DBWI: Population Cleansing in Retrospect... had Germany lost

Stalin wasn't a saint, he was a monster. He killed 3 million Ukrainians (the Germans finished off the rest, thanks for that by the way) and he deserves to be vilified. But to say that he would exterminate the German or Finnish nation when 1) his ideology didn't allow for that, 2) he never explicitly set out such goals as Hitler did in Mein Kampf (the original, unedited version that was available pre-war, not that revisionist nonsense the Heydrich regime tried to foist on us) is asinine.

More than likely he would have done what Communists always do, plundered the people and install a puppet regime.

So you think Stalin would not do something if his ideology would not allow that? Really? Communist ideology, to Stalin, was just a broad set of guidelines. He was a lot more about power and domination than following the writings of a Marx or a Lenin to the letter. He was significantly more about making Russia great again than many leftist revisionists like to talk about. His USSR was a Russian state first of all.

And he did not need to "exterminate" the Finns and the Germans, as such. Breaking the national spirit by killing off the intelligentsia and leading social groups and politicians, officers, law enforcement, etc, then mass forced labour, targeted food shortages, heavy targeted purges in repeated cycles, mass population transfers. Through these he could dilute the original populations in the conquered areas to such numbers that Russian majority would have been assured in the future.

This is what he already started in the Baltic states and Eastern Poland in 1940, and it would have been continued and further intensified had the Germans not attacked. Remember Katyn? I think you all pro-Stalin revisionists should do that. The Stalinist methods of putting down entire ethnic groups were different than the National Socialist methods. They were slower and more insidious. But then the Bolsheviks thought in the long term, as if they had all the time in the world to purge the unwanted elements from their Socialist Paradise...

Their methods would have led into the destruction of their enemy populations as surely as those of the National Socialists under Hitler, just a little more slowly and in a less showy manner.

And to say that you can just refer to "what Communists always do" and then apply that to a Europe dominated by Stalin and his Bolsheviks? Please. The Communists never had such power anywhere as Stalin would have had if his Red Army really took Europe in the 1940s. And those Communists that ever were in power outside the USSR never had such a leader as Stalin. So there really is no comparison. In reality, it would have been a lot more worse than you imagine if the Germans lost the war, for everyone that had fought against the Bolshevik regime.

OOC: Imagine my character as someone who had several relatives fight against the USSR during the war, and one who has been since an early age told about Stalinist atrocities against Finns and Karelians in Soviet Karelia, as well as someone whose Finnish schooling has been all about a nationalist view about WWII as Finland's "Second War of Liberty" against "Bolshevik-Russian oppression"...
 
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Oh my mistake, see I thought Germany was a modern nation in the 30s, I'll hold them to the standards of the 16th to 18th century from now on. Isn't it nice that they don't employ slave labour anymore? Outlawed it in the 1970s I hear.
I heard somebody say something like that (only "civilized" instead of "modern") to an elderly gent once; his response was to shrug and say "What use is being civilized, at the cost of everything else? Should Germans have stayed poor and defeated, so that we might be called 'civilized'?" The National Socialists, I've heard, have a saying: "'civilization' is only a word, useful only to the unambitious". Also, "nothing great was ever achieved without a certain level of barbarism".

True, the younger generation of Germans is more likely to disagree with this than those who grew up under Hitler, but even there, few are passionate about it. Maybe we're wrong about history; or maybe history can get better. Maybe we, and nations in general, don't need to sacrifice our sentiments and professed values to secure our security and prosperity... or at least not any more. It's a beautiful idea, don't get me wrong; I want to believe that. But I don't know if I can. Maybe, then again, that's just part of my heritage.
 
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So you think Stalin would not do something if his ideology would not allow that? Really? Communist ideology, to Stalin, was just a broad set of guidelines. He was a lot more about power and domination than following the writings of a Marx or a Lenin. He was significantly more about making Russia great again than many leftist revisionists like to talk about. His USSR was a Russian state first of all.

And he did not need to "exterminate" the Finns and the Germans, as such. Mass forced labour, targeted food shortages, heavy targeted purges in repeated cycles, mass population transfers. Through these he could dilute the original populations in the conquered areas to such numbers that Russian majority would have been assured in the future.

This is what he already started in the Baltic states and Eastern Poland in 1940, and it would have been continued and further intensified had the Germans not attacked. Remember Katyn? I think you all pro-Stalin revisionists should do that. The Stalinist methods of putting down entire ethnic groups were different than the National Socialist methods. They were slower and more insidious. But then the Bolsheviks thought in the long term, as if they had all the time in the world to purge the unwanted elements from their Socialist Paradise...

Their methods would have led into the destruction of their enemy populations as surely as those of the National Socialists under Hitler, just a little more slowly and in a less showy manner.

And to say that you can just refer to "what Communists always do" and then apply that to a Europe dominated by Stalin and his Bolsheviks? Please. The Communists never had such power anywhere as Stalin would have had if his Red Army really took Europe in the 1940s. And those Communists that ever were in power outside the USSR never had such a leader as Stalin. So there really is no comparison. In reality, it would have been a lot more worse than you imagine if the Germans lost the war, for everyone that had fought against the Bolshevik regime.

OOC: Imagine my character as someone who had several relatives fight against the USSR during the war, and one who has been since an early age told about Stalinist atrocities against Finns and Karelians in Soviet Karelia, as well as someone whose Finnish schooling has been all about a nationalist view about WWII as Finland's "Second War of Liberty" against "Bolshevik-Russian oppression"...

Oh oh oh, so Stalin would have done it...eventually. Forgive me if I don't put Stalin's hypothetical victims against Hitler's actual ones. Generalplan Ost was completely justified because Bolshevism.

Count yourself lucky that Hitler decided Finn-Ugric races weren't also inferior or you may have suffered the fate of his allies in Croatia (or Illyria as its called these days). What threat did they present to him, they were as anti Bolshevik as you.
 
Oh oh oh, so Stalin would have done it...eventually. Forgive me if I don't put Stalin's hypothetical victims against Hitler's actual ones. Generalplan Ost was completely justified because Bolshevism.

Again, who here is justifying what? Nowhere have I said that "Generalplan Ost was justified". It is all you who pulled that gem out of thin air. We are talking about a hypothetical scenario here, remember, what the world would be like in case the Soviets won the war against Hitler's Third Reich.

My argument is that if the National Socialists lost the war, there would have been a lot more Bolshevik atrocities and naturally a lot less National Socialist atrocities. In that world, the people would necessarily need to have a more, well, balanced view about the things the National Socialists did during the war, as they would have seen what a victorious, vindictive Stalinist USSR could do.

And so, outside Germany and its allies, current and former, I think there would be more understanding for the anti-Bolshevik, anti-Stalin attitudes among the Germans or the Finns, say. But then again, there would not be that many Germans or Finns to go around, of course, and among them, being critical towards the tenets and reality of Bolshevism would have for a long time been pretty much a death warrant. "Re-educating" that part of the people that would have lived would have been the order of the day, and officially and in public, we'd been all (or, again, those who survived) singing the praises of Comrade Stalin, the perfect Soviet system and the great Red Army.

Which brings us to an interesting dichotomy - on one hand, you'd have a lot more Bolshevik atrocities, but on the other, you have a powerful USSR that can keep down all talk of those atrocitiesm at least in the USSR and all the areas it controls. How much of those atrocities would have then been known in the Americas, say? Could they have even hidden such blatant examples as the Katyn massacre, proof of Stalin's policies directed against nationalities? This is important, I think, because if the USSR manages to suppress such evidence and brand all discussion about Bolshevik atrocities as "Nazi apologia", then we in fact in this world might see a reality where National Socialist atrocities are much more widely known than Bolshevik atrocities, even thought there would be a lot more of the latter... A rather harrying thought, really, but through Bolshevik oppression in Eastern and Central Europe I see a possibility that this could happen.


Count yourself lucky that Hitler decided Finn-Ugric races weren't also inferior or you may have suffered the fate of his allies in Croatia (or Illyria as its called these days). What threat did they present to him, they were as anti Bolshevik as you.

Interesting that you who call yourself an "anti-Nazi"should pull out the race card here... I think you might not be as free of the National Socialist taint as you seem to think.

This is, though, one thing we can say about the world in which the National Socialists lost the war: racial ideologies would have been a lot less pronounced in politics and everyday life. In that world, very few people would think whether Finns are "related to the original Aryans" or "of inferior Mongol stock". They would be, more often, calling Finns merely "enemies of the people", "undesirable elements" and "petty bourgeois wreckers and agents provocateur".
 
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Mmmm, this thread makes me wonder... All of you are assuming a complete Bolshevik dominance over Germany, and probably the rest of western Europe too.
But I think that, if Germany was to be defeated, it would be because of having to fight a two fronts war against the USSR and the British Empire allied with the USA. Now, wouldn't the western powers act as a sort of balance to the Soviet Union? Maybe Germany itself might be divided into two "spheres of influence". Not that the British/Americans couldn't be harsh masters, but maybe they wouldn't treat a "civilized people" with the same severity that they used towards their colonies or negro populations, wouldn't they?

So, hypothetically an American hegemonized western europe would not experience great horrors, maybe there the atrocities of the NS regime would be seen in a worse light, demonized even? After all there would not be any incentive to publicize the atrocities that the Soviets would be perpetrating in Central and Eastern Europe, as they would still be (albeit uneasily) allied to each other.

For my part, as an Italian, I think that things would not go much differently: the public discourse would probably still go on with the "italiani brava gente" nonsense [italians are good people] and gloss over atrocites committed in the Balkans and Africa. After 1969 and the "Return to the Albertine Statute" that marked the start of liberalization in our political regime we trumpeted up how many jews had lived in Italy relatively undisturbed, but never talked about the many that we handed over to Germany, the widespread discrimination and seizure of private property, as well as the concentration camps in Illyria and Lybia, not to speak of the gassing of Addis Abeba...

If the war had turned for the worse, I expect even less public discourse on this, and much more victimization, especially because we would lose some territory in the eastern frontier, and there would certainly be atrocities and ethnic cleansing of Italians there.
 

Deimos

Banned
Stalin wasn't a saint, he was a monster. He killed 3 million Ukrainians (the Germans finished off the rest, thanks for that by the way) and he deserves to be vilified. But to say that he would exterminate the German or Finnish nation when 1) his ideology didn't allow for that, 2) he never explicitly set out such goals as Hitler did in Mein Kampf (the original, unedited version that was available pre-war, not that revisionist nonsense the Heydrich regime tried to foist on us) is asinine.

More than likely he would have done what Communists always do, plundered the people and install a puppet regime.

I would have to disagree with that assessment. Stalin (and his predecessors) were engaged in continuous systematic mass murder throughout the existence of the USSR.
They regularly purged their own people, killed the former old guard of the party, eradicated the small farmers, destroyed their own army, they also purged the intelligentsia from the countries they conquered. Look to the Baltic states and Katyn for that. No matter the ideology, if the USSR of the 1930s is any indication then the result of their victory would have been starvation, purges and the survivors basically becoming serfs just under a different name.

You could argue that survival in such a world is better than to be killed by the Germans but I do not want to have that discussion - weighing lives against one another and determining who or what is worthy is exactly what the Nazis did.

[...] Could this have wider impacts on how nations and people view ethical and legal obligations to each other in war and across national lines? And could this even possibly mean concepts like "human rights" find more acceptance in the modern age? [...]
Any nation or culture sees the rights it gives to her people as inalienable and fundamentally good and will then proceed to ignore these rights when it is deemed suitable. The concept of universal human rights can be observed in religion (though not always exercised) and as the impotent and now dissolved League of Nations shows - the secular approach did also not fare well.
In a world where might makes right such ideals are tragically doomed to fail. There is a lot of bitter truth in what Italian filmmakers and composers showed in their westerns to work through their historical issues - "Be the first one to fire, every man is a liar" indeed.
 
I would have to disagree with that assessment. Stalin (and his predecessors) were engaged in continuous systematic mass murder throughout the existence of the USSR.
They regularly purged their own people, killed the former old guard of the party, eradicated the small farmers, destroyed their own army, they also purged the intelligentsia from the countries they conquered. Look to the Baltic states and Katyn for that. No matter the ideology, if the USSR of the 1930s is any indication then the result of their victory would have been starvation, purges and the survivors basically becoming serfs just under a different name.

You could argue that survival in such a world is better than to be killed by the Germans but I do not want to have that discussion - weighing lives against one another and determining who or what is worthy is exactly what the Nazis did.

Survival is survival though, and at least surviving would give you a chance to outlive Stalin. After all he died of a stroke in '46, whose to say he would even live to see a Soviet victory. With the exception of Beria, his underlings weren't that bad (still despots, but despots you could live with).
 

Deimos

Banned
Survival is survival though, and at least surviving would give you a chance to outlive Stalin. After all he died of a stroke in '46, whose to say he would even live to see a Soviet victory. With the exception of Beria, his underlings weren't that bad (still despots, but despots you could live with).
For someone who detests holding people to the stardards of earlier times, you are quick to accept people having their freedom and liberties taken away and being reduced to the state of serfs from centuries past in the name of survival.
Outliving Stalin is a prospect I would call the optimist route. He could have lived longer without the stress of the war and he was just a continuation from the murderous Lenin - I do not necessarily see their successors as any less inclined to violence when it was one of the fundamental parts that held the bolshevik Empire together. I would fear it would be even more repressive to the millions of Europeans it would conquer were it to be victorious. And furthermore, as the horribly efficient and genocidal Heydrich administration showed, you do not have to be in the innermost circle to eventually rise to power, you just have to be the most ruthless one.
 
Maybe we're wrong about history; or maybe history can get better. Maybe we, and nations in general, don't need to sacrifice our sentiments and professed values to secure our security and prosperity... or at least not any more. It's a beautiful idea, don't get me wrong; I want to believe that. But I don't know if I can. Maybe, then again, that's just part of my heritage.
Any nation or culture sees the rights it gives to her people as inalienable and fundamentally good and will then proceed to ignore these rights when it is deemed suitable. The concept of universal human rights can be observed in religion (though not always exercised) and as the impotent and now dissolved League of Nations shows - the secular approach did also not fare well.

In a world where might makes right such ideals are tragically doomed to fail.
You know, sometimes I do wonder -- do most people want to disbelieve might making right? Or is it just a few of us wistful romantics, while everyone else either embraces or accepts it without issue? Maybe even something as fantastic as "human rights" can, hypothetically anyway, be made "real" if enough people wanted or believed in them? Or maybe that's too subjectivist...
 
Survival is survival though, and at least surviving would give you a chance to outlive Stalin. After all he died of a stroke in '46, whose to say he would even live to see a Soviet victory. With the exception of Beria, his underlings weren't that bad (still despots, but despots you could live with).

Aren't there some indications that he was poisoned? Maybe by Beria or someone working under his orders? We know that Stalin was mentally very unstable by that time, ordering purge after purge in his diminishing domains. And still people obeyed him even after the defeats the USSR had suffered under him. If I was Beria or, say, Kaganovich, I might have poisoned Stalin myself to avoid going down like Molotov, say - or Bulganin who they say Stalin strangled with his bare hands after the crucial upsets of early 1945.

Anyway, "weren't that bad"? Men who presided over the death of millions of their own citizens, either working with Stalin because they thought he was right and was doing the right things or because they were too cowardly to stand up to the Red Tsar? Please, the Soviet leadership was full of monsters and cowards. Some were both. Again, often different kinds of monsters and cowards than those who worked with Adolf Hitler, but monsters and cowards none the less.
 

Deimos

Banned
You know, sometimes I do wonder -- do most people want to disbelieve might making right? Or is it just a few of us wistful romantics, while everyone else either embraces or accepts it without issue? Maybe even something as fantastic as "human rights" can, hypothetically anyway, be made "real" if enough people wanted or believed in them? Or maybe that's too subjectivist...
The problem, as I see it, is consequentionalism. We look too much towards the goals and do not care enough about the methods. Those who carry the dreams of secular universality within them are a product of the optimistic 19th century - that Periclean age where so much seemed possible.

Wistfulness - that precious emotional amalgamation made of of hurt and longing - that arrow to the other shore? When was the last time you folded you hands and were silenced by wondrous amazement like in front of the Christmas tree as a child? Do you still feel the bark of the tree in front of that old house by the lake and being blinded by the sunrise? Do you hear the birds flapping their wings in the wind? Do you remember a mother singing her child to sleep?
If you still remember, then you are just as lost as I am and in moments of clarity feel just as betrayed as I do. But do not tell anyone, ancient unkown friend, lest you want to be the target of their laughter.
 
You know, sometimes I do wonder -- do most people want to disbelieve might making right? Or is it just a few of us wistful romantics, while everyone else either embraces or accepts it without issue? Maybe even something as fantastic as "human rights" can, hypothetically anyway, be made "real" if enough people wanted or believed in them? Or maybe that's too subjectivist...

Too subjectivist. Imagine gay marriage, which was just legalized in the Chinese Empire, being legalized in Saudi Arabia. Might making right is historical fact. It doesn't matter who is right; that has no relevance whatsoever to history.
 
I do wonder...can the emotion of rage ever be suppressed in the majority of humans? Because it caused all the murder and death of WW2 and its aftermath. The Slavic people that allied with Hitler at first did so because of their suffering at the hands of others. They wanted uncontrolled revenge, and failed to see through the signs that were there. And they were next on the hit-list, once their usefulness to Hitler ended. Rage, revenge...are we doomed as a species with these emotions within us?
 
The problem, as I see it, is consequentionalism. We look too much towards the goals and do not care enough about the methods. Those who carry the dreams of secular universality within them are a product of the optimistic 19th century - that Periclean age where so much seemed possible.
Well, that bodes poorly for the OP challenge -- even if Germany had lost the war, the very fact that she was even capable of something like Population Cleansing in the late industrial age should be enough to effectively wipe out what historical optimism remained. (At least where such optimism makes claim to a teleology sentiment and ethics -- optimism of technological capability and material well-being would, of course, be a separate matter entirely.*)
Wistfulness - that precious emotional amalgamation made of of hurt and longing - that arrow to the other shore? When was the last time you folded you hands and were silenced by wondrous amazement like in front of the Christmas tree as a child? Do you still feel the bark of the tree in front of that old house by the lake and being blinded by the sunrise? Do you hear the birds flapping their wings in the wind? Do you remember a mother singing her child to sleep?

If you still remember, then you are just as lost as I am and in moments of clarity feel just as betrayed as I do. But do not tell anyone, ancient unkown friend, lest you want to be the target of their laughter.
In Germany at least, there are still a fair number of psychologists who think this should be considered an emotional disorder. Then again, a majority of said clique have little good to say of "people who waste energy speculating on imaginary alternatives to things of which reality has given only a singular totality, history being a prime example"; so I wouldn't expect this site, at least, to have many who hold such judgements.
Too subjectivist... Might making right is historical fact. It doesn't matter who is right; that has no relevance whatsoever to history.
Well to play a semantics, devil's advocate game here -- if "right" were really just a matter of what was decided by "might", then it would be just as relevant to history as might was. So if strength determines the course of history, then by definition, ethics are relevant to it, QED :p

But more seriously, what I think the real question is this: If more people did regard "the good" as something that somehow existed "out there", as something that somehow existed independent of human power dynamics, and that this "higher good" applied to all human beings, not just ones in their ethnic, national, or social group -- in short, if people did not believe that "might makes right", then would their shared conception of "right" lead them to direct their collective "might" toward said end? Or are such "ideals" impossible to maintain in the face of objective human desires and impulses?
Imagine gay marriage, which was just legalized in the Chinese Empire, being legalized in Saudi Arabia.
I can't say I know enough about Manchuko to weigh in on that particular comparison.

*Actually, come to think of it, a Bolshevik Victory arguably might have very well dealt a similar blow to material optimism as well, creating a world of totalistic despair, as opposed to rational despair... then again, these terms and distinctions are primarily used by the aforementioned "realist" psychologists
 
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