Godwin's Law with Stalin

With a POD after 1922 make Godwin's Law such that instead of comparison with Hitler/Nazis it has Stalin. Used to same effect.
 
The Weimar Republic survives, the USSR decides to "settle accounts" with Japan.

That wouldn't be a long war--even with Japan not getting bombed to hell and gone and with an intact fleet, Khalkin Gol showed their land army wasn't that great.

Maybe Stalin gets too greedy in keeping territory taken from the Japanese (all Manchuria, frex?) and Chiang Kai-Shek breaks with him, so Stalin invades China proper to put Mao or someone else sufficiently pliable in charge.

TTL might still have the terror-famines of 1932-33 and you might have occupied areas being stripped of food to feed armies instead of industrializing cities. The Holodomor on a continental scale.

And screwing around in China is going to piss off the "China Lobby" in the US, which could lead to US interference with Stalin's plans much like they did with the Japanese.
 
Kind of hard to do in a world where the Nazis are still a thing.

For most people, what the Stalinists did doesn't rise to the same level of heinousness as what the Nazis did. Because they had a very different m.o. The Stalinists were all about political expedience while pursuing ostensibly noble goals. The Nazis were bad guys who said they planned to do bad things, and what a surprise, they did them.
 
Wouldn't that mean we would have to a less "pragmatic" (a pragmatic as a paranoid power hungry lunatic can be) Stalin who would be willing to go invade Japanese Manchuria and Korea in the first place. If we remove Hitler from the equation with an early death, we could have something close to Godwin's law with Stalin.
 
Wouldn't that mean we would have to a less "pragmatic" (a pragmatic as a paranoid power hungry lunatic can be) Stalin who would be willing to go invade Japanese Manchuria and Korea in the first place. If we remove Hitler from the equation with an early death, we could have something close to Godwin's law with Stalin.

According to Gaddis's We Know Now, "socialism in one country" is not necessarily a peaceful creed that rejects expansionism in principle.

(And just because the book states that the USSR was expansionist doesn't mean it's reds-under-the-bed. Among other things, it explicitly states that Castro sent the first wave of troops to Angola on his own, not as part of some worldwide Soviet plot, and the Soviets only got involved somewhat later to avoid looking "less revolutionary than thou.")

Furthermore, the Japanese humiliated Russia not all that long before historically speaking. And the Japanese won't exactly have lots of friends, especially if the Anglo-Japanese alliance breaks per OTL. Europe is not going to dogpile the USSR over attacking the Japanese in the same way it would if the USSR attacked Poland or Germany. And going for warm-water ports like Korea would be rehashing traditional Czarist imperialism--it's not something radically new.

Heck, if Stalin were really clever, he'd wait until after the Rape of Nanking. Then he can claim it's a humanitarian gesture and with the KMT having lost its capital, they're not in much of a position to reject his "help."
 
I don't believe that Stalin's Navy in the Far East is much of a good match against Imperial Japan from 1933 to 1941 ....
 
I don't believe that Stalin's Navy in the Far East is much of a good match against Imperial Japan from 1933 to 1941 ....

They don't need to be. They can curb-stomp the Japanese Empire on land as they did OTL.

Even if Japan retains its OTL naval strength, they're not going to be able to defeat the USSR on land. Carrier-based air power can harry the Russian Far East, occupied Korea and Manchuria, etc., but they won't be able to hold ground.

Furthermore, the bulk of my proposed scenario happens afterward--Stalin is drawn into the politics of the Chinese Civil War and things go downhill. That's where the mass casualties will come from.

And if Stalin wants to finish Japan, occupied Chinese territories can be used to build a local industrial base to build a fleet to invade the Home Islands with all the finesse and kindness of his OTL industrialization program.
 
I think it's worth mentioning that while Godwin's Law specifically mentions the Nazis, it more or less applies to any argument which has degenerated into name-calling (Yeah? Well then you're just like Stalin!). So in some respects, any heinous figure from history can have Godwin's Law applied to him.
 
I think it's worth mentioning that while Godwin's Law specifically mentions the Nazis, it more or less applies to any argument which has degenerated into name-calling (Yeah? Well then you're just like Stalin!). So in some respects, any heinous figure from history can have Godwin's Law applied to him.

That may be true in principle but "You Nazi!" is used to hammer in the point. "You Stalinist!" simply doesn't have same ring to it and calling somebody a communist isn't same as calling somebody a Nazi. See "Grammar Nazi's", for example

Stalin is, as far as I saw, only used in same boogeyman style when it comes to gun control (Hitler, Stalin, Lenin & some random dictators support gun control) and evils of atheism (Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao & some random dictators were atheists).
 
That may be true in principle but "You Nazi!" is used to hammer in the point. "You Stalinist!" simply doesn't have same ring to it and calling somebody a communist isn't same as calling somebody a Nazi. See "Grammar Nazi's", for example

Stalin is, as far as I saw, only used in same boogeyman style when it comes to gun control (Hitler, Stalin, Lenin & some random dictators support gun control) and evils of atheism (Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao & some random dictators were atheists).

It is sort of that way in America with Communism, and even sometimes Socialism. Consider how much of an uproar there was over how 'Socialist' Obama was and his 'Socialist' Obamacare. With Republicans, Socialism/Communism takes the place of Nazi whenever they jump on anything that has an ounce of government influence.
 
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