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The Stalin-led massacre of Holodomor

bigred

Penultimate Amazing
bigred
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I knew generally that Stalin led horrors against his own people, but not this one specifically. IMO as much as people rail against the horrors of the Holocaust and understandably so, similar horrors as this don't get nearly enough attention.
 
When I was in Prague last year on a tour the guide was talking generally about the suffering Europe experienced during and after WW2, and asked the seemingly rhetorical question “who was the biggest murderer in that period”. I answered “Stalin by far”. This silenced everyone until the guide said “at last someone knows”. I spent so lot of time with that guide after that.

Stalin and Hitler (and Mao for that matter) were murderers on a gigantic scale, but Stalin was the worst, and he, like the others, targeted the most poor and defenceless. This is in the collective memory of the Ukrainians.
 
lionking said:
When I was in Prague last year on a tour the guide was talking generally about the suffering Europe experienced during and after WW2, and asked the seemingly rhetorical question “who was the biggest murderer in that period”. I answered “Stalin by far”. This silenced everyone until the guide said “at last someone knows”. I spent so lot of time with that guide after that.

Stalin and Hitler (and Mao for that matter) were murderers on a gigantic scale, but Stalin was the worst, and he, like the others, targeted the most poor and defenceless. This is in the collective memory of the Ukrainians.
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What? The right does not have a monopoly on psychotic mass murderers? Heretic!
We used to have a poster who was pretty much an apologist for Stalin, Mao and every other Left wing dictator. I wonder if he will show up here.
 
dudalb said:
What? The right does not have a monopoly on psychotic mass murderers? Heretic!
We used to have a poster who was pretty much an apologist for Stalin, Mao and every other Left wing dictator. I wonder if he will show up here.
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None of these were really "leftist" when they committed these crimes. Any more than Trump is "rightist" today. They were all totalitarian dictators, and their politics was either secondary, irrelevant, or long behind them. And make no mistake: they were all appallingly dreadful, with no redeeming values whatsoever.
 
Exactly...psychotic scum is equally abhorrent regardless of where on the political map they fall. To believe otherwise is borderline psycho as well IMO (or at the very least painfully stupid).
 
It depends on whether you think starvation over a period of time (=more people) is worse than torture and psychological terror followed by execution. How do you quantify that Stalin was worse than Hitler (although of course, comparisons are odious)?
 
Vixen said:
It depends on whether you think starvation over a period of time (=more people) is worse than torture and psychological terror followed by execution. How do you quantify that Stalin was worse than Hitler (although of course, comparisons are odious)?
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Who said "worst"? The question was "biggest".
 
Vixen said:
It depends on whether you think starvation over a period of time (=more people) is worse than torture and psychological terror followed by execution. How do you quantify that Stalin was worse than Hitler (although of course, comparisons are odious)?
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Stalin and Hitler presided over policies that did both. The major difference to me is how long they were in power.
 
lionking said:
When I was in Prague last year on a tour the guide was talking generally about the suffering Europe experienced during and after WW2, and asked the seemingly rhetorical question “who was the biggest murderer in that period”. I answered “Stalin by far”. This silenced everyone until the guide said “at last someone knows”. I spent so lot of time with that guide after that.

Stalin and Hitler (and Mao for that matter) were murderers on a gigantic scale, but Stalin was the worst, and he, like the others, targeted the most poor and defenceless. This is in the collective memory of the Ukrainians.
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And don't forget that Stalin's influence lasted long after his death due to the propaganda of the USSR. Even today that harm persists.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
I don't understand what you mean. Deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were perhaps two orders of magnitude less than Stalin killed.
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Depends what criteria one uses. The Holodomor is presumed to have been deliberate. Some say it was the collectivism of farming that went wrong (5-year plans and all that). China had a famine that killed up to 15m, due to poor planning(???) 1959-61. So it's useful to distinguish what is targeted genocide and what is due to the aftermath of earlier acts of destruction. Re Japan there was radioactive after effects for decades. There is also the famine inflicted by the British on Ireland re the Corn Laws (iirc Castlereagh). Also the knock-on effects over generations. The Siege of Leningrad was a deliberate strategy by Hitler to starve the enemy by blockade. The Holodomor is more unusual because few have heard of it.
 
The cold, calculated, production line killings of "undesirables" in nazi Germany are more terrifying to me; reading the Wannsee protocol is chilling to the bone, and feels like a manifestation of pure evil, but Stalin leads on numbers, and continued influence over society. This far, at least, Hitler and his way of looking at the world seem to be making a comeback.

Monsters are monsters, quantifying seems pointless - I don't think Pol Pot was any better than either of them, for instance. The Khmer Rouge did their best, they just didn't have as many to slaughter. They would have, if they could have.
 
Vixen said:
Depends what criteria one uses. The Holodomor is presumed to have been deliberate. Some say it was the collectivism of farming that went wrong (5-year plans and all that). China had a famine that killed up to 15m, due to poor planning(???) 1959-61. So it's useful to distinguish what is targeted genocide and what is due to the aftermath of earlier acts of destruction. Re Japan there was radioactive after effects for decades. There is also the famine inflicted by the British on Ireland re the Corn Laws (iirc Castlereagh). Also the knock-on effects over generations. The Siege of Leningrad was a deliberate strategy by Hitler to starve the enemy by blockade. The Holodomor is more unusual because few have heard of it.
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Deliberate killing, versus callous indifference to deaths caused by your own policies, versus incompetent incomprehension that you are causing such suffering is certainly worth considering.

But I do think you have a greatly overinflated idea of the numbers who died as a direct and a long-term result of the atomic bombings. Direct victims were fewer than some of the conventional bombing raids on Japan. And although many suffered, the numbers who died of radiation-induced diseases was surprisingly low. The British killed, or perhaps more charitably failed to save, vastly greater numbers in both the Irish famine and the Bengal famine both of which they handled inexcusably badly. But that pales before the numbers Mao and Stalin wiped out with their ideological reorganisations of farming which could not be questioned.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
Deliberate killing, versus callous indifference to deaths caused by your own policies, versus incompetent incomprehension that you are causing such suffering is certainly worth considering.

But I do think you have a greatly overinflated idea of the numbers who died as a direct and a long-term result of the atomic bombings. Direct victims were fewer than some of the conventional bombing raids on Japan. And although many suffered, the numbers who died of radiation-induced diseases was surprisingly low. The British killed, or perhaps more charitably failed to save, vastly greater numbers in both the Irish famine and the Bengal famine both of which they handled inexcusably badly. But that pales before the numbers Mao and Stalin wiped out with their ideological reorganisations of farming which could not be questioned.
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Fair point. However, I would say factors, such as the weather, poor crops and of course, foreign policy makes it difficult to deliberately kill off a population when there is otherwise good husbandry, storage and ability to flee to another region. So, Ireland had a potato blight - a root vegetable the average European could rely on - yet it was more profitable for the Brits to not to send grains that would have eased the problem. Result: one of the most avoidable famines in European history. But was it deliberate genocide? You tell me.
 
Helen said:
The cold, calculated, production line killings of "undesirables" in nazi Germany are more terrifying to me; reading the Wannsee protocol is chilling to the bone, and feels like a manifestation of pure evil, but Stalin leads on numbers, and continued influence over society. This far, at least, Hitler and his way of looking at the world seem to be making a comeback.

Monsters are monsters, quantifying seems pointless - I don't think Pol Pot was any better than either of them, for instance. The Khmer Rouge did their best, they just didn't have as many to slaughter. They would have, if they could have.
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True, numerically more died under Stalin than Hitler, but there was also a mass displacement of populations as a result of Hitler post-war. OK so they didn't die, but they lost their homelands forever. Plus Hitler and Stalin were initially allies, so two of a kind. But as you say, impossible to differentiate who was the worst. Now we have the Trump regime with the same chilling contempt for people from countries it dubs as '◊◊◊◊ holes'. The USA today would have no problem at all doing a 'Holodomor' on Somalia or Cuba because people don't learn from history.
 
bigred said:
Your math needs work, to say nothing of the silly devil's advocate thing.



Someone gets it, thank you
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You need to work on logic. Q: What is more criminal: taking a gun and shooting dead 20 people, knowing you are going to kill them, or, sneezing on public transport resulting in spreading your germs that eventually kills several hundred? It is only hypothetical that Stalin caused the Holodomor with the intention of committing genocide. If it was a result of poor collective planning that is not the same as wiping out 300,000 people in one fell swoop by dropping a couple of atom bombs on them, knowing they will be obliterated pronto, off the face of the earth.
 
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