Perception of Communism after Nazi victory

[Sang]

Last I checked the Communists weren't out to deliberately destroy civilization and reduce the survivors to slaves forever. The Nazis were, with the inhabitants of the USSR to be their "India". So kindly explain to me how Generalplan Ost is *less* evil than the reality of the Soviet Union?

Did the Nazis actually kill more than 15 million civilians?
They probably killed like 10-15 million innocents.
What about the Soviets? 65-135 million innocents killed.
Oh, and I shouldn't even mention Mao Zedong and his brutal regime...

Thus, I'd be rather killed for my ethnicity than my social class.
Why?
Because if they kill me for my race or ethnicity, I can die with pride, choosing death rather than hiding.
But being killed just because I'm a merchant or landowner? That's a totally different story...

 

[Snake Featherston]

Did the Nazis actually kill more than 15 million civilians?
They probably killed like 10-15 million innocents.
What about the Soviets? 65-135 million innocents killed.
Oh, and I shouldn't even mention Mao Zedong and his brutal regime...

Thus, I'd be rather killed for my ethnicity than my social class.
Why?
Because if they kill me for my race or ethnicity, I can die with pride, choosing death rather than hiding.
But being killed just because I'm a merchant or landowner? That's a totally different story...

Yes, they did kill more than 15 million people. The 6 million Jews were one part of a much broader swathe of massacres everywhere from Poland to the interior of the USSR. Again you provide this statement of the Soviet death toll with no evidence to support it, while providing no equivalent evidence to state that the Nazis "only" killed 15 million. If we limit ourselves solely to Jews and Soviet POWs then we have 9 million people in a relatively short amount of time (2 years for the Jews, six months for the 3 million Soviet POWs). And these 9 million are together with another 13 million.

Your claim that the Nazis and Soviets are equal evils is absurd. The Soviets were a more efficient version of Tsarism: messianic, brutal, and rife with corruption and incompetence. The Nazis were Zhang Xianzhongs and Tamerlanes with tanks and gas chambers instead of horse armies.

 

[Sang]

Your claim that the Nazis and Soviets are equal evils is absurd. The Soviets were a more efficient version of Tsarism: messianic, brutal, and rife with corruption and incompetence. The Nazis were Zhang Xianzhongs and Tamerlanes with tanks and gas chambers instead of horse armies.

So, what's the difference between the Nazis and the Mongols then?
Nazis weren't an ethnic group, Nazism is a political ideology.

Thus, the Mongols were responsible for around 60 000 000 deaths. Does that mean we must make Ghengis Khan the symbol of evil? The Mongolian people view him as a national hero. Oh, and I should also mention Attila the Hun, who is viewed as a national hero by the Hungarians.
Wars are unfortunately natural, and has always existed. Ethnic hatred is unfortunately natural, and has always existed.
People hate each other. People kill each other.

I'm not denying any genocides before you start accusing me with racism or antisemitism, I'm just pointing out that there was nothing special about the nazis or jews. Both were and are humans like us, with feelings of love and hate, with the ability to kill other people, etc.

 

[MattII]

A lot of people died in the Gulags IIRC, if only (and probably not just) because they were in even more inhospitable climes than the Nazi prison-work camps.

 

[Snake Featherston]

So, what's the difference between the Nazis and the Mongols then?
Nazis weren't an ethnic group, Nazism is a political ideology.

Thus, the Mongols were responsible for around 60 000 000 deaths. Does that mean we must make Ghengis Khan the symbol of evil? The Mongolian people view him as a national hero. Oh, and I should also mention Attila the Hun, who is viewed as a national hero by the Hungarians.
Wars are unfortunately natural, and has always existed. Ethnic hatred is unfortunately natural, and has always existed.
People hate each other. People kill each other.

I'm not denying any genocides before you start accusing me with racism or antisemitism, I'm just pointing out that there was nothing special about the nazis or jews. Both were and are humans like us, with feelings of love and hate, with the ability to kill other people, etc.

The difference is solely that one had tanks, the others had horse-archers. The two are the exact same things. The Nazis were explicitly geared to creating a state for the sole and total purpose of killing as many human beings as possible for the sole reason that a former street bum disliked them. The Soviets, by contrast, are a more efficient upgrade of a regime that was already in itself evil (I mean if we seriously go into the evils of the Tsarist regime it's a horrific thought that from the perspective of a Russian loving liberty the difference is that of Jiang and Mao, incompetent evil v. competent evil). The Nazis, however, took a regime with plenty of unpleasant aspects (Weimar Germany) and transformed it into something whose evil is frankly put incomprehensible to people now as it was then. The two are not comparable (and incidentally the few times the Soviets did commit wars of aggression they were small-scale and intended to be limited wars and were in fact limited wars. Hitler willfully fought the entire planet).

 

[Snake Featherston]

A lot of people died in the Gulags IIRC, if only (and probably not just) because they were in even more inhospitable climes than the Nazi prison-work camps.

Nah, that was because slave labor is a de facto death sentence most of the time. The reason that slave trades were as voracious as they were is because slaves did in fact die in great numbers, to the point that cutting off the trade meant slaves could and did suffer an unnatural atrophying of numbers from being worked to death. As the Gulag was a slave labor system, well......working people to death *is* a process that is very lethal in practice.

 

[Sang]

The difference is solely that one had tanks, the others had horse-archers. The two are the exact same things. The Nazis were explicitly geared to creating a state for the sole and total purpose of killing as many human beings as possible for the sole reason that a former street bum disliked them. The Soviets, by contrast, are a more efficient upgrade of a regime that was already in itself evil (I mean if we seriously go into the evils of the Tsarist regime it's a horrific thought that from the perspective of a Russian loving liberty the difference is that of Jiang and Mao, incompetent evil v. competent evil). The Nazis, however, took a regime with plenty of unpleasant aspects (Weimar Germany) and transformed it into something whose evil is frankly put incomprehensible to people now as it was then. The two are not comparable (and incidentally the few times the Soviets did commit wars of aggression they were small-scale and intended to be limited wars and were in fact limited wars. Hitler willfully fought the entire planet).

Once again, it only proves that good and evil are artificial, and people are just people.
How did the Nazis actually come to power? Hitler gained power legally, elected by the majority.
So, does that mean that the majority of Germans were evil bastards in the 1930's?

Oh, and why did the Soviet Revolution succeed? Because the majority supported it.

Sure, both regimes turned on their supporters (the masses) in the mean time, but once again, the majority of Germans supported Hitler, despite the fact today his political views are viewed as "evil".
Then think about it. Wasn't the savage murder of all the Native Americans, Indians and Africans by the European powers just as "evil" as the Nazi crimes? Weren't the soviet artificial famines just as "evil" ? Wasn't the USA just as "evil" to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Evil and good are subjective, they change by the perspective.

 

[I Blame Communism]

between 1917 and 1991

Aye wiel eck-sactly.

 

[Sang]

All sides commit crimes during wars, not just the ones who lose it.
Off course, we ignore the winners' crimes.

 

[I Blame Communism]

A lot of people died in the Gulags IIRC, if only (and probably not just) because they were in even more inhospitable climes than the Nazi prison-work camps.

I'm not sure what exactly is meant by 'prison-work camps' here, but to clarify the Nazi system for Soviet PoWs was vastly more lethal than its opposite number.

All sides commit crimes during wars, not just the ones who lose it.
Off course, we ignore the winners' crimes.

I don't know when 'evil murderous kleptocracy' became the same as 'not guilty!'.

I do like the argument here. 'Everybody's basically the same. That's why the Soviets are quantifiably worse than everyone.'

 

[Snake Featherston]

Once again, it only proves that good and evil are artificial, and people are just people.
How did the Nazis actually come to power? Hitler gained power legally, elected by the majority.
So, does that mean that the majority of Germans were evil bastards in the 1930's?

Oh, and why did the Soviet Revolution succeed? Because the majority supported it.

Sure, both regimes turned on their supporters (the masses) in the mean time, but once again, the majority of Germans supported Hitler, despite the fact today his political views are viewed as "evil".
Then think about it. Wasn't the savage murder of all the Native Americans, Indians and Africans by the European powers just as "evil" as the Nazi crimes? Weren't the soviet artificial famines just as "evil" ? Wasn't the USA just as "evil" to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Evil and good are subjective, they change by the perspective.

1) What does evil and good have to do with this discussion?

2) Actually that's an oversimplification. The Nazis never gained a majority, only a plurality. They were put into power because Hitler refused anything short of the full chancellorship and consolidated their power by barbaric terrorism. The Nazis never had a majority of German popular sanction, and there is a reason Nazi and German should be more separated than they were (though the Wehrmacht and Nazi regime were far closer than is generally appreciated).

3) No, just....no. The actual majority of Russians in the RCW backed the Social Democrats, not the Reds or the Whites. The Social Democrats had no armies, the Reds had the largest army, the Whites had small armies and no concept of how to square a huge number of circles. The Soviets won the RCW because they had the big battalions and the Whites were incapable of seriously cracking through those battalions. Not from popular support.

4) Again, no, Hitler never got even 50.1% of the German vote so a majority of Germans *did not* support his regime. His regime gained its "support" by stage-managed mass rallies and the ever-present threat of concentration camps for Germans.

5) Sure, but at the same time much of that was unintentional and reflects that the world in general is a murky and morally ambiguous place determined more by brute force than people credit it for. And most crucially none of this mitigates that the Nazis are equal in death tolls to the Soviets that defeated them.

6) See #5.

7) The problem with this is manifold but the crudest response to this is "and yet the conventional firebombings that together killed far more than the nuclear weapons did are never brought up in this discussion despite that morally speaking it's no different if fleets of bombers with incendiary bombs reduce cities to rubble and kill tens of thousands than if one bomb from one plane does it. Death is death." More sophisticated ones would note that in WWII indiscriminate slaughtering of civilians by bomber fleets was a de facto given and nobody cared about it then as it reflected the weakness of bombers relative to their modern-day counterparts, which are able now to do what the over-optimistic hopes of Bomber Command wanted then.

 

[BlondieBC]

The Communists will be whitewashed and most of their actual crimes either forgiven or minimized in the wake of the deliberate and wholesale Nazi obliteration of civilization in what used to be the USSR.

Agreed.

A real example is the Spanish/Aztecs. The Spanish Inquisition is still taught, but the human sacrifice of the Aztecs is often skipped.

Did the Nazis actually kill more than 15 million civilians?
They probably killed like 10-15 million innocents.

The ranges I have seen are between 9 and 17 million civilians killed for no reasonable military purpose. I would say it is likely in the middle of the range, if one excludes combat operation such as Stalingrad and Leningrad and military related deaths by all sides.

Compared to some other posters, I would consider POW deaths war crimes, but not properly classified as civilian deaths.

 

[Snake Featherston]

Agreed.

A real example is the Spanish/Aztecs. The Spanish Inquisition is still taught, but the human sacrifice of the Aztecs is often skipped.

Or more prosaically and relevant to OTL's Cold War politics Franco and Pinochet in their own times.....and Iraq for a short time in the Reagan Administration.

The ranges I have seen are between 9 and 17 million civilians killed for no reasonable military purpose. I would say it is likely in the middle of the range, if one excludes combat operation such as Stalingrad and Leningrad and military related deaths by all sides.

Compared to some other posters, I would consider POW deaths war crimes, but not properly classified as civilian deaths.

The other factor that amplifies the death tolls are things like their "anti-partisan sweeps" and civilian massacres outside the USSR. Things like Lidice and the Ardeatines Cave, both of which add to the Nazi butchers' bill, and their treatment of civilians in occupied Poland and Yugoslavia who were Slavs instead of Jews or Gypsies.

 

[I Blame Communism]

I don't think the Reds could have won the civil war if they hadn't been able to wave the revolutionary flag and tell people they were defending what it stood for. At the moment of crisis the Petrograd workers, who had already shown themselves quite capable of organising against the Bolsheviks, volunteered to assist Trotsky's defence against Yudenich actively and in large numbers; and hundreds of thousands of peasant deserters returned to the Red Army - in summer: generally soldiers in the civil war deserted in summer to enlist in winter - on the amnesty days once the Whites had penetrated central Russia. As you point out the Whites were incapable of getting peasants on their side: even those of western Siberia, who were generally prosperous commercial smallholders with little to fear from the power of the gentry, turned against them.

Sure, that's not the same as 'popular support': the people turned against the Bolsheviks throughout the war. It's at least as fraught as the German case and not at all as Sang would have it. But the Bolsheviks had the bigger battalions because the masses preferred them to the alternatives: after all, the Whites had inherited most bodies with any kind of military professionalism.

The central problem with the Russian Revolution and our understanding of it, I think, is the fact that the Russian democratic tradition it manifested was at once boisterous and direct, and next to non-existent: this was a society of meetings in the barn and semi-divine monarchy, and that gives some clues as to how a totalitarian regime could arise out of a complete collapse of respect for authority and backed by those who were thus taking command of their own fates.

 

[Sang]

Snake Featherston, answer one thing for me.

Why should a gentile Hungarian like my consider the Nazis worse than Commies?
Let's see.
Nazis:
+ supported Greater Hungary
+ considered Hungarians Aryan
Commies:
- ruined Hungary's economy
- brainwashed Hungarians into believing that communism is good
- Butchered tens of hundreds of innocent Hungarians
- Made living conditions in Hungary really bad
- Commited a genocide against Hungarians living in Vojvodina (Serbia) and Northern Hungary (Slovakia)

So, Snake Featherston, remind me how the nazis were worse to my people than communists.
You'd get similar response from Estonians and other non-slavic inhabitants of the former USSR.
When did the nazis ever commit genocide against Hungarians? Never. Communists? Twice, once in Czechoslovakia, and once in Yugoslavia.

 

[Snake Featherston]

To me the problem with this analysis is the election for the All-Russian Constituent Assembly showed the Bolsheviks did fairly well for themselves in the cities (an overall minority of the total Russian population) but had no support whatsoever in the countryside (where the SRs had overwhelming support). In practice the Whites scotched any claims to support they would have ever had when they deposed SR civilian governments for their own visions of military society and refused to sanction land reform, while the Reds managed to resolve the dilemma of how to reimpose military discipline in the wake of their own successes in undermining that of the old regime.

Most Russian peasants didn't really sympathize with either faction, but disliked the Whites worse. It's a case of two factions with relatively little popular support seeing the one with more defeat the one with less, neither of which were necessarily seen enthusiastically by most people in Russia proper.

 

[I Blame Communism]

Why should a gentile Hungarian like my consider the Nazis worse than Commies?

Why should a Scotsman like me consider either of them worse than Norwegians? The Norwegians substantially depopulated whole areas of Scotland and shattered Pictland and Strathyclyde. The bastards!

Answer? Because things beyond the parish-pump do in fact matter.

(One also wonders why, if there was a genocide against Slovakian Hungarians, they're still there.)

 

[Snake Featherston]

Snake Featherston, answer one thing for me.

Why should a gentile Hungarian like my consider the Nazis worse than Commies?
Let's see.
Nazis:
+ supported Greater Hungary
+ considered Hungarians Aryan
Commies:
- ruined Hungary's economy
- brainwashed Hungarians into believing that communism is good
- Butchered tens of hundreds of innocent Hungarians
- Made living conditions in Hungary really bad
- Commited a genocide against Hungarians living in Vojvodina (Serbia) and Northern Hungary (Slovakia)

So, Snake Featherston, remind me how the nazis were worse to my people than communists.
You'd get similar response from Estonians and other non-slavic inhabitants of the former USSR.
When did the nazis ever commit genocide against Hungarians? Never. Communists? Twice, once in Czechoslovakia, and once in Yugoslavia.

The Nazis didn't really support Greater Hungary or considered Hungarians Aryan. The Nazis took over Hungary as a puppet state and damned your country to one of the longest, bloodiest, and purposeless battles of the entire later part of the war (the Siege of Budapests), and they also railroaded most of your country's Jews to the death camps, killing a good number of Hungarians on no grounds other than their twisted concept of religion. But I suppose that you don't count the senseless, bloody, and purposeless slaughter in the urban nightmare of Budapest or railroading your Jewish countrymen as far as "genocides of Hungarians", eh?

 

[Sang]

Why should a Scotsman like me consider either of them worse than Norwegians? The Norwegians substantially depopulated whole areas of Scotland and shattered Pictland and Strathyclyde. The bastards!

Answer? Because things beyond the parish-pump do in fact matter.

You till don't get it.
Evil and good are dependant on the perspective, point of view. Evil and good are subjective.

To a jew, Nazis are the most evil thing to ever exist.
To a Hungarian, Communists are much worse than Nazis.
ETc.

(One also wonders why, if there was a genocide against Slovakian Hungarians, they're still there.)

There are still a lot of Jews living in Germany, and there are like 3 million poles living in Germany.
Thus, the Ukrainians, Russians, etc. are still here too.
Did the Jews disappear forever? No. They are still here, and in fact stronger than ever. Jewish population is predicted to rise from 15 million to 74 million in 2100.

But I suppose that you don't count the senseless, bloody, and purposeless slaughter in the urban nightmare of Budapest or railroading your Jewish countrymen as far as "genocides of Hungarians", eh?

Jews consider themselves a distinct ethnicity. They consider themselves Jewish first, and Hungarian/English/German/Polish/etc second.
Thus, war is still war, people die in wars.

 

[Snake Featherston]

You till don't get it.
Evil and good are dependant on the perspective, point of view. Evil and good are subjective.

To a jew, Nazis are the most evil thing to ever exist.
To a Hungarian, Communists are much worse than Nazis.
ETc.

To a Hungarian Jew Hungarian Fascists and Nazis were equally keen on killing them all. To Hungarians the Nazis were the ones that turned their capital into a bloody and purposeless urban bloodbath that did nothing to win the war and even if it had by some impossible miracle slowed the Soviet advances in the south would not have accomplished anything regardless. But then I suppose Jewish Hungarians don't count as Hungarians here, nor does the Siege of Budapest in terms of which evil regime murdered Hungarians when.