, it's business as usual. But as soon as things go sour at Stalin's central office, he's going to look for people to blame. You have a few farmers starving because of wheat quotas. Well, it's YOUR fault, now. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't really, but people are dying in the street because you have to keep up your export quotas are stealing grain from "The People." It had nothing to do with you in reality. People were displeased with Stalin's policies and were planning a revolt. All Stalin has to say is that he had nothing to do with it, but YOU are corrupt and incompetent. He has a scapegoat he can throw under the bus. And he does it.

Scapegoating, perpetual victimhood, etc., are all features of Stalin's Soviet state. That's just how it went. It kept the ruling class in check and made the peasants happy because something was getting done to get rid of all the corruption in the government.

A violent foreign policy wasn't merely a consequence of National Socialism. It was a defining attribute of it. You cannot have National Socialism AND peace with your neighbors. Likewise, you cannot have plenty for all people under Communism. Poverty, suspicion/paranoia, and resentment are inherent to the system. What would happen if Communism actually solved any problems? Well, there'd be no use for revolution. Without revolution, there is no communism. There is no such thing as a communist country with a bounty and at rest both internally and externally. The Soviets maintained an ongoing Cold War with the west in part through nuclear proliferation. They successfully maintained an effective state of war with the west without an actual flash-point through policies of nuclear deterrence. It worked. We were all too afraid of what MIGHT happen to challenge the Soviets. We were so afraid of it we refused to challenge them in Vietnam. Our airmen were forbidden to engage MiGs, although they did it anyway. But it wasn't out of fear of what might happen if we crossed the wrong borders. It was fear out of what would happen if there was no war to fight. The ideas of collectivism are infectious and not even the USA government was left untouched by it. The USA and the Nazi's committed to violent involvement beyond our borders. The North Vietnamese, North Koreans, and Soviet Russians were just defending their own people against foreign invaders.

And that right there makes all the difference. The struggle is REQUIRED. If you refuse to fight a war against Soviet Russia, there is nothing to fuel communism from the outside. All you can do is ISOLATE THEM and cut off their oxygen. But you also add fuel when you do that. Why is Soviet Russia so poor? Because those dirty, greedy, capitalist AMEEEERICANS can't stand for communism to succeed. So THEY are keeping us poor. If we attack, they just kill us. But if we just wait them out, build nuclear rockets, and just stay the course, we outlast them. They will see how much better off we are and they will join us. Then we will be at peace. If they actually achieved a global Soviet empire, then they would simply have to find new enemies to blame for ongoing class struggle. Communism can't exist without it. If the USA became a communist state and entered a treaty with the Soviet Union, everything would be hunky dory for a while. But when farmers aren't doing well in Ukraine, Stalin's gonna ask someone in DC what takes so long to get wheat from Nebraska. Pretty soon there's be a purge in Washington. Your next batch of American policymakers will most likely speak Russian as a first language. And once that's over, someone might have to lose his head in South Africa. Then there might be a mysterious fire at a Cuban tobacco plantation. In other words, if there aren't victims, you have to MAKE victims. That's how Communism survives.

We know Soviet communism ultimately disintegrated, so there's the question of why that happened. It's really simple why it fell apart: Hegemony. Ruling class, academic elites who were out of touch with the farmers and the workers. It's the same situation in China, except China maintains an uneasy balance that keeps communist leaders in power. They have something that Russia didn't have: Pride. By cheating the system, Chinese communism manages to endure. The failure in Russia simply comes down to the fact that people got tired of being victims for so long. The oligarchy is preferable to what they had. Putin's continued success as leader of post-Communist Russia owes to his ability to capture the pride and glory of Soviet Russia without ACTUALLY restoring the Soviet Union. But much like Hitler, Putin's foreign policy comes from a position of weakness. The war against Ukraine is not meant to succeed. If Putin had been serious about reabsorbing all of Ukraine, he easily could have done it many times over. What Putin needs right now is to get rid of toxic (to him) elements of Russia--criminals, political opponents, dissidents. So throw them into a conflict with Ukraine and sell the story that they're just trying to protect their own people. So far Ukraine hasn't turned this back onto them, but with increased Western support they easily could fight Russia and actually WIN. I would love to see that happen, personally. But Putin just needs to get rid of some inconvenient people right now, and the de-Nazification of Ukraine is a great excuse.



Dengashinobi
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27 Jan 2023, 8:26 pm

Hitler lost a total war totally. Germany was conquered entirely and his enemies were very angry. They killed Nazism and pissed in it's grave. It's much easier to vilify someone who has no friends left alive but only enemies. The victors write the history. In the case of the communist dictators, they did not loose any war, instead they came out as victors. Communism was never defeated by it's enemies, instead it just transitioned into various political and economical systems. There were millions of victims of communism, but there were also millions who benefited by scaling the social ladder and some became the new upper class. They of course will honour the historical figures who are associated with their historical ascend to prosperity. In short communism was not killed like fascism was.



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27 Jan 2023, 9:03 pm

Let's not forget the fact that Hitler and his axis declared war on the entire rest of the world. All the others only declared war on their own people.


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AngelRho
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27 Jan 2023, 9:36 pm

Dengashinobi wrote:
Hitler lost a total war totally. Germany was conquered entirely and his enemies were very angry. They killed Nazism and pissed in it's grave. It's much easier to vilify someone who has no friends left alive but only enemies. The victors write the history. In the case of the communist dictators, they did not loose any war, instead they came out as victors. Communism was never defeated by it's enemies, instead it just transitioned into various political and economical systems. There were millions of victims of communism, but there were also millions who benefited by scaling the social ladder and some became the new upper class. They of course will honour the historical figures who are associated with their historical ascend to prosperity. In short communism was not killed like fascism was.

Communism spread internationally through a series of internal uprisings with the support of Mother Russia. National Socialism involved annexing territory by force rather than by consent and only for the benefit of the German people. Communism avoids hostile foreign relations by sparking revolutions and civil wars. National Socialism rushes headlong into confrontation.



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27 Jan 2023, 10:48 pm

Hitler is ranked #3 as far as worst dictators go. But that only measured the body count of the victims of his rule. (Mao was #1, Stalin was #2)

He would be #1 or #2 hands down if the ranking was measured by pure evilness. The other possible contender would be Francisco Macias Nguema, leader of Equatorial Guinea from 1968-1979.

Like Hitler, he was democratically elected at the same time EG declared independence from Spain, in 1968. Ironically, no election in EG since then was free or fair.

But what separates Macias from Hitler is his severe mental illness (likely schizophrenia) and his paranoia of anything considered "colonial", ranging from modern medicine, to boats, to the word "intellectual".

In one instance, he had over 100 political prisoners publicly executed by soldiers dressed as Santa Claus while Mary Hopkin's "Those Were The Days" played on the loudspeakers of the main stadium.

In another, he had the chief statistician dismembered to "teach him to count", after unfavorable data was compiled.

He ordered the genocide of the Bubi people (Macias and the top leadership were of the Fang people), and proclaimed himself to be God. Even things as simple as wearing glasses were a reason for persecution. And all while the actual government had, for all practical purposes, ceased to function.

He destroyed boats and mined the only road out of the country (leading into Gabon). He carried EG's entire treasury reserves in a set of suitcases.

Eventually Macias' inner circle gradually abandoned him, and he rarely left his palace deep in the jungles of Rio Muni (the mainland portion), far from the island capital of Malabo. There, he would have casual "conversations" with imaginary people.

When members of his own clan were being executed, that's when his followers finally had enough. A group led by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang, overthrew him in August of 1979, and sentenced him to death "101 times". Because the locals feared his supposed magic powers, Moroccan mercenaries executed him.

Obiang took power after Macias' overthrow, and still leads EG to this day.


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27 Jan 2023, 11:31 pm

Starting another "whose holocaust was the worst?" debate is inane and stupid.

Hitler is not judged "more harshly", but about equally harshly as others.

Stalin or Mao might have killed more people in camps, but they didnt start a world war that killed more millions. And if Hitler had won the world war he started he would have gone on to murder more, and commited more genocides, and wouldve exceeded Mao or Stalin.

Stalin may have gotten a state funeral, but they quickly removed his name from thousands of towns, buildings, and mountain peaks across the USSR that had born his name minutes after he died. With Hitler foreign invading armies forced "regime change" upon Germany (they didnt use that Bush era term, but thats what it was) so unlike Russia the Germans HAD to disown their dictator at gunpoint.

Relative to the number of people under his rule, and the short number of years he ruled, Pol Pot was probably worse than Mao, Stalin, Hitler, or Tojo. He managed to murder two million of the six million of his own country's people in the few years he ruled Cambodia. Hitler occupied most of Europe, but only for about six years, Japan much of China for about a decade. Mao and Stalin both ruled vast continent sized countries with hundreds of millions of people for multiple decades. If you take time and population size into account Pol Pot was likely the most bloody per capita/per unit time of his reign, and Mao was the least homicidal (though his body count may have been highest by some measures in absolute numbers). Which is one of reasons these debates are inane...any comparison is peaches to pears. Hitler was in between but closer to Pol Pot in his score of innocents murdered per capita/per minute because his rule of Europe was so brief.

But in my humble opinion Pol Pott gets rare credit for matching Hitler by creating a unique "industry of genocide" that had a certain grotesqueness those other mass murderers didnt create. The two were were the only two in a unique 'grossness' class of their own in my subjective opinion.

One modern figure who does get a free pass is King Leopold of Belgium. He caused the deaths of millions in the Belgian Congo. One suspects that the reason he is not put on the usual mental mount Rushmore of mass murder that Hitler and Stalin are put on is that most of his victims were Black Africans and most of the victims of Hitler and Stalin were White Europeans.



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28 Jan 2023, 3:06 am

naturalplastic wrote:
Starting another "whose holocaust was the worst?" debate is inane and stupid.

Hitler is not judged "more harshly", but about equally harshly as others.

Stalin or Mao might have killed more people in camps, but they didnt start a world war that killed more millions. And if Hitler had won the world war he started he would have gone on to murder more, and commited more genocides, and wouldve exceeded Mao or Stalin.

Stalin may have gotten a state funeral, but they quickly removed his name from thousands of towns, buildings, and mountain peaks across the USSR that had born his name minutes after he died. With Hitler foreign invading armies forced "regime change" upon Germany (they didnt use that Bush era term, but thats what it was) so unlike Russia the Germans HAD to disown their dictator at gunpoint.

Relative to the number of people under his rule, and the short number of years he ruled, Pol Pot was probably worse than Mao, Stalin, Hitler, or Tojo. He managed to murder two million of the six million of his own country's people in the few years he ruled Cambodia. Hitler occupied most of Europe, but only for about six years, Japan much of China for about a decade. Mao and Stalin both ruled vast continent sized countries with hundreds of millions of people for multiple decades. If you take time and population size into account Pol Pot was likely the most bloody per capita/per unit time of his reign, and Mao was the least homicidal (though his body count may have been highest by some measures in absolute numbers). Which is one of reasons these debates are inane...any comparison is peaches to pears. Hitler was in between but closer to Pol Pot in his score of innocents murdered per capita/per minute because his rule of Europe was so brief.

But in my humble opinion Pol Pott gets rare credit for matching Hitler by creating a unique "industry of genocide" that had a certain grotesqueness those other mass murderers didnt create. The two were were the only two in a unique 'grossness' class of their own in my subjective opinion.

One modern figure who does get a free pass is King Leopold of Belgium. He caused the deaths of millions in the Belgian Congo. One suspects that the reason he is not put on the usual mental mount Rushmore of mass murder that Hitler and Stalin are put on is that most of his victims were Black Africans and most of the victims of Hitler and Stalin were White Europeans.


I agree with what you said. Hitler's greatest atrocity was the war itself. And his vision for the future guarties that he would never have stopped. His vision was eternal war. The fact that the West chose to ally with Stalin against Hitler is also telling, though the German threat was also a more immediate threat tha the Soviet Union at the time.

But still, there is a great discrepancy between how Mao, Stalin and Hitler are treated today. One cannot refer to Hitler or Nazism in any way other than an absolute anathema. While you have comercial products being sold with the face of Stalin in it. You have youth using the hammer and sickle for fashion purposes. The issue is one of cultural respondence to the matter, not just of an informed assession among historians.



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28 Jan 2023, 11:28 am

^^^100% right.

Under both Communism and National Socialism, society exists under a constant state of perpetual struggle. Hitler’s vision of Germany had he succeeded would have ended up resembling Orwell’s 1984. Germany’s borders would have enveloped a large swath of Europe and Asia with people Hitler didn’t like getting sent to the front lines of non-existent war. Hitler and Stalin could have been totally MFEO by keeping each other at a stand-off and creating an excuse for their respective peoples to do their patriotic duty and fight for their country. As it happens, neither Nazis nor Reds were ready for that scenario at that time.

The proper role of government is to defend its own people, not to invade other countries. Hitler’s foreign policy was irrational. The Warsaw Pact in response to NATO makes sense in light of western demonization of Communism. If Hitler had something like the Soviet’s Brezhnev Doctrine, declaring war on the Reich would have been unthinkable.

Except…

Timing has a lot to do with it, too. A repeat of WW1 was unimaginable at the time and appeasement policies were all anyone would consider regarding Hitler. WW1 was not so cataclysmic to make a new war completely out of the question, plus there was no nuclear deterrent at that time. The Brezhnev Doctrine might have drawn its power from the fear the west had of the USSR and the threat of nuclear war. It’s possible that if Hitler had figured out a way to expand National Socialism into Poland and Czechoslovakia through clever branding AND THEN instigated something like the Brezhnev doctrine, there might never have been a war.



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28 Jan 2023, 11:46 am

I'm sure the very effective allied propaganda campaigns contribute significantly.

Hitler's genocidal plans probably play a big role. Even other dictators who engaged in genocidal or democidal activities didn't industrialize mass homicide to quite the same extent.

That said, it's perfectly fair to consider the various atrocities committed by Leninist dictators (and other regimes) to be on a similar level morally. Symbols of these regimes ought to be reevaluated in the same way Confederate flags are being reevaluated.

Whether you blame Leninism or a long legacy of Russian autocracy (or both) for the brutality of the Bolshevik regime, there's no getting around that much of their actions deserve to be condemned without hesitation. That doesn't mean that no positive developments occurred under that regime, only that the bad outweighs the good by orders of magnitude.

But, we should also apply those sorts of standards to colonial powers like the British and French empires. One of the other factors that makes Hitler's evil more memorable to westerners is that he victimized white people, while the Brits and French terrorized other peoples, further away.

One thing to remember about history is that it's all bad guys.


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28 Jan 2023, 1:39 pm

I don’t believe the West really cared all THAT much about genocide, mechanized or otherwise. The Final Solution was not that well known to many people who weren’t directly involved. It took actually liberating the concentration camps for the world to truly understand Hitler’s agenda.

But as long as it was strictly a German problem, the rest of the world was powerless to do anything about it. There was nothing anyone else SHOULD have done about it. Any country has that right. My problem with Hitler’s actions is that the Holocaust was about destroying MILLIONS of German citizens without reason. Without. Reason. Hitler’s program would have eventually resulted in the disintegration of Germany from within, no war necessary.

I don’t think America should have gotten involved in Germany. It wasn’t about genocide. It was all about fear of what would happen if Russia was to gain complete control over Germany and springboard a new Communist regime in a puppet state. That’s not good enough to attack another country. I don’t care how evil you think they are.

Japan was a whole different story. The bombing of Pearl Harbor perfectly justified a retaliatory war in the Pacific. Escalating the war into a nuclear conflict was very sad. But Japan could not be excused from their actions against the United States. They only have themselves to blame for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They could have ended the war any time. They chose not to.

I’m adamantly against Communism and the USSR. But in a discussion of why did Hitler meet his end and other dictators get a pass, I have to ask this question: Which Western European powers did Stalin attack that would have warranted declarations of war? Anyone? Anyone? The ONLY military actions ever taken by Mother Russia that weren’t defensive operations were related to the Brezhnev Doctrine (internal attacks on Communism are attacks on the entire Warsaw Pact). There was never any point to attacking the USSR, so whatever Stalin and his successors did in the way of mass slaughter was never of any consequence to anyone in the west.

Plus, they had nukes.



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28 Jan 2023, 1:51 pm

AngelRho wrote:
I don’t believe the West really cared all THAT much about genocide, mechanized or otherwise. The Final Solution was not that well known to many people who weren’t directly involved. It took actually liberating the concentration camps for the world to truly understand Hitler’s agenda.


Agreed. The Holocaust helped solidify the reputation, but it by and large wasn't known and wasn't a major motive for continuing the war while it was occurring.

That said, things like serial coding people, putting resources towards killing innocent people that could have gone towards the war effort, the use of ghettos and concentration camps, the mass extermination factories, etc all contribute to why that genocide is especially memorable compared to others.

I'm sure media representations of the Holocaust help with solidifying Hitler's position as the general public's worst dictator ever.

AngelRho wrote:
Plus, they had nukes.


Absolutely. The west seemed a lot more willing to fight before the Soviets also had nukes. If Churchill got his way WWII would have been the prelude to a war against the USSR.


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28 Jan 2023, 2:00 pm

Regarding the Confederate flag, I was for the longest time a proud supporter of the Confederate flag with the belief that it represented sacred honor and the determination of Southerners to defend their right to self-rule, slavery be damned.

I have since had a change of mind on that, though. Racial slavery is perhaps the lowest form of collectivism/statism. There’s not enough sacred honor in the world to justify slavery, not to mention that self-rule/states rights are incompatible with racial slavery. War was unnecessary, but had slavery not been a political pawn an easy transition from a slave economy to the restoration of individual rights to freed slaves would have been possible and a lot of postwar resentment and the rise of white supremacy could have been avoided.

There is no difference between the Confederate flag and the hammer-and-sickle. To support one is to support the other.

With how intensely American, liberal, academic elites support causes like CRT, expanded government programs that keep minorities economically and intellectually dependent on THEM (white liberals), I’m surprised they hate the Confederate flag so much.



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28 Jan 2023, 2:28 pm

AngelRho wrote:
With how intensely American, liberal, academic elites support causes like CRT, expanded government programs that keep minorities economically and intellectually dependent on THEM (white liberals), I’m surprised they hate the Confederate flag so much.


You might view those as causing dependence, but generally speaking supporters of those programs look at them as being important for reducing extreme poverty and helping people survive. Meanwhile, there's probably agreement on how chattel slavery works.

Take off the ideological lenses for a second.

Also, that's a pretty disinformed take on CRT. CRT at it's core is an attempt to use critical thinking to understand why racism persists in a supposedly colourblind world. Conservative disinformation peddlers like to use canards about CRT to rile up closet racists, but it doesn't make their claims correct.


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AngelRho
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28 Jan 2023, 3:00 pm

funeralxempire wrote:
AngelRho wrote:
I don’t believe the West really cared all THAT much about genocide, mechanized or otherwise. The Final Solution was not that well known to many people who weren’t directly involved. It took actually liberating the concentration camps for the world to truly understand Hitler’s agenda.


Agreed. The Holocaust helped solidify the reputation, but it by and large wasn't known and wasn't a major motive for continuing the war while it was occurring.

That said, things like serial coding people, putting resources towards killing innocent people that could have gone towards the war effort, the use of ghettos and concentration camps, the mass extermination factories, etc all contribute to why that genocide is especially memorable compared to others.

I'm sure media representations of the Holocaust help with solidifying Hitler's position as the general public's worst dictator ever.

AngelRho wrote:
Plus, they had nukes.


Absolutely. The west seemed a lot more willing to fight before the Soviets also had nukes. If Churchill got his way WWII would have been the prelude to a war against the USSR.

FDR’s programs together with Stalinism do appear much more cheery next to Hitler’s domestic and foreign policy. It’s like, oh, you think THIS is bad? You shoulda seen what Hitler did.

Every regime has to have their Brownshirts. Hitler couldn’t have made it without them. Then they became inconvenient for the military. The long knives came out. Stalin had any number of purges throughout his career. They come and go in the USA. Any time a black man is beaten or killed by police and mobs turn out in droves to set entire cities on fire. Defund the police, CRT, gun control, abortion…liberals come out of the woodwork, circle the political wagons, presidents make speeches, incumbents win re-elections. When parties flag at the polls and majorities shift in legislatures, we call out SWAT teams and the National Guard. Activist groups in the USA are kept in just enough check that they aren’t imprisoned or killed en masse, but I remember thinking at one point during the Obama administration it was only a matter of time.

One of the successes of the American system is that regular turnover in government prevents a lot of the kinds of violence seen in Communist countries and in Nazi Germany. However, I fear that the American system is becoming increasingly brittle.

Even if you absolutely despise Republicans, you at least have to admit there’s a lot of manipulation going on there. With Trump you had Proud Boys et al. Now there’s a bunch of useful idiots if ever there were any. I believe that liberal leaders view their own activist extremists the same way.