• Graylitic@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Stalin was a piece of shit but there’s mountains of difference between the Nazis and the USSR, and the CPC as well. Was the USSR perfect? Fuck no, it wasnt even good. Was it as bad as Nazi Germany, the country that killed millions of Jews for their ethnicity? Also fuck no.

    • HardNut@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      To invoke Bill Burr: why don’t Stalin’s kills count? He’d be sitting up at the top of the scoreboard with Mao if you counted them.

      Political murder isn’t inherently better than ethnic murder. Stalin and Hitler both murdered out of malice, the fact that you’re clearly more comfortable with political murder shows a dangerous bias

      • Graylitic@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Would he? By modern estimates and not the Conquest numbers made before the CIA documents and USSR archives were available, would Stalin be sitting up with Mao? Even then, most of Mao’s “death toll” were due to extreme incompetence, such as telling his soldiers to kill birds who were eating rice, which led to an overpopulation of bugs who ate far more rice.

        I fully acknowledge that Stalin was a piece of shit. However, the USSR ultimately did provide for their people and people were generally hopeful. The Nazis were committing genocide purely for the sake of it, Stalin was murdering to keep the USSR going against what he feared were counter revolutionaries. One is evil, one is paranoid and dangerous.

        • TheActualDevil@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Killing “counter-revolutionaries” was just Stalin putting a different label on whatever enemies he wanted killed. It’s no different. Because the USSR was ostensibly a revolutionary and progressive government they just used more palatable phrasing and staged sham trials, but it amounts to the same.

          • Graylitic@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            I already explained that he was paranoid and dangerous, but he wasn’t killing out of pure malice and evil like Hitler with the Jews and other genocide victims. There’s a clear difference between those.

            • HardNut@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I would actually argue the opposite. Hitler and Stalin both clearly killed out of paranoia or something approximating it. Hitler didn’t just hate the jews, he thought they were involved in a collective conspiracy to take over the world. He had a hero complex, and he thought he was saving the world. Stalin was more worried about personal immediate danger, so you can see why he made those close to him out to be the “other” rather than some minority collective

              • Graylitic@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                That’s certainly a hot take and certainly one most people would heavily disagree with.

                Hitler killed people based on ethnicity to promote a master race and based on political affiliation. Stalin killed people based on paranoia and political affiliation. These are not equivalent. Plus, Hitler killed far more people per-Capita.

                • HardNut@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  I don’t think that contradicts what I said. I also don’t think it’s a particularly hot take, Hitler was very open about his conspiratorial ideas about the Jews, it’s a huge aspect of what motivated his desire to take them out in favor of his people, his master race. The ideas don’t contradict, they go together like peanut butter and jelly

                  • Graylitic@lemm.ee
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                    1 year ago

                    That’s a weird way of pushing Nazi apologia. Not saying it’s intentional, I really don’t think you’re a Nazi, but by equating Hitler and Stalin you’re semantically trying to equate a paranoid leader who genuinely had anti-communist reactionaries after him amidst the people he killed with a person who orchestrated mass ethnic cleansing on racial grounds and no actual evidence, to a much higher degree per Capita than the former.

                    By doing so, this is essentially Nazi apologia and anti-Communist rhetoric, holding Communist states to a stricter standard than fascist ones.