timschochet
Footballguy
Since I can't seem to widen the discussion in here with new blood, I'm going to try to widen the discussion in other ways. This thread is devoted to discussing the politics of historical issues. It's open to any subject matter so long as it happened in the past. I'm probably going to offer a lot of random posts here on various subjects, and hopefully some will be picked up and discussed. And if they're not, I'll just offer my own opinions and that's OK too.
Who was more evil, Hitler or Stalin?
My daughter, who is studying world history, asked me this question yesterday. Not that I haven't thought of it before. Most Jews would say Hitler, for obvious reasons, especially Jews like me with family members who perished in the Holocaust. I think most liberals would agree with this assessment as well, for the strange reason that communism is somehow historically perceived as more benign than Nazism because it's intent is better. That's a whole separate discussion which I might get into here at a later point. I think, though I'm not sure, that older American conservatives might say Stalin due to their memories of the Cold War, though that is rapidly dwindling.
My own view is Stalin. Here's why, in a nutshell: almost all of Hitler's crimes were against outsiders. Yes some Germans were thrown into concentration camps, there was the Roehm Purge of 1934, the retaliation against the generals of 1944, the attempt to exterminate the mentally ill and mentally challenged, etc. These are all infamous incidents. But for the most part, if you were an aryan German, you benefited from Hitler's rule through most of the Nazi years. The irony of Pastor Neimoeller's poem "First They Came" is that, though they did come for him personally, they never came for the class he represented (German Protestant Christians.) Hitler's regime saw the murders of 20 million people, but they were other people: Jews, slavs, Russians, western Europeans, eastern Europeans. It is true that at the end of the war Hitler desired and ordered the complete destruction of Germany's infrastructure which would have led to the mass starvation and death of the majority of the German people. But this didn't happen because Speer disobeyed him. Had Speer obeyed him, then Hitler would have won this contest, and easily so.
Joseph Stalin also caused the death of 20 million people through collectivization. But at least half of them were Russian and the majority of the rest were Ukrainian. He also was the man behind the Great Terror of 1936-1939, which killed a few million more and terrorized everyone in the Soviet Union. Stalin's major crimes, therefore, were against his own people, rather than outside, and they benefited nobody, not even himself. To me, as terrible as Hitler's outside crimes were, Stalin's inside crimes are by definition even worse.
When I first offered this theory to a good friend of mine who loves discussing World War II, he argued that Hitler was worse because of the gas chambers, which represented industrialized killing. Stalin's killing was by firing squad or through forced starvation, and thus slightly less horrific than the industrialized method of marching millions of men, women and children into large rooms and pumping chemical poison into them. This is actually a very compelling argument, IMO- but for the Nazi regime being worse than the Soviet regime, perhaps, rather than Hitler being worse than Stalin. I pointed out that, at the time that the worst crimes were committed, the Soviet Union was less industrialized than the Third Reich; that's the only reason the method of execution was less industrialized. Also, Hitler himself had nothing to do with the specifics of the gas chambers- he ordered the Jews killed, but the conduct and method was developed by other men, almost for sure without his involvement. Thus my conclusion.
Of course some people reading this are going to wonder, why should we even rank these two men, probably the worst two mass murderers ever? How can you possibly measure which one was worse? And why bother? All good questions, for which I have no good answers. I just find the subject matter interesting. Some won't.
Who was more evil, Hitler or Stalin?
My daughter, who is studying world history, asked me this question yesterday. Not that I haven't thought of it before. Most Jews would say Hitler, for obvious reasons, especially Jews like me with family members who perished in the Holocaust. I think most liberals would agree with this assessment as well, for the strange reason that communism is somehow historically perceived as more benign than Nazism because it's intent is better. That's a whole separate discussion which I might get into here at a later point. I think, though I'm not sure, that older American conservatives might say Stalin due to their memories of the Cold War, though that is rapidly dwindling.
My own view is Stalin. Here's why, in a nutshell: almost all of Hitler's crimes were against outsiders. Yes some Germans were thrown into concentration camps, there was the Roehm Purge of 1934, the retaliation against the generals of 1944, the attempt to exterminate the mentally ill and mentally challenged, etc. These are all infamous incidents. But for the most part, if you were an aryan German, you benefited from Hitler's rule through most of the Nazi years. The irony of Pastor Neimoeller's poem "First They Came" is that, though they did come for him personally, they never came for the class he represented (German Protestant Christians.) Hitler's regime saw the murders of 20 million people, but they were other people: Jews, slavs, Russians, western Europeans, eastern Europeans. It is true that at the end of the war Hitler desired and ordered the complete destruction of Germany's infrastructure which would have led to the mass starvation and death of the majority of the German people. But this didn't happen because Speer disobeyed him. Had Speer obeyed him, then Hitler would have won this contest, and easily so.
Joseph Stalin also caused the death of 20 million people through collectivization. But at least half of them were Russian and the majority of the rest were Ukrainian. He also was the man behind the Great Terror of 1936-1939, which killed a few million more and terrorized everyone in the Soviet Union. Stalin's major crimes, therefore, were against his own people, rather than outside, and they benefited nobody, not even himself. To me, as terrible as Hitler's outside crimes were, Stalin's inside crimes are by definition even worse.
When I first offered this theory to a good friend of mine who loves discussing World War II, he argued that Hitler was worse because of the gas chambers, which represented industrialized killing. Stalin's killing was by firing squad or through forced starvation, and thus slightly less horrific than the industrialized method of marching millions of men, women and children into large rooms and pumping chemical poison into them. This is actually a very compelling argument, IMO- but for the Nazi regime being worse than the Soviet regime, perhaps, rather than Hitler being worse than Stalin. I pointed out that, at the time that the worst crimes were committed, the Soviet Union was less industrialized than the Third Reich; that's the only reason the method of execution was less industrialized. Also, Hitler himself had nothing to do with the specifics of the gas chambers- he ordered the Jews killed, but the conduct and method was developed by other men, almost for sure without his involvement. Thus my conclusion.
Of course some people reading this are going to wonder, why should we even rank these two men, probably the worst two mass murderers ever? How can you possibly measure which one was worse? And why bother? All good questions, for which I have no good answers. I just find the subject matter interesting. Some won't.
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