Hitler and Stalin: Who really killed more?

[Venom]

On my "scale of Evil" I place both men at the very top. Doesn't matter much the exact numbers.

 

[TubbaBlubba]

On my "scale of Evil" I place both men at the very top. Doesn't matter much the exact numbers.

I agree that the ranking of two particularly odious politicians is kind of irrelevant, but do the power structures involved matter to you? Does the fact that things awfully similar to the Great Famine of the 1930's happened in British possessions due to an overall indifference to the plight of colonial subjects matter? Does it matter that the last such famine, killing millions in Bengal, happened under Winston Churchill in 1943?

Does this affect your assessment of Churchill? Does it put him on the same level as Stalin and Hitler? If not, why not? Sure, we can quibble about the exact responsibilities and colonial dynamics that cause such catastrophes, but no doubt Churchill had a horrible attitude toward Indians, and millions of preventable deaths occurred under his watch.

I'm not saying you should come to a particular conclusion, but it's useful to think about. It's all-too easy to make evil foreign.

(Now, watch as the Churchill apologists flow in.)

 

[Venom]

Does this affect your assessment of Churchill? Does it put him on the same level as Stalin and Hitler? If not, why not? Sure, we can quibble about the exact responsibilities and colonial dynamics that cause such catastrophes, but no doubt Churchill had a horrible attitude toward Indians, and millions of preventable deaths occurred under his watch.

I'm not saying you should come to a particular conclusion, but it's useful to think about. It's all-too easy to make evil foreign.

(Now, watch as the Churchill apologists flow in.)

I rank Churchill lower, as a self centered warmonger, about 3 notches below Hitler and Stalin and guys like Lenin, who use absolutely extreme violence and mass deporation, mass murder, premeditated and well planned.

If we talk Western powers I cant think of anyone off.top I'd rate at the top, not that I know too much of modern European history, maybe if we go back to the middle ages.
Certainly there are stuff committed by the allies during WW2 I consider war crimes that a lot of posters here don't think are.

 

[Vixen]

I can't claim to be an expert in this topic, but I cannot help being sceptical about Stalin's rehabilitation, as it were. A country that unashamedly has troll farming to sway US elections and the UK Brexit referendum, as well as sending agents to foreign soils to assassinate perceived traitors, is not averse to 'fiddling the figures' on how many Stalin killed, especially given Vladimir Putin's open admiration of Stalin and nostalgia for 'the old days'.


How do you count it, anyway? In place like West Prussia, Estonia and even Poland, you had both German occupation and then retalitory occupation by Soviet soldiers bent on retribution, millions of civilians were displaced and made to flee, with hundreds of thousands perishing. Who is responsible for this, Hitler or Stalin?

As for the tactic of mass famine, in the Ukraine Stalin did make it a capital offence for anyone to 'steal food from the state' (i.e., grain and farm produce grown on the very soil of the local people from whom the land was confiscated in the first place!).

ISTM that post WWII, USSR being the victors, together with the allied forces, really made a meal of their martyrdom, making all sorts of demands and conditions on their perceived old enemies. If look at British Library archives, there is a whole plethora of literature accusing other countries of crimes against the Soviets by propagandising Stalinists determined to make political capital out of the situation.

 

[TubbaBlubba]

I rank Churchill lower, as a self centered warmonger, about 3 notches below Hitler and Stalin and guys like Lenin, who use absolutely extreme violence and mass deporation, mass murder, premeditated and well planned.

If we talk Western powers I cant think of anyone off.top I'd rate at the top, not that I know too much of modern European history, maybe if we go back to the middle ages.
Certainly there are stuff committed by the allies during WW2 I consider war crimes that a lot of posters here don't think are.

I'm not a subscriber to overly cartoonish caricatures of Churchill either (and he existed within an important broader context), but broadly, I see the violence and disregard for entire peoples inherent to the establishment and continued existence of the Birtish Empire as comparable in many regards to the atrocities Soviet Union (which was culturally, if not administratively, a continuation of the Russian Empire).

Personally I find the nihilistic campaigns of extermination that were integral to Nazi Germany enough to put that state and its "luminaries" in a category entirely of its own.

I am not immediately sure what premedetated and "well planned" "mass murders" you refer to w.r.t. Stalin and Lenin. The Katyn massacre perhaps? I'll agree that Churchill was never personally responsible as PM or commanding officer of anything like that.

I mean, the goal isn't ultimately to draw up a scoreboard. But IMO there is a great deal of cultural bias in the fact that Churchill, a proud supremacist and defender of an empire that killed innumerable millions throughout its existence, having even participated in some of its excesses and being significantly responsible for one of its worst famines, is a celebrated hero while most Westerners reserve no end of vitriol for Russian attempts to rehabilitate Stalin.

In my view, that the moral equation of Hitler and Stalin is so ubiquitous is largely a product of Cold War propaganda and the "Totalitarianism" model that prevailed in the immediate decades following World War II. One of the worst aspects of it as far as I'm concerned is that it masks the distinctive experiences of victims of Soviet atrocities.

 

[Vixen]

Totalitarianism is a reasonable model IMV. The National Socialist Workers of Hitler being only different from the Soviet protalitariat in that one is nationalist, and the other internationalist.

Both share envy and hatred of the owners of capital and hereditary wealth, believing the working classes are oppressed by bourgeoisie or the minor aristocatric Weimar junckers in Hitler's case.

The model in both cases is for 'the workers' to seize power and become the new ruling class.

 

[TubbaBlubba]

I can't claim to be an expert in this topic, but I cannot help being sceptical about Stalin's rehabilitation, as it were.

What rehabilitation? Among certain segments of Russian society? Surely you don't mean within Western academia?

A country that unashamedly has troll farming to sway US elections and the UK Brexit referendum, as well as sending agents to foreign soils to assassinate perceived traitors, is not averse to 'fiddling the figures' on how many Stalin killed, especially given Vladimir Putin's open admiration of Stalin and nostalgia for 'the old days'.

This is a problem with virtually any human atrocity, and one historians are aware of. Poland claims as many ethnic Poles as Polish Jews were killed (which is far from true, although well over a million ethnic Poles were killed). Ukraine inflates the numbers for crimes committed by the Russians. Turkey still refues to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. Etc. In the case of the U.S.S.R., it was an extremely bueraucratic state and enormous archives remain (unfortunately, they are not easy to get access to). Attempts by the Russian state to forge a mitigation of Stalin into these documents would be a comically enormous conspiracy with a huge risk of discovery for an insignificant gain.

How do you count it, anyway?

That's a huge topic. Broadly, you spend an awful lot of time in archives and crunching numbers.

In place like West Prussia, Estonia and even Poland, you had both German occupation and then retalitory occupation by Soviet soldiers bent on retribution, millions of civilians were displaced and made to flee, with hundreds of thousands perishing. Who is responsible for this, Hitler or Stalin?

 

[TubbaBlubba]

Totalitarianism is a reasonable model IMV. The National Socialist Workers of Hitler being only different from the Soviet protalitariat int hat one is nationalist, and the other internationalist.

Both share envy and hatred of the owners of capital and hereditary wealth, believing the working classses are oppressed by bourgeoisie or the minor aristocatric Weimar junckers in Hitler's case.

The model in both cases is for 'the workers' to seize power and become the new ruling class.

No, this is wrong on an immense number of levels and totalitarianism has been largely abandoned for good reason. The similarities you list is broadly what fascists rejected. The Nazis like the Italian fascists were corporatists. They favoured cooperation with industry operating as private entities for the benefit of the state. This is hugely different from seizing the means of production. In the case of Nazi Germany, it was ultimately all a sham in order to prepare for war.

While fascists coopted much socialist rhetoric, one of the fundamental substitutions was to replace class hierarchy with racial hierarchy. It's also a fact that fascism in practice was very different from the rhetoric sometimes used to rile up working-classes.

I strongly suggest you read modern treatments of fascist ideology, like "Anatomy of Fascism".

 

[kayle]

[...] and the Gulag did not consist of anything like death camps.

tell this to the relatives of those who were killed there. Oh yes, Stalin did not use gas but cold - that's much different... And the percentage of survival was much higher, so it makes the Gulag quite a nice place with well-furnished camps with happy prisoners, nothing like death camps

 

[Craig B]

I love these attempts to, basically, show that somehow Stalin was "less evil" then Hitler.

That is however not the question here, which is how many people were killed by these despots. That is an interesting question historically because although both these men were monstrous criminals, their methods and motives were very different. The cause of death of their victims was different, and their personal fates and that of their regimes were different. So while the degree of their personal evil was, as you imply, so great as to render comparisons pointless, the nature of their criminality is a much more useful, interesting and relevant question.

 

[TubbaBlubba]

tell this to the relatives of those who were killed there. Oh yes, Stalin did not use gas but cold - that's much different... And the percentage of survival was much higher, so it makes the Gulag quite a nice place with well-furnished camps with happy prisoners, nothing like death camps

If you say so. Personally I wouldn't engage in that kind of apologetics and I don't see the point in such a positive portrayal of what was an extremely brutal prison system, but if that's how you want to portray the Gulag system, I guess I'm not going to stop you.

 

[Craig B]

tell this to the relatives of those who were killed there. Oh yes, Stalin did not use gas but cold - that's much different... And the percentage of survival was much higher, so it makes the Gulag quite a nice place with well-furnished camps with happy prisoners, nothing like death camps

The main difference - I take the part I've highlighted as a joke by you - is that Nazi camps were intended primarily as extermination centres. The vast majority of people sent there did not even spend a day in confinement before they were murdered. Stalin's camps were primarily intended to exploit the labour of inmates, many of whom died in consequence of ill treatment and neglect, or punishment for infringement of rules.

That is a significant difference. It has nothing whatever to do with the Gulag being nice or Stalin being Santa Claus.

 

[Belz...]

Stalin had a better mustache.

 

[SpitfireIX]

Stalin had a better mustache.

Last summer, I was watching my cousin's four-year-old-daughter, and she said, "I want you shave your mustache so it only under your nose," while using her fingers to cover the ends of my mustache.

"No, I'm not going to do that."

"Why not?"

"I'll explain it to you when you're older, Sweetheart."

"'Splain it to me now."

"All right. A long time ago, when Aunt Nancy^* was your age, Germany was ruled by a very evil man named Adolf Hitler. He started a war that killed millions of people, and he murdered millions more just because they were different. He had a mustache like that, and if I shave mine that way, people will think I support him."

____________________

^*My mother, who was born on Kristallnacht.

 

[Porpoise of Life]

Last summer, I was watching my cousin's four-year-old-daughter, and she said, "I want you shave your mustache so it only under your nose," while using her fingers to cover the ends of my mustache.

"No, I'm not going to do that."

"Why not?"

"I'll explain it to you when you're older, Sweetheart."

"'Splain it to me now."

"All right. A long time ago, when Aunt Nancy^* was your age, Germany was ruled by a very evil man named Adolf Hitler. He started a war that killed millions of people, and he murdered millions more just because they were different. He had a mustache like that, and if I shave mine that way, people will think I support him."

____________________

^*My mother, who was born on Kristallnacht.

What was her response?

 

[Belz...]

What was her response?

"Wow, Chaplin killed that many people? I didn't think his movies were that bad."

 

[SpitfireIX]

What was her response?

Silence. I'm not sure how well she followed what I was saying, but she asked me to explain, so I did. I will have a longer talk with her about it when she's older. Interestingly, her oldest sister, who's 13, likes reading about the Holocaust (we're not Jewish^*). Mostly Diary of Anne Frank-type books, but not exclusively. So maybe the four year old will someday, too.
__________

^*I had a great uncle by marriage on the other side of the family (my mother's side) who was born Jewish, but converted to Christianity before he married my great aunt. He was a bombardier on a B-17, but he was in the Pacific. It just occurred to me to wonder whether that was by design, to keep him from potentially falling into the hands of the Nazis.

 

[SpitfireIX]

"Wow, Chaplin killed that many people? I didn't think his movies were that bad."

 

[dudalb]

I rank Churchill lower, as a self centered warmonger, about 3 notches below Hitler and Stalin and guys like Lenin, who use absolutely extreme violence and mass deporation, mass murder, premeditated and well planned.

If we talk Western powers I cant think of anyone off.top I'd rate at the top, not that I know too much of modern European history, maybe if we go back to the middle ages.
Certainly there are stuff committed by the allies during WW2 I consider war crimes that a lot of posters here don't think are.

Because most poster here don't buy into this "Moral Equivilency" nonsense so popular among a certain class of "intellectuals".

 

[Belz...]

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/1706047a4c06136836.jpg[/qimg]

If only he knew...