Why are other dictators judged less harshly than Hitler?

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CRT is too complex a subject and inappropriate to deeply discuss here. I was just simply pulling examples out of a hat for the sake of argument. The relevant issues are fluid but are all always variations on a theme. CRT WAS recently a trending topic. The more the black community comes to see the major points of CRT as irrelevant and contradictory to reason and reality, the less it comes up in conversation.

Every now and then there’s a news article of CRT in the high school classroom, but it’s no longer the hot topic it was only a few months ago.

It will die, and something else will rise to take its place. That’s just the way of things.

Is this just a complaint that liberals (and their allies) try to apply pressure in hopes of achieving change on issues that matter to them? How dare they advocate for what they believe will result in positive change, those rascally radicals.



Honestly, that's likely true, but misses something important; the far-left doesn't care about the Democratic party except for viewing them as less overtly terrible than the GOP, but also that even among far-right types, there's plenty who aren't particularly devoted to the GOP, except for viewing them as less terrible than the Democrats.

It doesn't matter if neoliberals in both parties view other segments of the party as useful idiots, because those segments only view those neoliberals as a means to an end to begin with. Politics isn't really binary, it's lots of blocs seeking to influence adjacent blocs to cooperate on and share priorities.

Those 'news articles' are exactly the disinformation I was talking about, just intended to rile up people who don't know much about the topic besides feeling that giving attention to racism within society is the real racism.

As for your insistence that CRT is irrelevant and contradictory, I would expect that to be claimed by someone who swims in rivers of disinformation on the topic. It's irrelevant and contradictory because some guy who's been hired to claim that said so.

Why did Stalin and Mao get state funerals?

Because their parties still controlled their countries. The Nazi Party were deposed by the time Germany could have held a state funeral for Hitler. If Goebbels had pulled off an unlikely victory, then the Nazis would probably have held a state funeral for Hitler. If Stalin had been killed in a nuclear decapitation strike in 1948 and the Soviet Union surrendered to the US, the new government wouldn't have held a funeral for Stalin. If the Nationalists somehow re-invaded China during the Cultural Revolution and killed Mao, they wouldn't have held a state funeral for him either.

Why is Hitler "the" evil dictator when Stalin and Mao killed more?

Probably because the Anglosphere fought a total war against Hitler, but not against Stalin or Mao.

Why are Stalin and Mao not thought of as bad people?

Mostly, they are. There are "tankies" who still support them despite what they did, and some naive communists who support revisionist takes on them, and of course pro-Mao views are still common in China, but even most communists hate Stalin and Mao, while mainstream politics is overwhelmingly condemnatory.

The general public - in fact, the whole world - only has a set number of things they care about in any depth. You might know a lot about 20th century world leaders, but there are other things you have a shallow understanding of. For example, I know who Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio are, but I probably don't know about other baseball players who are roughly as good but lack the cultural relevance of those two. I know who Miles Davis and John Coltrane were, but not about other jazz musicians who were probably just as talented or prolific. I have heard of Louis Vuitton and Coco Chanel, but I do not know what they are good or bad at, who was more innovative or influential, and I have no views on the quality of their designs. I am sure you can come up with other examples.

Sometimes we know about an "icon", but not about the depth. Like, most people know who the Beatles are, and they know more about the Beatles than about the Rolling Stones, the Who, or the Kinks - never mind the Yardbirds, the Animals, or the Moody Blues. Great bands like Love or the Zombies have basically no public profile.

Hitler is the Beatles of dictators. Or the Joe DiMaggio, or the Miles Davis, or the Alfred Hitchcock, or the Coco Chanel, or the Kim Kardashian, or the William Shakespeare, or... OK, this is my favourite analogy, the Stephen King. Stephen King isn't the greatest writer of all time, but he is one of the most famous. He probably has better name recognition than someone like George Saunders or Vladimir Nabokov, who the literary snobs go crazy for. Hitler is an icon who represents dictatorship, genocide, and evil, for a world with limited attention. But if he's the Miles Davies then Stalin is the John Coltrane, and Mao is Duke Ellington.

No, CRT is much more interesting reading straight from the source.

CRT is simply CT but with R. All anyone needs to know about it is that the Soviet experiment was a failure and continues to fail because communism doesn't solve the problem that led to its rise in the first place: Hegemony. Monarchy represents a hegemony based on birthright with an aristocracy built on the backs of the peasants and working poor. This much is true, of course. Communism is a hegemonic shift in which the aristocracy is replaced with liberal, academic elites--philosophers, lawyers, etc. These elites don't represent "real people," the workers and farmers. Therefore, they are not really concerned for these people but only with their own self-interest. Thus communism fails to deliver the equality it first promised because it cannot prevent corrupt, self-interested hegemony from taking over from one government to the next.

The "R" in CRT means that black people are denied civil rights because the hegemony that grants them those rights was never concerned with the benefits of black people to begin with. And they aren't entirely wrong, either. Who was Abraham Lincoln? White guy. Who appointed black judges in the South and so forth during Reconstruction? White people. Who passed segregation laws presumably to protect the rights of black people? White people. Who were the Supreme Court justices who struck down segregation? White people. During desegregation, where did they bus black school children? To white schools. And how many blacks ever won the presidency? Exactly ONE. The American system isn't racist by accident. It's racist by DESIGN. And the only way blacks can be fairly represented is if white people step out of the way and replace a white hegemony with a black one.

Look, communism, CT, and CRT all are very good at citing facts to support their claims/theories. Even Hitler pointed to facts about Jews dominating the world of European finance. All sorts of Nazi propaganda was built on facts. And Satan wasn't EXACTLY lying to Eve in the Garden of Eden. Everything sounds right and true if you find the right audience to, but that doesn't mean twisting facts creates the intended reality. There is no institution that can't be totally corrupted over time. So saying these things are based on facts doesn't really amount to much.

CRT posits that ALL white people are racist. I would say that we all bear some form of bias, prejudice, or just plain old preference. Could that manifest as racism? Sure. But then there's not a single person in the world that doesn't affect. If all white people are racist, then all PEOPLE must be racist, too. CRT insists that blacks are incapable of racism.

CRT insists that all non-whites and non-males are victims of a white patriarchy with an intersectionality of victimhood. White women can be excused from being racist because they are themselves victims of white patriarchy. They HAVE to be racist, in other words, because they are forced into it by their male oppressors.

Black men are clearly victims of oppression.

But black men are themselves also patriarchal, which means black women are more oppressed than black men.

What about if you are black and gay? There's another layer of oppression, with no one being more oppressed than black lesbians.

Jury's still out if you are black, gay and trans.

The problem is that there are many within these supposed victim classes that are individually successful. In America, you aren't forced to live in bad neighborhoods. Forced to grow up in them, but you don't have to stay once you reach adulthood. You can change your name, attend college, get on-the-job training, invent things, and compete in the marketplace.

The aim of CRT, CT, communism, socialism, and marxism in general is there is no intention of elevating people beyond victimhood. That's one place where it all becomes absurd. Suppose all white people subscribe to the idea that black people cannot succeed without a hegemonic shift in their favor. Well...that's no good because that means black success is not because they deserve it, but simply out of pity from white oppressors. It depends on WHITE people. Getting out of the way is nothing but white condescension. Communism only works as long as there is an ongoing revolution. What happens when a classless society is actually achieved? Then there is no need for communism. There's not even really a need for government anymore, really. If the communist experiment succeeds, communist leaders are obsoleted. And if leaders want to survive as such, the struggle cannot ever end. What if National Socialism succeeded and ended up enveloping the entire world under one Aryan government? Then there's nothing left for anyone to do, no point in even really having a leader.

Such was the problem of the Roman Empire--it took over the entire Mediterranean world and stretched all the way to Britain. What was left to conquer? With nothing left to conquer, there was nothing meaningful to defend. And without anything to defend, the Roman became a state too weak to defend itself when the situation in Asia and Northern Europe changed. Although...I don't really believe the Roman Empire fell exactly. I think it transcended geography and politics and became an ideal that continued to evolve, change, and live on in sovereign governments since the fall of Rome.

But the point is that total success, total peace, the perfect achievement of all goals and ideals ends up destroying the state. Hitler NEVER would have conquered the world. To do so would eliminate his reason for existing as Fuhrer. Soviet Communism was never meant to spread beyond Russia. To do so would mean the end of the revolution that was the reason for establishment of the Communist party. And the whole idea of mutually assured destruction is bull. You can't mutually assure the total destruction of every man, woman, and child on the whole planet in a nuclear winter. There aren't enough nukes for that and never will be. Deterrence is simply the threat of nuclear options, nothing more. Once you hit the red button, you DO almost completely assure the destruction of your own government from nuclear retaliation. Even if you managed to wipe out your enemy in a preemptive nuclear strike, you just killed your whole reason for fighting. It's over. Nothing left to fight for. No reason left to exist.

The beauty of democratic and republican systems and free market capitalism is that there will ALWAYS be achievement, innovation, invention, competition, and purpose. You CAN achieve peace and purposeful cooperation, and all of this can be had without violence, without racism, and without creating victims. Restrict the role of government to protecting its people and maintaining law and order.

There's a handful of points on which you're actually reasonable before you're off in the guano again. You seem to only get the extent to which racism is baked into American society (and others) when you're trying to make a facetious point, but then your conclusion is to get offended over that reasonable observation. Very Tucker-esque.

You even concede that these arguments are based on facts, rather than just simply being emotionally driven. The only problem is, following the logic the facts supports to it's conclusion is offensive, and those emotions must be protected from facts that they'll disagree with.

Among things, being from a marginalized community (or several) doesn't mean one can't succeed, it just means they'll have more to overcome.



How can non-white people make use of institutional power that favours white people? Hint, they can't. Your rebuttal fails to even address the argument you're pretending to rebut.

There's so many more disinformed takes within your post that I don't have the energy to go through point by point, especially when it boils down to everything I disagree with makes people into victims who can't think for themselves, only I have the correct ideology.

I don't accept the premise that the institutional power in question exclusively favors white people. I DO accept the premise that the American institution left to do what it was intended to do favors all individuals. There is a false assumption that the American institution is intended to guarantee success. The American system cannot be reasonably used to force wealth upon people who lack the responsibility for it nor deny wealth to those who've earned the right to it.

Of course, America as it exists right now is not a reasonable system. Entitlement programs and wealth redistribution effectively eliminate the incentive to work, to create, and to earn. At one point, I thought it was simply a means of giving minorities what they want. Currently, however, I think it's a matter of keeping black people out of the marketplace and out of positions of power. And this is where I think CRT takes an interesting turn. The only thing white people can do is admit that they are racist, own their virtue signaling, and...well, pretty much do nothing differently. Just stay out of the way of minorities. White people cannot help black people anyway, according to CRT, because "helping" blacks means:

1. Emancipating blacks without making sure they have a place to go, nobody to care for them.
2. Appointing black officials without the consent of the governed, leading to resentment and violence, not to mention bribery and other corruption
3. Exposing blacks to violence by freeing them, giving them property, giving them the vote, but not protecting them from retaliation from white supremacists.
4. Finally expanding civil rights and extending protection to blacks from whites through segregation--blacks have their place where they are separate and safe, but in all other ways equal to all other Americans.
5. Segregation is found to be inherently unequal as black communities suffering from poverty and lacking access to public services such as schools and other goods and services, which means...
6. Blacks are forcibly integrated into white society, once again exposing them to hate, fear, resentment, and violence.

And I've barely even gotten warmed up. Don't forget that half the rationale for institutional racial slavery was that black slaves were better off as slaves in polite society in which they were productive rather than fending for themselves where they came from. It was the Democratic Party that was pro-slavery. It was the Democratic Party that demanded states rights at the expense of individual rights. It was the Democratic Party that fought against civil rights and birthed the white supremacy movement. It was the Democratic Party that instituted entitlement programs that forced black dependence on the federal government. It was the Democratic Party that passed Jim Crowe laws, Democratic that repealed Jim Crowe, segregation and desegregation, all of it. And now it's largely the Democratic Party making noise apologizing for being so white and racist. And since everything they've done to "help" black people has ended up only creating more misery, they finally have an excuse in CRT to give up the fight.

Except they won't, really. It just means that the white liberal hegemony can exist out in the open. There's too much money and too much power in institutional racism, and CRT excels at paving the way for it.

Now...just being honest here, I do admit for the purpose of this discussion I've given Republicans a free pass. Don't even get me started on Republicans. It's the same damned thing. I do think Republicans have done more for individual rights and freedom than Democrats have. I stand by that. But they suffer from the same problem as Democrats, Communists, Nazis, and what have you. Republicans, just like Democrats, only have a right to exist so long as there are problems to solve. Once a problem is actually solved, there are consequences. Businesses shut down and people lose jobs. People get fined and arrested. Industries vanish. And by that, I mean businesses that deserve to die shut down rather than continue on life support like Government Motors Corp. People lose jobs because because new innovations make their jobs redundant or irrelevant. People get fined and arrested because they hurt other people. Republicans push big oil and coal because "economy," because their working class voters depend on oil, coal, steel, etc. to keep antique internal combustion engines running when they should be finding the successor to the Lithium Ion battery and more abundant and readily available, cleaner fuel sources. Clean electricity, or safe hydrogen from hydrolysis. What's taking so freaking long on developing fusion power? Why can't we have inexpensive solar panels and storage arrays without corrupt companies taking government subsidies for clean energy and running? What about reliable wind turbines that don't explode in a gentle breeze? If Republicans didn't fight innovation but rather took the lead on this, they'd solve so many problems that Democrats are lagging behind on. But if they actually solved problems Democrats created, what would we need Republicans for?

And there's the problem with politics. One side always creates problems. One side always pretends to solve problems and complains that the other side is standing in the way. Go ahead, make a list of everything wrong with the Republican Party after I've dished on Democrats. I'm not going to argue about it. Whether you're right or I'm right doesn't even matter. There MUST be problems created and someone to blame when solutions can't be implemented. It doesn't matter which side you choose.

Getting back on track, Soviet communism excelled at creating problems to solve. Find a problem, any problem. Maybe solve sort of half way, but whatever you do, when you solve a problem, make sure that the solution causes more problems on its own. And once you do that tackle those problems one by one. Makes you look good. But never solve a problem without the solution creating entire lines of issues that eventually have to be addressed.

Hitler, by contrast, offered entirely too much up front. Say what you will about Hitler, but he did everything he said he would do. It was just that delivering on foreign policy so quickly brought other major western powers to his doorstep.

People really do say about the same for Hitler and Stalin these days. Hitler wouldn't be nearly so famous had his actions not started a world war.

Militarism and glorification of war was an integral part of the fascist ideology. Fascists were actively persueing war. As communists did, they had lost contact with reality. That's why both failed.

There are a log of well-informed comments here, nevertheless I would like to offer my own take:

Hitler was a demagogue. He personally inspired people to embrace his cause, making those who saw his movement as a threat to fear and loathe him personally. To the unconvinced, Hitler appeared to be a buffoon yet millions fell in love with his leadership and followed blindly. To digress, one could successfully argue that as described, he and Trump were near clones of each other as Trump makes the same impression on those who reject his cult of personality. Arrogant twits like to ridicule those who don't admire Trump as pathetic victims of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" however it make perfect sense that awareness of Trump's activities would cause some people to feel deranged. It's worth mentioning that Trump was born about a year after Hitler died. You could make a case that he is in fact Hitler reincarnated, assuming your theory of reincarnation doesn't require the new incarnation to have either been born or conceived the moment the original died.

Joseph Stalin was a brutal dictator but he wasn't the sort of demagogue Hitler was. Hitler led a successful movement to overthrow the German government whereas Stalin rose within the ranks after a dictatorial régime was already in place. Also he chose his victims more on the basis of politics than according to a theory of racial superiority. Even if it can be shown that he was directly responsible for more deaths than Hitler, this sort of history doesn't inspire the same level of fear in modern days because there is no modern-day parallel that resonates with people living in the West, so Stalin comes to mind far less frequently, in contrast to Hitler with whom a number of modern-day parallels can be identified. So in that sense, Hitler's memory is more likely to trigger everyday Westerners than is Stalin's. One more point worth mentioning is the role of the USSR in WWII at which time Stalin was the leader and the USSR arguably shouldered the greatest burden of war against the Nazis (despite having been complicit with them at an earlier stage). In consequence, anti-Stalin propaganda in the West was never as pervasive as anti-Hitler propaganda so there's a far stronger tradition of hating Hitler than of hating Stalin and whereas it's assumed everybody hates Hitler, whether or how fervently one hates Stalin can be correlated with how anti-Communist one is which makes it more of a political issue.

As for Mao, TBH he was one of the greatest leaders of all time plus he came to power after years of struggle between his faction and the Kuomintang, as well as massive bloodshed at the hands of the Japanese not to forget earlier struggles in China against European colonialism. After all that, I could argue that whoever ended up controlling China had decades of famine, political executions, etc. to look forward to in fact, at the risk of seeming overly cynical, most of us aren't going to judge starvation occurring under one's watch the same way they would judge a government drawing up a detailed plan to efficiently exterminate millions of members of certain groups it didn't favor, especially the sort of plan Hitler prosecuted. Many admire Mao today, although they may choose to ignore many inconvenient facts about his career, but one must admit that his struggle to prevail over Japan and the Kuomintang was heroic and deserves to be recognized. There's also cultural differences especially when one considers how things are done in a Confucianist society versus an individualist Western society. I think I'm justified in saying that individual freedom and democracy as Westerners understand those concepts are still foreign concepts in China — it's not intellectual dishonesty; it's perfectly true. BTW Taiwan under the KMT was also a brutal dictatorship, at first, but it was "our" brutal dictatorship so its undemocratic excesses weren't publicized in the West the way those of "Red China" were. I should also point out that, by and large, both Mainland China and Taiwan have gotten past the extreme brutality of their early post-WWII history without any change of government, not to say that there isn't still huge political repression on the Mainland but you have to admit they're a long time past the days of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, in fact they openly talk about those eras (with restrictions of course) so we are looking today at what is generally accepted as a legitimate government, like it or not, and there isn't a huge motivation to publicize unfavorable content about Mao's career apart from staunchly anti-CCP individuals and groups.

Good point, Max. I think we should rename this thread DIY Guide To Evil: Some Do’s and Don’ts.

In a comparison between Hitler and Stalin, Stalin is the clear winner on longevity. Now you are right, Stalin was “anointed” Lenin’s successor. But Hitler did not lead an overthrow of government the way Lenin did. Oh, Hitler tried and failed. Did prison time for it, too.

No, I’m not seeing where in a Most Evil shootout that Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot are really that significantly different from Hitler where the body count is concerned. If you want to be evil, you can get away with mass murder and genocide and nobody will get in your way. It’s just how you go about it that matters.

Nobody wants to go up against superpowers like the USA (let’s include American leaders, like FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan, Dubya Bush, and Trump), China, or USSR because nukes. The NorKo’s had a tidy little empire of evil over there, as did the Vietnamese. But how about those evil Khmer Rouge Cambodians? Pol Pot would have been an easy target for early regime change since he made too many enemies in China and in Vietnam. Why not go after him? The Vietnamese annexing Cambodia would have been a no-brainer, or if the USA had wanted to unilaterally invade Cambodia, the Cambodian people certainly would not have minded. But then you still have to make an argument of exactly WHY we should invade Cambodia when they really have nothing to do with us in the West.

Pol Pot gets a free pass in part because a) The French have already long since given up because they can’t control the region, and b) the US is dealing with its own domestic bloody nose after Vietnam. If Pop Pot had raised a military and attacked US territory, there’d be no end to the bloodshed in Cambodia. As it happens, they keep their civil wars and revolutions strictly to themselves and avoid US intervention.

How about someone who really was NOT that bad but ended up dead, anyway? Let’s talk about Nicolae Ceaușescu. Now THERE was an evil man if ever there was one, did far LESS destruction than any Eur/Asian dictator, came to a very ugly end. If you want a primer on how NOT to be evil, Nicolae Ceaușescu has you covered.

A very interesting observation. I also think that Hitler exhibited autistic traits. For example his notorious charisma for public speech is him passionately speaking about his special interest, which was his view on politics. He was also a loner which is also a sign of autism.

I feel like we've already had this discussion, but this "slavery and segregation were good things actually" nonsense is just silly. As, for that matter, is pretending that the Democratic Party of 1923 has any relevance to the Democratic Party of 2023.


We have two of those four things - reliable wind turbines and inexpensive, subsidy-free solar panels. Storage is getting there.

Cold fusion (i.e. fusion that generates commercial power - not actually "cold" in any meaningful sense) is another kettle of fish: it's both extremely capital-intensive, and requires us to make a scientific discovery that we might never make. We don't have a functional technology that we need to make cheaper through practice, we have a few very early leads that are very expensive, a long way from completion, and we don't have good ideas for improving. As a species we're throwing a lot of resources at it, but it's not a simple thing to do!


I think that's fundamentally the wrong way of looking at things. There isn't one side creating problems and one side struggling to solve them. Problems arise because the world is a very complex, chaotic thing. Yes, sometimes legislators create problems - and since Eisenhower retired, it's mostly but not solely been the Republicans in your country - but the vast majority of issues aren't things that anyone "did".

I'm not at all in favor of slavery or segregation and I wouldn't dare say that I believe they were ever good things. But for people alive in that time period, those were the justifications given. It's not about what's right or what I agree with, but about what happened, why, and the outcomes.

The other stuff is irrelevant, but I'll just sum it up by saying I am frustrated by all the political games that kill the development of new technologies. I understand what you're saying, and you're right. But if I were a billionaire in the energy sector, I'd put 3/4 of my net worth into making fusion a reality. I never even mentioned the word "cold" fusion, I know how it works. But emerging technologies bringing fusion closer to reality together with renewables are offensive to certain voters, and Republicans choosing the fossil fuel hill to die on are doing more harm than good. Coal is grinding to an end for energy production and will eventually only be useful for applications that depend on having a carbon source--like, say, boutique metalworking, etc. Oil is useful for certain chemicals and polymers, but the demand for it doesn't justify how much we pump out of the ground. I'm sure there are other uses for gasoline as well, but it has long been government that has inflicted a deep dependence on gasoline for our freedom to travel. By this point in time, we should have grown well past the internal combustion engine. Or should we just apologize to everyone working on steam engines we put out of business and try to resurrect the steam locomotive?

Actually...I do think I'd find that fun. But it's purely a novelty. So much of how we do things today just don't make sense when things should be a lot better.

Sure, I was the one who specified “cold” fusion because we have fusion, that’s not the issue… the issue is it being usable.

Bill Gates right now is worth about $100bn. He could find a 20-year fusion programme with a budget of $5bn a year, assuming he could liquidate his stocks. The UK Atomic Energy Agency in Oxfordshire has a $200m fusion programme, so in theory Gatwa could fund 25 similar programmes - more, if he got other people or organisations to match his funding.

Issue is that if you’re a billionaire philanthropist, are you going to fund speculative moonshots, or are you going to give out mosquito nets which cost $5 each, when giving out 200 is likely to save a life? What about funding research into new vaccines, even a vaccine against cancer? Space exploration? Subatomic particles? A cure for age-related illness? Zero-carbon planes? New crops? Faster trains? Or even new battery technologies and off-grid solar panels for remote deprived regions?

You might say that in the long run, funding the invention of fusion would enable those things anyway. And, fair. But it’s a risk - there is the risk that you don’t actually make a difference, either because it gets invented by someone who would have done it anyway, at roughly the same time, or else it is actually impossible and it never gets invented despite all the research. I’m sure you’ll agree that which technologies get priority is a case of “reasonable minds may differ”.

The US was also inclined to tolerate the Khmer Rouge, since the US was already backing away from SE Asia by the time they came to power. The KR were a Chinese ally, and the US was trying to exploit Sino-Russian tensions by turning China. Given that Vietnam was a Soviet (not Chinese) ally, the rationale was that if Cambodia had to be communist, it was better for them to be under pro-China communists than pro-Soviet ones.

As former national security advisor Brzezinski recalled: “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.”