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You comparing Stalin to Hitler? Are people mad these days?
by usaphp 10y ago
You comparing Stalin to Hitler? Are people mad these days?
- hanklazard 10y agoBoth were dictators who killed millions. Seems like a reasonable comparison.
- ommunist 10y agoAdd Sir Winston Churchill to the list. He is personally responsible for death of millions of Bengali people.
- ddorian43 10y agoWe don't count them.
- quonn 10y agoStill, nobody would compare Churchill (or Bush; see above) to Hitler or Stalin. This is because Hitler was not just responsible for the people killed in WWII. Hitler and Stalin also killed people because they wanted to get rid of personal enemies and because they actually wanted to do some form of ethnic cleansing.
- codedokode 10y agoDo you have any facts about Stalin doing "ethnic cleansing"? I thought he put people into Gulags no matter what ethnicity they were.
- ommunist 10y agoThe US _today_ has the highest incarceration rate per 1000 people in the world. It uses slave labor in private prisons _today_. Why are you so keen on digging the Soviet past. Because it is safer to bark on a dead lion?
- ommunist 10y agoWell, the US government did ethnic cleansing during the WW2 by putting all Japanese americans to concentration camps. Don't bark onto dead lions. Look what your own government is doing with your own nation today. You have slave labour in private prisons!
- guelo 10y agoThey were both dictators that killed millions of their own citizens.
- mnx 10y agoWhy not? This seems like a fairly common comparison, made by actual historians. Some estimate that Stalins death toll may exceed that of Hitler.
- pyre 10y agoWhy would it be mad? Because Hitler singled out an ethnic group for extermination in addition to political opponents rather than just killing off political opponents? They both racked up a comparable body-counts of their own people as rulers (well, enough for both to be consider mass-murders, though I understand that Stalin had a high body-count).
- palunon 10y agoWell, both are dictators responsible for the death of millions of people for political and ethnic reasons. They are perfectly comparable. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/03/10/hitler-vs-stalin-who-killed-more/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/03/10/hitler-vs-stalin-... http://historyofrussia.org/stalin-killed-how-many-people/ http://historyofrussia.org/stalin-killed-how-many-people/
- usaphp 10y agoThe second link that you posting is complete nonsense, it gives an estimate from 1.2 million to 20 million... that's ridiculous estimate, like poking into sky. And then they use the higher end of scale to compare it to other dictators. Stalin was in power for around 25 years, saying that he killed 20 million people during that time, it means he was killing about a million every year, or 3000 people every day, how is it even possible for a single person to order killing of so many people on daily basis?
- GauntletWizard 10y agoThe same way Hitler did it - Massive bureaucracy, declaring large swaths as non-persons. Much of it was done indirectly - The upper bounds of those numbers attribute certain large famines as being politically motivated or blame Stalin for deaths caused by mismanagement, but even conservatively, he ordered millions of people forcibly resettled into areas that were not productive, and then failed to feed them. He sent hundreds of thousands to prisons in Siberia for political crimes - Not personally, but by setting up the system so that those were crimes and the whims of his secret police were followed. Hitler never killed anyone - If you're talking about holding the gun. Hilter still had blood on his hands, and Stalin had more.
- lostlogin 10y agoThrough devastating policy causing starvation which was part of a broader picture of genocide. By running gulags which basically worked inmates to death and through assassinations and murder. The information isn't hard to find, but the book reviewed below is a great history. www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jul/20/biography.features
- knowaveragejoe 10y agoI'd love to hear your reasoning why the comparison is so wildly incorrect that it earns this response.
- usaphp 10y agoWould you put George bush in that comparison? Or we already forgot how hundreds of thousand people died during invasion of Iraq for clear political reasons?
- DblPlusUngood 10y agoYou are addressing criticisms of Stalin with a logical fallacy called "whataboutism".
- usaphp 10y agoI just hate hypocrites...You did not answer my question either.
- guelo 10y agoWe know that you hate the US, that's fine. But that doesn't mean you can't be objective about your own country's history.
- usaphp 10y agoWhere exactly did I say I hate US? Quite the opposite I love It. I hate politicians who make stupid decisions that ruin people's lives. And nobody talks about those ruined lives anymore because it's not popular. Why can't you be objective about your country history that killed hundred thousands of innocent people in Iraq, Kosovo conflict and those Guantanamo prisons?
- quonn 10y agoPlease. George Bush did not run a dictatorship, had very limited power and did not kill his political opponents. There would be much more to say, but I'll leave it at that.
- redthrowaway 10y agoStalin killed far more people than Hitler, and Mao killed far more people than Stalin. I'm not sure where this instinct to give brutal dictators a pass so long as they were leftists comes from, but it makes no sense.
- sctb 10y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12745229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12745229 and marked it off-topic.