It’s been seventy-five years since Stalin deliberately starved the kulaks. As many (or more) died as in Hitler’s Holocaust, but it was all right, because his intentions were good, and you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
It’s also the anniversary of an early, and odious, failure of journalism on the part of the New York Times. It should be ashamed that it not only accepted the Pulitzer for Duranty’s fawning lies and propaganda, but kept it for so many years.
And Ilya Somin has some thoughts on the less-than-useful distinction between genocide and mass murder.
My wife and I discussed this while watching “Wehrmacht” on the history channel. My wife is Japanese and a bit of a “nationalist”. So, her perspective on this is slightly different than most people in the U.S. She and I agreed that the reason why Stalin was OK while Hitler was not is for the following two reason:
1) The Soviets won WWII (along with us) whereas the Nazis lost and history is always written by the victorious.
2) Stalin killed all people equally. He kill Russians, Ukrainians, and everyone else with equal gusto. He did not single out specific racial groups and target them for killing. Hitler, on the other hand, espoused the concept of the Germanic “master race” and killed anyone who did not measure up, along with the Jews who did measure up but killed them anyways because they were Jews.
Hitler and Stalin were equally evil. But Stalin always seems to get more of a “pass” from the establishment.
Stalin spread the death equally.
Stalin was “okay” beacsue his politics matched the politics of the media and higher-education elites; basically the same people who later would softsoap the Communist massacres in China, Laos, Viet Nam, Zimbabwe, various chunks of Latin America…
A toast for the anti-Duranty, Gareth Jones?
He covered that era well: “Mussolini is building roads, bridges, canals, and viaducts in many parts of Italy. He aims at a re-building of his native country, and it is remarkable that his programme follows the lines laid down by the Liberal party in Great Britain. What irony that the enemy of Democracy should be carrying out the policy advocated by British Liberals!”
Who softsoaped the Rwandan genocide?
or Biafra?
Stalin is as bad as Hitler? Oh please. There’s a special circle in Hell reserved just for Stalin, and compared to Stalin’s circle Hitler’s is a balmy cool day in the Bahamas.
To be sure, Hitler waged aggressive war, but that is hardly an unusual fault among world leaders. Hitler also singled out the Jews for harassment, which is also hardly unique, and then extermination, which is not unique per se — Hitler was only unique in the efficiency with which he conducted his pogrom.
These are all evil things, without doubt, and we can add in the reprisals and shootings in France — there are memorials in practically every tiny village near the Belgian border — and so on and so forth. But it was Stalin, not Hitler, who systematically starved, murdered, betrayed and terrorized tens of millions of his own people in the name of their own good. It was Stalin, not Hitler, that built the Iron Curtain, the Cold War and the nuclear stand-off that ruled the last half of the 20th century, and exported a poisonous governing philosophy to Africa and Indonesia that has kept those regions poor and violent for generations.
Furthermore, Hitler’s evil died with him. His name is a curse, and his sins reviewed weekly on the History Channel. There’s no chance Nazism will arise again. Stalin’s evil has lived on and on, and infects the world as widely today, perhaps, as it did in 1940, if not 1950. There is every chance that Stalinism will come again.
The answer to your question, jack lee, is Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party. Yet more appeasement from the pants-dropper and the party of cynical narcissists. You can also ask which recent President has done more for disease and misery in Africa than any other, and the answer may surprise you (if you listen to the TV news, that is).
Furthermore, Hitler’s evil died with him.
But that wasn’t intentional. I don’t think Hitler should get credit for other peoples’ work.
He doesn’t, Karl. Rather Stalin’s shade benefits (so to speak) from the legions of useful idiots, then and now, who carry water for his nightmare philosophy.
To be serious, though, I have often wondered why Nazism earns the special hatred of the academy, the left, Hollywood, and assorted Sensitive People. Why Hitler, and not Stalin, Mao, Tojo, Pol Pot, Mugabe…?
On the theory that a question so profound can only be addressed in a blog comment by an inane one-liner theory, I’m going to propose that the problem lies in the fact that Hitler was in fact distinctly hostile to the intelligentsia, felt they were a bunch of poofters who ought generally to be sent to the Eastern Front to man up or die. Stalin at least gave them lip service, and used them, largely to hysterically betray and denounce each other. Who knows? It’s odd.
Hitler vs Stalin… that’s really the thing that finalized my break with the Left.
Hitler massacres people based on their religon, conducts aggressive wars of conquest, builds a slave nation… he’s evil, and any association with his ideals or policies justly earns you the hiss of the world (thank you, Patrick O’Brian).
Stalin kills MORE people 9including most of the sme groups Hitler killed), enacts MORE wars, creates a LARGER slave state, and helps export the same to over one-fifth of the Earth’s landmass(and tries hard for the rest)… and he had a lot of good ideas, meant well in the beginning, but he was just misguided.
Sorry… if National Socialism was evil on the hoof, straight-out Socialism is too. Defending the doings of the Comintern or the atrocities of Mao because “they wanted reform!”, to me, files you in the same category as the various and sundry Reich apologists and nazi fetishists.
It defies my reason how identifying yourself as a Nazi could get you ostracised; while identifying yourself as a Communist or Socialist is accepted, and can be just a good career move (in academia, for instance).
“by their deeds shall you know them…”
My opinion about this is that neither of them compare to Mohammed, who is responsible for 1350 years of death, destruction, torture and slavery and whose ideology has survived all that time – and still holds a billion people in its evil grasp, and threatens the West and human survival.
There is no Devil but Satan, and Mohammed (hellfire and eternal damnation be upon him) is his prophet.