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> So sometimes ends justify means. Fun fact - according to "The Better Angels of Our Nature" more people died in the Soviet gulags than in the rest of the war
by jamii 13y ago
> So sometimes ends justify means.
Fun fact - according to "The Better Angels of Our Nature" more people died in the Soviet gulags than in the rest of the war combined, Nazi concentration camps included.
So "we killed all these people to stop the Nazis from killing a substantially smaller number of people" doesn't really fly.
- streptomycin 13y agoHow many would the Nazis have killed if they conquered the Soviet Union and won WW2? That's the estimate you'd have to compare against.
- jamii 13y agoSure. I'm just saying that you actually have to make that comparison. The Nazis were not so amazingly evil that any conceivable means justifies the end. You actually have to weigh it up. Given that the Soviet Union far outstripped Nazi Germany in terms of systematic murder during WW2, it would take a stronger argument to convince me that Nazi Germany + Soviet resources would have been any worse than the Soviet Union + Soviet resources.
- democracy 13y agoWant to elaborate on systematic murder? I don't have any idea what you are talking about.
- memracom 13y agoIf you just look at the war years, then there were 600,000 deaths in the gulags versus 20 million in the war, roughly half of which were civilians. If you look at gulag and purge deaths for all of Stalin's reign, then, yes, that is a big number which could go as high as 30 million over 38 years that included an extended period of civil war. But that was then and the world has changed a lot since then. Especially in the Soviet Union after Stalin and in the former Soviet Republics. It would really take another world war to get back to that level of slaughter. Or global warming and famine.