Hitler and Stalin: Who really killed more?

[Senex]

Could you be more specific and actually formulate relevant criticism of what has been said? I'm basing my view on what I read in actual academic works and discussions and perspectives of historians. Frankly, I think your ridiculing of contextualization is incredibly contemptuous toward the victims of Soviet atrocities.

Do you mock people who contextualize British atrocities on the same scale as Soviet ones as "trying to show Churchill was less evil than Hitler"? Do you think there's a point to understanding the suffering of victims of Soviet atrocities in their own right? Or are they only pawns in a game of political pie-throwing for you?

hehehe... in the old days you might have been called a commie apologist.

 

[TubbaBlubba]

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

Where's that specific and directed criticism grounded in scholarship I asked for?

 

[angrysoba]

What was her response?

"Well, at least you will stop looking like Joseph Stalin!"

 

[SpitfireIX]

"Well, at least you will stop looking like Joseph Stalin!"

Sadly, my lip hair is nowhere near as impressive as his; here's a picture I posted in the weight loss thread in FC. I'm standing on the train platform at Saskatoon, during my trip to Canada in late summer 2015.

 

[SpitfireIX]

If only he knew...

I recall a documentary about Chaplin that stated that The Great Dictator was a box-office disappointment, because by the time it was released, no one thought Hitler was funny anymore.

 

[Belz...]

He also said that if he had known the horrors that were going on in Europe he wouldn't have made the movie.

 

[MaGZ]

There were only two purges under Hitler, the Night of the Long Knives and those executed after the July 20 Plot. Stalin routinely went after entre classes of people giving his NKVD thugs quotas to meet for execution.

 

[Porpoise of Life]

There were only two purges under Hitler, the Night of the Long Knives and those executed after the July 20 Plot. Stalin routinely went after entre classes of people giving his NKVD thugs quotas to meet for execution.

What about the holocaust? Oh wait, it's you...

 

[Border Reiver]

There were only two purges under Hitler, the Night of the Long Knives and those executed after the July 20 Plot. Stalin routinely went after entre classes of people giving his NKVD thugs quotas to meet for execution.

Kristallnacht.

 

[JesseCuster]

There were only two purges under Hitler, the Night of the Long Knives and those executed after the July 20 Plot. Stalin routinely went after entre classes of people giving his NKVD thugs quotas to meet for execution.

Because if there's one thing you can say about the Nazis, it's that they didn't go after entire classes of people....

Wait, what?

 

[dudalb]

I recall a documentary about Chaplin that stated that The Great Dictator was a box-office disappointment, because by the time it was released, no one thought Hitler was funny anymore.

Great Dictator has some brilliant moments, but is far from being one of Chaplin's best.
IMHO the funniest bit I the meeting between Chaplin and Jack Oakie as the Mussolini figure.
One piece of mythlogy is about how brave Chaplin was in attacking Hitler. In fact taking potshots at the Nazis had become common place by 1940. Even MGM, the most cautious of the Hollywood studios when it came to avoiding controversy, made in 1940 "The Mortal Storm" a strongly anti Nazi film.
And as early as 1938, Warners brough out "COnfessions Of A Nazi Spy" an expose of Nazi Espionage in America.
And even a film as wholesome as 1939's "Babes In Arms" (MGM) that first of the "Let's put on Show, kids!" Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney "Backyard Musicals" had a musical number which ridiculed Hitler.

 

[dudalb]

There were only two purges under Hitler, the Night of the Long Knives and those executed after the July 20 Plot. Stalin routinely went after entre classes of people giving his NKVD thugs quotas to meet for execution.

Just when you think our local Neo Nazi cannot make himself look more ridiculous , he manages to surprise you.

 

[Major Major]

Great Dictator has some brilliant moments, but is far from being one of Chaplin's best.
IMHO the funniest bit I the meeting between Chaplin and Jack Oakie as the Mussolini figure.
One piece of mythlogy is about how brave Chaplin was in attacking Hitler. In fact taking potshots at the Nazis had become common place by 1940. Even MGM, the most cautious of the Hollywood studios when it came to avoiding controversy, made in 1940 "The Mortal Storm" a strongly anti Nazi film.
And as early as 1938, Warners brough out "COnfessions Of A Nazi Spy" an expose of Nazi Espionage in America.
And even a film as wholesome as 1939's "Babes In Arms" (MGM) that first of the "Let's put on Show, kids!" Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney "Backyard Musicals" had a musical number which ridiculed Hitler.

And the Three Stooges did You Nazty Spy! in 1940. When the Three Stooges get on your case, you've lost any credibility.

 

[dudalb]

Goof one,Major.
And after the war started the Stooges really went after Hitler. I remember one short where, masquerading as Nazis,subsituted "Hang" for "Heil" in "Heil Hitler".

 

[Cleon]

And the Three Stooges did You Nazty Spy! in 1940. When the Three Stooges get on your case, you've lost any credibility.

Somehow I don't think it a lot of convincing to get a bunch of Jews to do an anti-Hitler act.

 

[quadraginta]

Somehow I don't think it a lot of convincing to get a bunch of Jews to do an anti-Hitler act.

It still has to appeal to the audiences, no matter what the ethnicity of the performers. Or it won't sell tickets.

 

[caveman1917]

So I can give a bit of background on the historiography of Soviet crimes and atrocities - the tl;dr is that Snyder's number is about correct, but Snyder is not a very good historian and I would not use him as a main source for this.

The grand old man in this context is Robert Conquest, who wrote the definitive works of his day in the -60's and -70's, The Great Terror and The Harvest of Sorrow. Both are eminently readable to this day and I highly recommend them to anyone interested in Soviet history.

I would, on the other hand, highly recommend just throwing Conquest's works straight into the dustbin. While there is some stuff of interest in his works, it is so entwined with Cold War anti-communist propaganda (which he was, after all, employed to produce) that it makes his works useless as historical reference. It's probably more work to check all his claims and sources to separate fact from fiction than to just collect the necessary primary sources to build your own view of what happened. His works are a net negative, and the stuff that actually is factual and accurately represented is outdated by the opening of the Soviet archives anyway, just like most other works written before the Soviet archives were opened.

The more vicious aspect of this, in my view, is the construct of the "Holodomor" ("Death by Famine"), widely promoted by Ukranian nationalists.

It even appears that the term "Holodomor" was deliberately coined to be similar to "Holocaust".

I definitely think that deaths as a result of Stalinist-style collectivization are a category worthy of study

Which deaths would that be? Ascribing the famine to the collectivization and mechanization of agriculture (CMA) is a cum hoc ergo propter hoc. For all you know the famine would've been even worse without the CMA, and the CMA might have saved lives instead. It seems even the more likely case. The theory that the CMA caused the famine fails on several levels:

1. Since the 1933 growing season continued the CMA along the same lines as the 1932 one, but with even less "experienced peasants" (since many starved in the famine) and even more unexperienced people brought in to do the farming work, the theory would predict the 1933 harvest to be even worse. Yet the 1933 harvest was the largest of the period.

2. Statistically, pre-CMA harvest failures occurred every 3-4 years and full-blown famines every 10 years, post-CMA there were none of either anymore. The CMA is strongly associated with the end of food insecurity and famines in the region.

The theory that best explains the famine (or at least the harvest failure leading up to it) is environmental causes, and since by point 2 above the CMA is statistically associated with security against such events (rather than the opposite) it seems more likely that the famine would've been even worse without the CMA. So maybe it's not the deaths as a result of Stalinist-style collectivization that are a category worthy of study, but the lives saved as a result of it.

 

[caveman1917]

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 realize you probably just threw that out there without much thought, but as someone fond of nihilism I'd object to describing Nazism (or its campaigns) as "nihilistic". They were nothing of the sort, it's just Nazis appropriating a philosophical doctrine for their own purposes while turning it upside-down to the point it becomes completely unrecognizable - somewhat the same thing they did with "socialism". A nihilist who's driven by concepts like nation, race, traditional family roles, authoritarianism, etc is not a nihilist at all by even a long shot.

 

[caveman1917]

50 million is probably too high by a factor ~2. Not that it matters that much.

As I noted above, one remarkable fact in assessing the context of these atrocities is the steady decline in mortality during Mao's rule (even during the Great Leap Forward), especially when compared with India. It's... complicated, and one of the big reasons why dictatorships of huge countries can be so disastrous.

It's not that complicated. If you die due to socio-economic circumstances under capitalism then it doesn't count as a kill by the regime, but if you do under socialism then it does. As you mention, people were dying at even greater rates before Mao's rule, but you only get counted as a "victim of X" when the X is socialism or communism. That's basically all there is to it. If you apply the same standards of counting deaths to capitalism as to socialism you arrive at a figure in the billions of victims of capitalism.

 

[angrysoba]

The theory that best explains the famine (or at least the harvest failure leading up to it) is environmental causes, and since by point 2 above the CMA is statistically associated with security against such events (rather than the opposite) it seems more likely that the famine would've been even worse without the CMA. So maybe it's not the deaths as a result of Stalinist-style collectivization that are a category worthy of study, but the lives saved as a result of it.

Could we at least see some sources that might back up this claim?