I know people downvote mind-killers. But is it really a mind-killer to say that Stalin and the Soviet system under him was not clearly better than Hitler?
Aggression against other Sovereign states in the hopes of territorial gain (sometimes with revanchist justification)
Confinement relocation and extermination of inconvenient ethnic and ideological groups
Frack considering Stalin was only beat by death from organizing a Pogrom on a massive scale because of his paranoia, and that Atheist Jews no longer where a powerful faction in the Soviet Union circa 1930 to 1950 and that Jews tended to be a bit better off than was appropriate in the age of forced egalitarianism (and disdain for the bourgeois and hunts for kulaks), its not that clear that if say Communists had beaten the Nazis in the struggle for power in Weimar Germany there wouldn’t have been a Shoah anyway.
Communism overall has been historically a pretty terrible system.
Pol Pot became leader of Cambodia in mid-1975. During his time in power, Pol Pot imposed a version of agrarian socialism, forcing urban dwellers to relocate to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labor projects, toward a goal of “restarting civilization” in a “Year Zero”. The combined effects of forced labour, malnutrition, poor medical care and executions resulted in the deaths of approximately 21% of the Cambodian population.[5]
Mao’s China and North Korea are also data points. The only time Communism was a sort of ok system to live in (NEP period of the Soviet Union, China after Deng, Tito’s Yugoslavia) is when it didn’t really follow its ideology and allowed some economic freedom. And even then it was clearly totalitarian when it came to intellectual liberty (see the use of psychiatric institutions and sluggish schizophrenia as a diagnosis of dissidents or the constant witch hunt for wreckers and contra-revolutionaries).
If one considers National Socialism to be a kind of Fascism (which I don’t think it is, I think its distinct ideologically) then one could also add at this point that its arguable that mellow watered down Fascist regimes actually come out looking better than mellow watered down Communist regimes of the same era (1945-1990).
I give people who claim that those people that their brand of Communism would never turn out like that a fair hearing if they don’t seem kooky or clearly irrational, but the same would be true if I ever met a NeoNazi who fit the criteria claiming the same of his political brand. .
I treat the Che guevara T-shirt on a college freshman the same I would treat a child who scribbles swastika graffiti but has no idea what the symbol stands for today. I wouldn’t consider it a crime or even blame them for it, but I would try and convey that the he is normalizing symbolism that carries a message he may not endorse.
I’ve also been confused about the blind eye turned to certain Communist excesses. Mass murder isn’t cool just because it’s your own population… even if your heart is in the right place.
I’ve also been confused about the blind eye turned to certain Communist excesses. Mass murder isn’t cool just because it’s your own population… even if your heart is in the right place.
Excesses? Interesting word choice. So, um, how much murder is the right amount?
Confinement relocation and extermination of inconvenient ethic and ideological groups
To be fair to Stalin, under him there was never any campaign of all-out extermination on a purely ethnic basis. There were mass expulsions, relocations, and other projects targeted at various ethnic groups that intentionally and cold-bloodedly inflicted death rates well into double-digit percentages, but the goal was breaking resistance, looting, exploitation of slave labor, preemptive liquidation of potential rebels, etc., never a genocide in the true sense of the term. (Even if the stories about Stalin’s planned anti-Semitic purge are true, it would never have been anything close to a real genocidal campaign.)
The Nazis’ absolute determination to exterminate an entire ethnic group as defined by ancestry down to the very last person at all costs, spending vast resources just to ensure not a single one of its members gets away, is to the best of my knowledge really unique historically.
Otherwise, except for this particular fact, about whose relevance I’d say reasonable people may disagree, one would really have to stretch one’s case to argue that the Bolsheviks were significantly more benign than the Nazis. In fact, the very concept of “Stalinism” and the tendency to heap all blame on Stalin is a propagandistic sleight of hand; his fellow political gangsters like Lenin and Trotsky weren’t much different except in what they were able to get away with.
One source of pro-communist bias here is the common belief that communists, bad as they were, persecuted only dissenters and rebels, and left alone those who conformed obediently—in contrast to the horror of being on the Nazis’ extermination list, where nothing at all would help you, not even the most abject submission. This is however completely wrong: if you found yourself among the intended casualties of a Bolshevik plan, it was no different, except that in fairness these were never plans for all-out extermination on ethnic basis.
If one considers Nazis to be a kind of Fascism (which I don’t think it is, I think its distinct ideologically) then mellow Fascist regimes actually come out looking better than mellow Communist regimes.
In the present predominant opinion, the Nazis occupy the absolute first place on the scale of evil, with reasonable justification. However, they are followed on this scale by a bunch of right-wing regimes of all sorts, which are in turn followed by the worst communist regimes, and only distantly. (Even though, as you note, many regimes in the second category were outright idyllic compared to the standard communist fare.)
There is certainly enormous bias there, both because of the traditionally leftist inclination among the Western intelligentsia and because of the cognitive dissonance that would otherwise be caused by celebrating WW2 as a righteous crusade while at the same time admitting that it involved an alliance with a despotism no less awful than the ones it was fought to defeat. (This cognitive dissonance occasionally rears its head in amusing ways even as it is.)
I know people downvote mind-killers. But is it really a mind-killer to say that Stalin and the Soviet system under him was not clearly better than Hitler?
Aggression against other Sovereign states in the hopes of territorial gain (sometimes with revanchist justification)
Confinement relocation and extermination of inconvenient ethnic and ideological groups
Frack considering Stalin was only beat by death from organizing a Pogrom on a massive scale because of his paranoia, and that Atheist Jews no longer where a powerful faction in the Soviet Union circa 1930 to 1950 and that Jews tended to be a bit better off than was appropriate in the age of forced egalitarianism (and disdain for the bourgeois and hunts for kulaks), its not that clear that if say Communists had beaten the Nazis in the struggle for power in Weimar Germany there wouldn’t have been a Shoah anyway.
Communism overall has been historically a pretty terrible system.
Mao’s China and North Korea are also data points. The only time Communism was a sort of ok system to live in (NEP period of the Soviet Union, China after Deng, Tito’s Yugoslavia) is when it didn’t really follow its ideology and allowed some economic freedom. And even then it was clearly totalitarian when it came to intellectual liberty (see the use of psychiatric institutions and sluggish schizophrenia as a diagnosis of dissidents or the constant witch hunt for wreckers and contra-revolutionaries).
If one considers National Socialism to be a kind of Fascism (which I don’t think it is, I think its distinct ideologically) then one could also add at this point that its arguable that mellow watered down Fascist regimes actually come out looking better than mellow watered down Communist regimes of the same era (1945-1990).
I give people who claim that those people that their brand of Communism would never turn out like that a fair hearing if they don’t seem kooky or clearly irrational, but the same would be true if I ever met a NeoNazi who fit the criteria claiming the same of his political brand. .
I treat the Che guevara T-shirt on a college freshman the same I would treat a child who scribbles swastika graffiti but has no idea what the symbol stands for today. I wouldn’t consider it a crime or even blame them for it, but I would try and convey that the he is normalizing symbolism that carries a message he may not endorse.
I’ve also been confused about the blind eye turned to certain Communist excesses. Mass murder isn’t cool just because it’s your own population… even if your heart is in the right place.
Excesses? Interesting word choice. So, um, how much murder is the right amount?
Konkvistador:
To be fair to Stalin, under him there was never any campaign of all-out extermination on a purely ethnic basis. There were mass expulsions, relocations, and other projects targeted at various ethnic groups that intentionally and cold-bloodedly inflicted death rates well into double-digit percentages, but the goal was breaking resistance, looting, exploitation of slave labor, preemptive liquidation of potential rebels, etc., never a genocide in the true sense of the term. (Even if the stories about Stalin’s planned anti-Semitic purge are true, it would never have been anything close to a real genocidal campaign.)
The Nazis’ absolute determination to exterminate an entire ethnic group as defined by ancestry down to the very last person at all costs, spending vast resources just to ensure not a single one of its members gets away, is to the best of my knowledge really unique historically.
Otherwise, except for this particular fact, about whose relevance I’d say reasonable people may disagree, one would really have to stretch one’s case to argue that the Bolsheviks were significantly more benign than the Nazis. In fact, the very concept of “Stalinism” and the tendency to heap all blame on Stalin is a propagandistic sleight of hand; his fellow political gangsters like Lenin and Trotsky weren’t much different except in what they were able to get away with.
One source of pro-communist bias here is the common belief that communists, bad as they were, persecuted only dissenters and rebels, and left alone those who conformed obediently—in contrast to the horror of being on the Nazis’ extermination list, where nothing at all would help you, not even the most abject submission. This is however completely wrong: if you found yourself among the intended casualties of a Bolshevik plan, it was no different, except that in fairness these were never plans for all-out extermination on ethnic basis.
In the present predominant opinion, the Nazis occupy the absolute first place on the scale of evil, with reasonable justification. However, they are followed on this scale by a bunch of right-wing regimes of all sorts, which are in turn followed by the worst communist regimes, and only distantly. (Even though, as you note, many regimes in the second category were outright idyllic compared to the standard communist fare.)
There is certainly enormous bias there, both because of the traditionally leftist inclination among the Western intelligentsia and because of the cognitive dissonance that would otherwise be caused by celebrating WW2 as a righteous crusade while at the same time admitting that it involved an alliance with a despotism no less awful than the ones it was fought to defeat. (This cognitive dissonance occasionally rears its head in amusing ways even as it is.)