Both ideologies murdered extremely large numbers of people, what's to dispute?
"Our Struggle": What If Hitler Had Been a Communist?
- Thread starter The Red
- Start date
The regimes murdered extremely large numbers of people.
If we are to analyze the ideologies which those regimes claimed to represent, we must see whether the actions of the regime coincided with the tenets of the ideology.
Minor point, but
1 : Tojo is far too low considering China alone had about 40 million people dead
2 : Stalin is too high (i'm counting deaths he could be said to be responsible for here, so not including ww2 related deaths it only reaches about 10 million ish (which is horrific but not 60 million)
3 : Hitler is also too low, by a few 10's of millions.
4 : Theres actually a few dictators who aren't here who should be (Suharto for instance killed most of the largest non-soviet communist party in the world at the time, a few hundred thousand people, in a single purge).
Well...
Let me give you another example.
America is a country that denounces the evils of totalitarian communism.
They say Gulags were evil because they worked people to death.
They also say Nazis were bad because they were...socialists.
And yet, conservative politicians defend a corrupt rebellious form of America whose whole ideology was built on the subjugation of others.
And our prison system that was created in the era of tough on crime is one that allows private business to benefit from virtually no-cost labor, albeit under the guise of prison rehabilitation. And this was for crimes as petty as the posession of marijuana.
Stalin waged war on "class enemies". American justice wages war on "moral enemies."
Whether it is a totalitarianism built on creating a "worker's state", totalitarianism built on "racial purity", or actions to protect "the moral majority", the principles of gaining absolute power over society are the same.
Kill your enemies.
Kill potential rivals.
Subjugate the popilation.
Exterminate part of the population that doesn't want to submit.
For the Leninists, the Kronstadts who helped them come to power became the class enemy that needed to be exterminated.
For Hitler, the enemy became his old SA buddies.
For Stalin the enemy was Ukrainian farmers.
For OTL Hitler, the enemy was Jews.
It doesn't matter who or what. The aim is almost always absolute power, with slogans and ideology being more or less a justification.
It's a little too uncharitable to say the America is a monolithic nation that is ideologically unified with the former administration, that the entirety of the people believes what you claim we do. Besides, this strays a little to close to modern politics and we should change the topic.
I still get the feeling that people are arguing different things here...Youngmarshall simply wanted to state (as far as I read it) that communism as an Ideology is not inherently violent in the way that Nazism is...
the fact that there are countless examples of Communist regimes being terrible isn't the point...his statement was purely about the Theoretical Ideology, nothing else
the fact that there are countless examples of Communist regimes being terrible isn't the point...his statement was purely about the Theoretical Ideology, nothing else
My point is that often times, the ideology you present maybe different, but the means by which power is obtained if often the same.
You could argue that he is responsible in the fashion of being such a goddamn idiot to take Hitlers deal in Molotov-Ribbentrop but thats not direct responsibilty really, and Were generally talking in terms of absolute malice... And as Cal Pointed out this is all a rather pointless debate, at the end of the day these people were murderous bastords and we should condem them all.
In over all terms, I DONT expect the German Commies to be near as bad as the Nazis in their murderousness ITTL, their is no Total Hatred of a ethnic Group or Lebenstraum concept for one. However I dont think Communist occupation will be particualy kind on any nation, and the Purging of the Political Opponents and "reactionaries" ITTL will be smaller in scale but vicous. In addition, I still see some ethnic groups getting the short end of the stick to say the least, particualy Poland in the same manner that Ukraine was during the Holodomor, or how the Russians originally treated the nation when they took over the country during Molotov-Ribbentrop (Katyn anyone?). So in short, not absolute Insanity and Mania of Nazism but still a very terrifying and evil front coming right up...
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I feel bad that this whole conversation is happening on a very good timeline by someone I consider a personal friend. This thread should be about his work not political debates. I should probably just stop relying but I do feel like I have been misunderstood a little, so one last reply and then no more.
Honestly I wasn't even defending communism as an ideology. I enjoyed the implication that someone who has spent ten years campaigning for the UK conservative party is a secret communist, I was merely saying that Nazism is uniquely violent.
Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot etc. were appalling people who did appalling things. Likewise slavery, genocide and other bad things done by other non fascists such as monarchies and liberal democracies are also bad. I'm not pretending that only Nazis did bad things, that would be ridiculous.
But I was responding to the idea that a non Nazi Hitler would be exactly the same as a Nazi Hitler as long as he is authoritarian and violent (which Red! Hitler in this Tl obviously is) and I think that underestimates the extent to which the Third Reich's attempts to just kill as many people as they can even when that wasn't a rational decision is pretty rare. Communist dictators ran forced labour camps and caused famines and ordered massacres but they didn't have the Darwinist annihilation of races of central to their way of thinking. Pol Pot's Death toll was appalling, but Pol Pot wasn't running an economy based on invading other countries and using their people as slave labour.
The only type of thinking which comes to close to that level of genocide being innate to its thinking is settler colonialism which Nazism took inspiration from but in a much more deliberate way. Even the Congo Free State or North Korea at their very worst never had the brutality of the third Reich on that scale.
The Central Question of this timeline is taking the man behind that and giving him an ideology which isn't 'only the german race has value, lets conquer Europe, kill every slav and Jew and steal their land'' and seeing what changes. Now admittedly you could reasonably say from the perspective of Hitler the ideology he has taken on instead is 'only the german worker has value, lets liberate the workers of europe by conquering their countries, kill every international financer and put the enlightened germans workers in control of the land they'd liberated' but you can also reframe it differently, you can't really reframe nazi ideology in a non violent way.
But that's the timeline, right. That's the point of this. The tension isn't does Hitler gain power, we know the answer is yes, but will Hitler still be Hitler, which again we know to some extent that he's going to be a bad dude but the way that happens could mean a lot of things.
That tension is only there if you believe that 'Das Kapital' and 'Mein Kampf' differ in the level of violence they innately encourage. Now I haven't read either of those books, and I don't intend to, but I do think they're different from the summaries I have read. And so a Hitler working to make the former happen is a Hitler with different priorities than one working on the latter. Thus you have tension in the narrative. How much of the atrocities will we still see vs how much will we not.
If you genuinely think, as some commentators seem to, that there is no difference between nazi and communist ideology, that a red hitler will rule identically to otl hitler than this timeline has no interest to you. But I do see a difference. I don't think it's innate to believing in Marx to think that exterminating all slavs and jews has to happen the way the Nazis did, Stalin was a pretty nasty guy who didn't like jews and the Shoah didn't happen in the USSR.
I didn't think 'nazis bad actually' was actually a controversial take if I'm honest with you. But guess it is. It reminds me of a thread a while back about whether Roosevelt would still support the UK in WW2 if the British Empire was doing things in the colonies as bad as what Germany was doing in Poland and a bunch of people replied to say 'that's otl'. And I just don't think it was, the British Empire was a crime against humanity and the millions of deaths caused by it should be remembered but it wasn't Nazi Germany. No other country on Earth has been.
I think you can recognise that Nazism emerged from a violent time full of violent ideologies. That the German State of 30 years earlier was committing Genocide in Namibia, that the Soviets were killing millions in the Ukraine, that the Italians were committing genocide in Libya and the Western Allies were brutalising half the world etc., so that Nazism built on a lot of the racism and violence of the existing order rather than emerging out of nowhere. But that it was still an ideology that foregrounded that violence and made it central in a way that other ideologies do not.
Anyway no one needs my nonsense, they should instead read this timeline its great. Buy the book.
Quite surprised moderation hasnt stepped in yet when this thread derailed pages ago.
One of the mods actually chimed in with his own opinion.
And an almost warning.
Gosh darn sometimes you have to edit these things...grr, got to catch them before they happen...
Stalin ruling as a fascist would probably exalt the Orthodox church and the Russian military, as opposed to OTL where he supressed the former and purged the latter to keep it out of power at all costs. Might even turn the Russification policies of the Tsarist era up to 11. Damn, now I want a "What if Stalin had been a fascist" TL.
Rather impractical given the fact hes a georgian and all...
Well, Hitler wasn't blonde or tall.
I think the matter of race is probably an excellent part of any story like that. If Stalin were a fascist ruling over some kind of Slavophilic greater Russia, people would look back on him as a psychological basket-case (as most fascists ultimately are) as well as an evil tyrant, which could add dimensions to the study of authoritarian personalities such as his in that timeline's present day.
As for the 'practicality' of the whole thing, if I told you that a depressed smoker, a cripple, and a failed painter could become three of the most influential men of the 20th century, you might reconsider how difficult an alternate rise of Stalin could be. Ultimately I don't think many dictators become powerful through 'practical' means, at least on the surface, but it's certainly the sort of thing Stalin could pull off, if maybe given a little more public charisma.
Well Hitler was "Austrian" and Napoleon a Corse, so that's not such a large stretch there. Let's be honest none of those Nazi fools truely loked Nordic and Aryan, not even in what their own propaganda describet it as, so it could happen...
Not to mention the Nazi's and other included or excluded groups of people not based on true science or any sort of cultural or ethnic groups of the human race, but how they saw fit in their ideological mind, so a slavophile Stalin might point out that Georgians are fellow Slavic Orthodox people in a crazy fascist world view he might develop.
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“Austrian” was not really viewed as a separate national, much less ethnic, identity at this time, Austrians were viewed as Germans. There is a reason that so many Austrian's supported the Anschluss. The way people separate them to such a degree during discussions of that time period is Anachronistic, Austrian national identity was not really all that well developed or popular during this time period. Napoleon did not take power over a state that was based upon an explicitly ethnic ultranationalist ideology, but a revolutionary state fighting to overturn the old order, his situation is not even remotely comparable to the situation Stalin would be in here. Some of the Nazi's may not have LOOKED all that Nordic, but all of them were Ethnic German's, so definitely still fitting within the category of the "master race" they talked about. Stalin is not even a Slav, much less a Russian, and although he was very Russianized an Ethnic Russian Ultranationalist state, which is what a Fascist Russia would be, would not accept such a person as a leader. Stalin's rise was possible because of the fact that the Soviets up until Stalin promoted the cultures of the various nationalities ruled over by Russia and many of these minorities where early leaders in the Bolshevik movement. Such a thing would not be the case in a Fascist Russia, to say the least.
No, but they had a very concrete definition of the racial categories they ranted about and multiple categories that different groups were put under. It was based on pseudoscience and bullshit, but they had a consistent definition. A Slavophillic Fascist Russia would likely have such a thing as well, and Georgian's would be quite unlikely to be part of the "master race" in their view. They would definitely have much better status than non Christian minorities like Central Asian's or Azeri's, or non Orthodox like the Baltic people's, but becoming leader's of Russia or the Russian Fascist movement is unlikely in the EXTREME. He could not "point out Georgians are fellow Slavic Orthodox people", because quite frankly they aren't Slavic at all and nobody thinks they are, they are indigenous to the Caucuses and descended from the Colchian and Iberian civilizations of the region, of no relation to the Slav's whatsoever. They are Orthodox and would most likely be treated much better than non Orthodox groups, but they would face extreme Russification policies and they wouldn't be in leadership positions. Quite frankly it does not matter what kind of worldview Stalin develops if he can't convince anybody of it or make it dominant in the Russian Fascist movement, which again is not going to happen.
My interpretation is that you have a totalitarian wave on th 1910s-30s, and that the soviet incarnation of communism and the fascist moviments were bad for being totalitarian versions of normal ideologies.
You can be a libertarian communist without a problem just as you can be a liberal nationalist. In fact at the time Stalin terror was going all the way, Norway elected a communist PM that was accepted by the King who was pretty chill.