…and does it matter?
I think the answers are yes, and no. This artificial distinction between “genocide” and the mass murder on a grander scale by Stalin, Mao et al is just a means to distract from the fact that Hitler was not the worst man in history, and that his depredations were actually typical of the left.
“Genocide” is the “hate crime” enhancer for mass murder. It’s like, if you murder someone and then spit on his body and say take that you filthy Jew/gay/woman/Muslim/black/undocumented worker then you are just way more evil. Killing someone isn’t so good, yes, but disrespecting their diversity along the way is very bad indeed.
NO WAY would a hero of Barack do something mean like that lol
I think the distinction between genocide and mass murder is made by those who want to elevate group rights above individual rights.
Carl – genocide is a little bit more than that though. In theory at least, it’s not just about getting people to submit, which mass murder is about, it’s about removing some group from the face of the earth.
My take on it is .. after a certain amount of badness, why the hell is anyone even trying to say who is “worse”? This is really intellectual masturbation of the “angels on the head of a pin” sort.
What I can’t wrap my mind around is that many Russians believe the mass murders were justified and even necessary.
obama’s friend bill ayers:
link
In theory at least, it’s not just about getting people to submit, which mass murder is about
Uh…and you don’t there’s a conceptual difficulty with convincing people to submit after they’re murdered? I’m not quite following the logic here, to be honest.
Google “cognitive dissonance,” ken. In my experience the number of individuals who can look with a cold, clear eye at their past behaviour and without flinching identify where they have been first class sh**heads is low.
I mean, heck, I bet if you surveyed ex-lovers over who was to blame for the breakup, 80% would say the other, which is just a bit statistically impossible.
“The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”
That was from the mouth of a mass murderer who personally reviewed and signed the lists of people to die, and who had an even more direct hand in the deaths of many others.
He was a filthy beast, for whom the Left still obsequiously apologizes.
“What I can’t wrap my mind around is that many Russians believe the mass murders were justified and even necessary.”
It’s a Russian thing. Read “The Russian Tradition,” by Tibor Szamuely. Or, to get a somewhat more light-hearted equivalent, watch Michael Palin as the chained-up prisoner in “The Life of Brian.” It’s the same mentality…
He was great at making analogies. That shrewd uncle Joe. I can imagine the reactions on the people who were his intended recipients. Several of his quotes go down in the annals of history like this one I am particularly fond of:
“You have let down our country and our Red Army. You have the nerve not to manufacture IL-2s until now. Our Red Army now needs IL-2 aircraft like the air it breathes, like the bread it eats. Shenkman produces one IL-2 a day and Tretyakov builds one or two MiG-3s daily. It is a mockery of our country and the Red Army. I ask you not to try the government’s patience, and demand that you manufacture more ILs. This is my final warning.”
In that cause “trying the government’s patience” would usually result into being sent to a gulag, or worse. Well, maybe just some swift kicks in the stomach with steel soled boots.
“This is my final warning.” Oh man, so the punishment is death?! I guess we really need to make some of those Il-2. Ah, and he is such a poet too our Comrade, comparing Il-2 to bread for the Army. Yes, of course we will bust our asses to increase production further!
So yeah the guy was a murderer. It is my belief that he could have achieved his goals without so much bloodshed.
He found himself the de-facto ruler of a country after a revolutionary war in which he himself had been arrested by the state police for agitating the masses, or something like that. He could have done several things with that power. First thing he did was kill or expatriate his rivals (not very democratic that uncle Joe). Next thing was to make a huge speech about how the USSR did not need anyone else. They could build their worker’s paradise right there and now! As long as they followed his instructions. The instructions of course were to fork out all your production to Red Army personnel for FREE. If they were lucky they could get some breadcrumbs for their efforts, or some more kicking with steel soled boots. But they would get to paradise! They just needed to fight against the whole world and win! They would have to stop eating so the soldier could eat, the machines of war be constructed, etc. So they did obey, get abused, or die.
Still he will go down in History in the annals of tyrants like Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, or the others which will come. Because they always come, whenever we weaken our vigilance.
Carl,
sorry, didn’t go into enough detail ..
in theory “just” mass murder is used as control, whereas genocide is what one does even after having control.
So if a theoretical dictator was lining up and shooting political opponents, that would mostly be because they didn’t think they had control. Whereas when they start killing ethnic groups to the last person, that’s not likely because they were posing a threat to his control.
I think the OTHER distinction that separates Hitler from the rest is his CHOICE of killing based on religion or other ‘factors’. When Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot…killed millions they didn’t DISCRIMINATE.
They just killed anyone who got in the way.
The latter group killed just to get / prove “X” idea to the populace or to solve “Y” problem. Hitler murdered out of anger and said so. The fact that the latter group’s “master idea for peace / great plan for humanity” was obviously just as nuckin futs as Hitlers Final Solution doesn’t even matter. Especially to leftists.
They key on the DISCRIMINATORY thinking.
As Carl said, it’s about disrespecting someone. Killing someone is no big deal compared to being anti-diversity!!
Still he will go down in History in the annals of tyrants like Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, or the others which will come. Because they always come, whenever we weaken our vigilance.
There is a vast gulf between a Stalin or a Hitler and The three that you mention. None of those three capriciously slew large numbers of people at random within their domains or targeted entire groups of their citizens for extinction.
Stalin and Hitler are throwbacks to the most ancient impulses of Persian, Assyrian, and African despots.
Nothing about the evil of Stalin, Mao, or the like is minimized by drawing a qualitative distinction between their actions and the Holocaust.
Neither should the distinctiveness of the Holocaust be minimized by using the kind of language (‘anti-diversity’) appropriate to a wholly different level of political discourse.
No human life is worth more than another.
All that being said, there are certain aspects of the Holocaust that put it in a class by itself among attempts at genocide. These include:
a) That it was directed at a group that has been the subject of sanctioned hatred and killing for some 2000 years.
b) That, nonetheless, this group has been one of the two primary roots of the positive evolution of the West (viz, the “Jerusalem-Athens axis”).
c) That it was carried out by a society at the center of Western civilization, which systematically deployed industrialized methods to achieve the highest efficiency, rate and quantity of killing, even at the cost of shortening its own existence.
I am not ‘indulging’ in victimhood here. It is a crime against all past, present and future victims of acts of mass killing not to recognize the central and distinctive characteristics of the most focussed, most deeply rooted genocide yet attempted.
Dennis – I would agree that Caesar himself was not such a bad ruler, but he opened the door for Caligula and Nero. No popular, power-hungry military genius one generation = no batshit crazy man-god the next. Caesar is to Caligula what Hitler would have been to Bismarck had Germany won WWI.
Genghis Khan was a mass-murderer. His armies killed, burned, and raped their way across Asia. The Khanates only softened and became integrated into local cultures in later generations. Similar to the Soviet Union in that regard.
As for Napoleon, he was much more intent on military crusade than on murdering his own people. Still, he cut a swath of destruction across northern Europe for no good reason.
You can argue the finer points, but whether you’re a tyrant for the sheer blood sport of it, for the spoils, or you enable later tyranny to satisfy your own ego, a tyrant you be nonetheless.
Does a genocide require a “maximum leader” to instigate it? Where does what the Muslim Turks did to the Christian Armenians in 1915 fit into this? Or Rwanda during the 1990s?
The irony is that if you oppose non-violent genocide, you’re a “racist.”
Eh, both genocide and mass murder are forms of control. To control the survivors, because fear is a primary emotional component of political control. To control the perpetrators, because once you have made a man commit an atrocity for you, you own him. This was Mao’s most powerful observation, and the primary business of the Long March and the Yenan exile – the repeated tormentation of the party by the party, until those who survived in a functional state were capable of anything, because they had the Party crouching in the ruins which used to house their inhibitions, self-worth and self-regard.
For sake of understanding Rand’s perspective, I want to ask about some other historical atrocities.
If the distinction between Stalin’s murders and Hitler’s murders aren’t important, if both are just symptomatic of Leftism, how does slavery in pre-Civil War American fit into , from an ideological studies perspective, or from a “genocide” perspective?
Stalin murdered people, in part, by working them to death, just as slaves in America were worked to death. Unlike Stalin (for the most part, correct me if I’m mistaken), but like Hitler, racism played a key role in why African-Americans were victimized. This is obviously important if you’re interested in fighting racism. But if you’re interested in the left-right ideological perspective, does it matter? Does this tell us something about the excesses of the Right or the Left?
After all, if we’re interested in whether there is an important distinction between genocide and mass murder, does it make any sense to make a distinction between murder and other ways at other ways of completely ruining millions of people’s lives besides murder? Also, Stalin
Heh, I was just getting warmed up, and my 10 month old banged on the keyboard and hit the submit button. Please disregard that last paragraph — it was going to be deleted.
Instead, I wanted to ask, in a non-snarky, completely sincere way, about the excesses of the Right. I know of no successful libertarian countries. America and Hong Kong seem to be the most right-wing places on Earth right now that aren’t miserable failures (ironic given that Hong Kong is owned by truly evil communists, and America has a president who is falsely accused of being some sort of evil communist). But we do have anarchy in certain failed states – like Congo — and these states have seen systematic rape on a scale that is blood curdling and unbelievably horrifying. It is that sort of thing that I was going to ask about — if you want to teach about the excesses of the Left, do that sort of atrocity tell us anything about what happens when there is a complete lack of government, which I suppose is the goal of many libertarians commenting here (including you Rand?)
My own take is that the Holocaust isn’t really an object lesson in what is wrong with Leftism — it is an object lesson in what is wrong with Racism, which is why I’ve been recently comparing it to slavery in America. But that approach has a weakness in that it doesn’t explain the similarities between Stalin’s murders and the Holocaust. Does anyone want to suggest an over-arching theory of what went wrong in all three situations? Could it also explain what goes wrong in an anarchy? My best attempt would be to say that the sort of compromises between government control and freedom that we’ve made in the USA and throughout the Free World is the best we’ve come up with so far, and purist libertarians are proposing a dangerous world just as purist communists and just about any kind of fascist is. Too simple? What’s your answer?
Sorry, my kid climbing all over me while trying to post. Hope you can see what I’m driving at despite certain jumps in the argument.
“just as slaves in America were worked to death”
Were they? I’m sure some were, but was it common or routine to do so?
I’ve not done a great deal of study on the issue, but what little I do know on it suggests that that “working a slave to death” was not common. Slaves were thought of as property, as a tool if you will, an expensive tool at that. Don’t most people try to take at least some care with an expensive tool, so as to get the most for the money you spent in purchasing the tool? So why work to death a slave that you spent considerable money to acquire? I’m not making excuses for slavery, it was a horrid and shhameful institution, but I think the “worked them to death” is hyperbole and the comparison of slavery in the US to Hitlers holocaust is asinine.
Compare the life expectancy between a slave and a free person. I’d say, be sure to correct for income, but of course, you can’t. The Nazis, the USSR, and the slave states all had work camps with slaves where you could make the “tool” argument.
…we do have anarchy in certain failed states – like Congo — and these states have seen systematic rape on a scale that is blood curdling and unbelievably horrifying. It is that sort of thing that I was going to ask about — if you want to teach about the excesses of the Left, do that sort of atrocity tell us anything about what happens when there is a complete lack of government, which I suppose is the goal of many libertarians commenting here (including you Rand?)
Please tell us this wasn’t meant to be a serious comment.
Anyway, what’s the difference? I’m comparing the systematic institutional government-sanctioned destruction of someone’s life. Comparing the experience of someone who survived Hitler’s death camps for five years before being rescued vs someone who was born in slavery, treated horribly, and then died early in slavery in America doesn’t seem asinine too me, regardless whether the intention was to kill or enslave.
Yes, it was serious. After all this time reading your blog, Rand, I still don’t know what you really consider a perfect state of affairs with regard to government. You don’t want to ultimately get rid of it?
Unfortunately the terms Right and Left do not mean what they used to and are not helpful to an ideological discussion.
The real distinction is between those who believe in the right of the state to have power over the people and those who believe in individual freedom with all just state power coming from the consent of the governed.
In this light all of the statists, Hitler, Stalin, the KKK, etc. are today’s “Left” and those who want personal freedom and responsibility for all people are today’s “Right”. This has not real relation to the textbook definitions of liberal or conservative.
USA was founded on the principle of the consent of the governed. Many compromises were made in order to have the majority of the states join the Union. I would not argue that those compromises were wise or even needed but they were made. Part of the emotional reason for the civil war was that government supported slavery were not consistent with the founding principles of the country.
We still suffer much from the willingness of to many to compromise principle for any reason.
It seems that the debate over the relative badness of Hitler versus anyone is usually started to make the whoever is not Hitler look better than they are/were. All mass murders need to be stopped and their evil exposed not excused.
The power of all governments needs to be made so small that no power hungry person will bother to be put in charge of any government. This is the only sensible path to either world freedom or world peace. Getting there is problematic at best.
I blundered, as any statist would maybe 🙂 , when I called slavery in America government-sanctioned. That’s not the point. My question is whether slavery (or rape camps, or mass murder) would occur without sufficient government control as the result of private individuals pursuing their own individual goals. But we know what’s wrong with failed states. Slave-holding America is interesting in that it is not a failed state. I would characterize it as a state with too little government control. I know others here wouldn’t, but how would you characterize it?
After all this time reading your blog, Rand, I still don’t know what you really consider a perfect state of affairs with regard to government. You don’t want to ultimately get rid of it?
You have clearly not been reading for comprehension. Please explain to me how you reconcile my repeated admiration for the Constitution and its founders and a desire to return to it with the goal of getting rid of government. That would seem to me to require a lunacy-level amount of cognitive dissonance.
And with all due respect, describing the Congo as an ultimate “right wing” country is a slur most vicious and malicious, and not of the Congo. It’s on the level of either profound cluelessness, or profound trollery.
You don’t want to ultimately get rid of it?
Would that include getting rid of the Constitution?
Bob: “well, let me think and espouse [blah… blah… blah…] … Yes it would. I think. Please discuss.”
What has Rand ever said that woud lead you to think he would be in favor of that?
Bob: “… OK, I wasn’t serious. Can we talk about slavery instead?”
Rand,
First of all, I intended no personal attack whatsoever. I reconcile your admiration for the constitution with my perceived interest in you ultimately wanting to do away with government easily: pragmatism! But if I’ve misread you, that shouldn’t be a big deal. I hope I didn’t really offend you! Other thoughtful commenters here, like Carl Pham and, Ken Anthony, and others have, from time to time, if I’m reading them correctly, been interested in a governmentless libertarian paradise, but if I’m mistaken, I hope they won’t get upset either.
As for a malicious and/or vicious slur against “the right wing” when discussing Congo, YOU are the one who keeps saying that the left-wing is responsible for both the Holocaust and Stalin’s murders, as if people like, say, Al Gore or Bill Bradley, or to pick a much MUCH less illustrious example of a left-wingers — me! — are somehow in the same camp as Stalin and Hitler. Are you making a vicious and malicious slur against me, a registered Democrat, when you talk about “the Left” being responsible for the Holocaust? No? Then don’t worry when I talk about the Congo — it is meant in the exact same spirit — non-malicious non-vicious political science.
As for being a troll: Never. You’ve said so yourself about me when others have complained. The first time you ask me to leave, I will, but it would make me sad, since I enjoy your site and I admire you, despite the lack of reciprocity.
I’d really like to know how slavery in America fits into your ideological perspective. Slavery was condoned by the US Constitution you and I both so admire. Was slavery in America a right-wing failure?
First of all, I intended no personal attack whatsoever. I reconcile your admiration for the constitution with my perceived interest in you ultimately wanting to do away with government easily: pragmatism! But if I’ve misread you, that shouldn’t be a big deal
No, Bob. You’re so busy setting up one stupid strawman after another that you’re failing to read for comprehension.
You guys go on and on, month after month, about how the Holocaust was the result of leftism,and then all you’ve got is “strawman!” when I ask about how other atrocities fit into that ideological perspective? Please don’t worry about the need to defend Rand from my horrible attacks — I like Rand, I think he is smart, and if I get something wrong, a gentle correction suffices. Rand, the following IS off-topic, but your ideological stance has to go further than an admiration for the US constitution — surely you’re interested in what state constitutions should limit or not limit, and that goes directly back to the question of the civil war and what went wrong. I’m asking if slavery was a right-wing failure to properly exercise government control.
I reconcile your admiration for the constitution with my perceived interest in you ultimately wanting to do away with government easily: pragmatism!
Can you, in less than 100 words, … like… redo that so I can understand it?
Pardon me for writing disjointed sentences — these posts are being written in between learning games for babies. I read each of these comments to my daughter too — all these big words are helping her learn to speak.
I’m just saying that some libertarians push for a very limited interpretation of, say, the commerce clause, as an achievable step on the way to their ultimate libertarian paradise (maybe in an O’Neill colony). If that’s not Rand, then I misspoke. If that’s not any of you, I’d be shocked. Carl, for example, described a really fun modular approach to libertarian space habitats awhile back, and I think he’d genuinely enjoy living in his creation. His solution to slavery was to detach the slavers’ module, which doesn’t address the problem of how to set up a society where people don’t get enslaved.
I’m just saying that some libertarians push for a very limited interpretation of, say, the commerce clause, as an achievable step on the way to their ultimate libertarian paradise (maybe in an O’Neill colony).
No, that’s not what you’re “just saying.” You’re saying (ludicrously) that such a position is equivalent to wanting to “get rid of government.” That you can’t see what an outrageous strawman this is is a testament to either your willingness to push the boundaries of trolling, or some sort of severe cognate disability.
Rand, you just this week said the same thing about Obama being a socialist — that he was also a pragmatist who was going to take small achievable steps, but in his heart, he was a socialist. I’m not making an outrageous argument which beyond the bounds of this blog. I’m making the kind of arguments you make.
We don’t have Obama to interview, and I’m not sure you’d believe him anyway, but we do have you, and I do believe you, so if you’re saying you don’t want to get rid of government completely, then ok, I was wrong about you personally. Similarly, I think you’re wrong about Obama and about many on the Left, including me.
But I still wish you’d explain how slavery in America fits into the left vs right ideological perspective that you applied in your post above to an analysis of Stalin’s atrocities and Hitler’s atrocities.
We don’t have Obama to interview, and I’m not sure you’d believe him anyway, but we do have you, and I do believe you, so if you’re saying you don’t want to get rid of government completely, then ok, I was wrong about you personally. Similarly, I think you’re wrong about Obama and about many on the Left, including me.
The difference is that Stanley Kurtz has written a well-researched book demonstrating that Barack Obama has been a socialist for his entire adult life, whereas there is absolutely zero existing evidence that I want to get rid of government, and you have not even attempted to cite any.
Lest we get lost, Rand said “[Hitler’s] depredations were actually typical of the left.” Is this a vicious and malicious slur against members of the US Democratic party?
Would it make you feel better if I said totalitarian left?
Rand, you compared Hitler to Stalin — both leftists, you said. I’m asking how slavery in America fits in. All the other stuff, about your personal political beliefs, about whether socialists are boiling the frog, all of that isn’t nearly as interesting. Right?
America is our country, we love it, and so we should understand how its history fits into an intellectual framework. You are comparing historical atrocities, so lets try to understand how American historical attrocities fit in.
Slavery was slavery. The topic of the post was deliberate mass murder. Your insisting on talking about America and slavery is a red herring and a non sequitur. But that’s what trolls do.
Well, I’m not a troll. I’d have to go look up some history to show you why slavery *was* mass-murder, but lets pretend that slavery never killed very many people — it was still an atrocity and I shouldn’t have to explain why. It went far far beyond treating people as tools who didn’t get paid (which would also be an atrocity, but a far less horrible one than what actually happened to American slaves, regardless of whether they were mass murdered.) I don’t understand why it is trolling to understand how the atrocity of American slavery fits in, once you have already taken the step of comparing Stalin’s atrocity to Hitler’s atrocity. Not everyone died in Stalin’s camps nor in Hitler’s camps, but the non-murdered ones were just as victimized, and the people who did it to them deserve to be punished (killed) just as much.
Genghis Khan was a mass-murderer. His armies killed, burned, and raped their way across Asia. The Khanates only softened and became integrated into local cultures in later generations. Similar to the Soviet Union in that regard.
The Khan did not kill anyone in cities that surrendered to the Mongolian army and even most of their leaders were allowed to remain in power. When resistance was encountered, it was a scorched earth policy. When the Khan’s ambassadors were skinned alive and killed by the Persians the Mongolian army made short work and eliminated great swaths of the populations of the middle east, except where these cities surrendered. This is the only reason that Herat and Kabul still exist in Afghanistan, 46 other cities decided to resist and were erased.
After the conquest life in the Khanate controlled lands was far more peaceful than is the case in that part of the world even today.
Your statement that they only later softened is historically incorrect.
The reference for this is the book “The Life of Ghenghis Khan”, by Harold Lamb.
Here this took ten seconds of googling:
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=74
Slaves suffered extremely high mortality. Half of all slave infants died during their first year of life, twice the rate of white babies. And while the death rate declined for those who survived their first year, it remained twice the white rate through age 14. As a result of this high infant and childhood death rate, the average life expectancy of a slave at birth was just 21 or 22 years, compared to 40 to 43 years for antebellum whites. Compared to whites, relatively few slaves lived into old age.
A major contributor to the high infant and child death rate was chronic undernourishment. Slaveowners showed surprisingly little concern for slave mothers’ health or diet during pregnancy, providing pregnant women with no extra rations and employing them in intensive field work even in the last week before they gave birth. Not surprisingly, slave mothers suffered high rates of spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and deaths shortly after birth. Half of all slave infants weighed less than 5.5 pounds at birth, or what we would today consider to be severely underweight.
Infants and children were badly malnourished. Most infants were weaned early, within three or four months of birth, and then fed gruel or porridge made of cornmeal. Around the age of three, they began to eat vegetables, soups, potatoes, molasses, grits, hominy, and cornbread. This diet lacked protein, thiamine, niacin, calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D, and as a result, slave children often suffered from night blindness, abdominal swellings, swollen muscles, bowed legs, skin lesions, and convulsions.
Well, I’m not a troll.
Then stop acting like one. Comparing Stalin’s atrocity to Hitler’s atrocity only leads to American slavery in a lazy mind. Or a troll.
Here this took ten seconds of googling
Glad you didn’t waste too much time chasing a red herring. Now stop wasting ours.
Damn, if 19th century slaveholders had fed their slaves vitamin D supplements, we’d be on firm ground.
Why is it a red herring? What is the point of comparing Hitler and Stalin — to demonstrate why the left (sorry, the totalitarian left) is evil, right? Wasn’t that the point of your post? So what’s wrong with asking where an American mass-murder fits in to your ideological perspective?
Rand, I don’t share your views (I don’t think Hiter was a leftist at all) but I’m not arguing that point, I’m just trying to learn more about your views. I wish you’d share.
You’d be amazed how many times I bring up Jonah Goldberg’s thesis (learned about it here) when I talk to my left-wing friends. I force them to think about it — it is worth thinking about. I’m heavily influenced by the righ-wing commentary I read – it makes me understand my country’s political arguments better. So, why isn’t this an opportunity for education on your part? Is slavery a failure by the right-wing? How does that American attrocity fit into your understanding of the leftv vs the right?