Perception of Communism after Nazi victory

[Snake Featherston]

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.

Except that they were still Hungarians, who just happened to follow the Jewish religion. Which is why Hungarian fascists collaborated with the Nazis in sending hundreds of thousands of their countrymen to Nazi murder factories and in the senseless butchery of their own people for no reason that served any purpose other than Nazi bloodlust.

 

[I Blame Communism]

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).

But you can only vote for one party, and electoral politics were not the only, or even the most important way of organising and contesting power in Russia by a long way.

This isn't a society where polling data means what it does in an urbanised country with an established democracy, remember. Villages would frequently vote as a unit for the party decided on by the communes, who had long been used to working with the SRs through agricultural co-operatives and so on. So the soldiers at the front, who in 1917 were utterly overrun with 'trench-bolshevism' (which was basically peace-activism and mass-fraternisation, creating fertile soil for the only party promising peace at once), returned to their villages and transformed into SRs. A great many working people didn't fully understand the distinctions between the socialist parties, who were far less divided outside Petrograd anyway, and these voted for whoever was best at speaking to them in their own language and gaining their trust.

In short: the peasant masses preferred the kind of socialism represented by the SRs, yes, but this wasn't a party-political society and they would more probably have thought in terms of 'the revolution' (on the land) against 'the counter-revolution' (which they knew all about from 1905-7). And they were revolutionaries almost to a man.

 

[Sang]

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.

1. Hungarian Jews consider themselves Jewish first, so they don't count as Hungarians.
2. The Siege of Budapest was a battle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviets were the ones who besieged Budapest, not the Nazis.
3. And were the Hungarians murdered just for being Hungarians? I doubt it. It was a ****ing war, in wars people die, including civilians.

 

[I Blame Communism]

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.

And I as a Scotsman am a statistical anomaly who should spend all day cursing the evil Norwegians? Actually I'm of straight paternal Norse descent myself, because of Complicated History.

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.

There are various statistical fiddles at work here (huge sections of the diaspora experienced no genocide whatever), but the first thing to say is aye wiel the Nazis lost didn't they.

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.

I consider you reported!

 

[Sang]

I consider you reported!

Any proof of me saying offensive things?
I just spit out the truth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews

The Jews also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and an ethnoreligious group, originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation.

Problems?

Pointing out that Jews are an ethnic group and a nation is not racism nor antisemitism.
It's in fact the very foundation of Zionism.

 

[I Blame Communism]

I think nation-state history is entirely wrong, but I disagree with people about it all the time. No, the thing that gets up my nose is the use of particularly odious nation-state history ('you belong to so-and-so invented category whether you like it or not') to deny the genocidal character of the Nazi regime.

 

[BlondieBC]

Or more prosaically and relevant to OTL's Cold War politics Franco and Pinochet in their own times.....


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.

Yes a lot of it is how one counts. Once I get to 10 million dead civilians, you are in the top cut of evil as far as I am concerned.



The Serbs killed by Croats also provides the nice illustration. Should that be a separate Croatian genocide number, or should Hitler bear the primary blame. I can see arguments for both sides, and outside of WW2, 300,000 civilians killed in death camps would be a shockingly high number.

 

[Sang]

I think nation-state history is entirely wrong, but I disagree with people about it all the time. No, the thing that gets up my nose is the use of particularly odious nation-state history ('you belong to so-and-so invented category whether you like it or not') to deny the genocidal character of the Nazi regime.

1. What's wrong with Nationalism?
2. I never denied the genocidal character of the Nazi regime, I just pointed out that it was nothing special. Genocides have happened ever since the Ancient Times. What makes the Nazis so special? The Mongols wiped out entire nations, while the Nazis failed to do the same. The Jews and Poles are still around, while we can't say the same about various ethnic groups in China and Central Asia, who were wiped out by Genghis Khan's hordes.

 

[CalBear]

1. Hungarian Jews consider themselves Jewish first, so they don't count as Hungarians.
2. The Siege of Budapest was a battle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviets were the ones who besieged Budapest, not the Nazis.
3. And were the Hungarians murdered just for being Hungarians? I doubt it. It was a ****ing war, in wars people die, including civilians.

They don't count as Hungarian? Really? No, REALLY?

Well, you don't count as member either.

Banned.

 

[LeX]

In a certain sense, Nazism was more evil, terrifying, and scarier than Communism. But this is because the Nazis, the way they did things, was on an emotional level extremely shocking and intimidating. But the Stalinists and Maoists were not better, just blander.

While in Nazi Germany you had fanatical SS officers doing things like personally executing or torturing people emphatically designated for destruction, when the horrors of Stalinism come up you simply have faceless bureaucrats taking random names from a list and purging the associated individuals. There were no exact "races" to persecute, just "class enemies" who could be anyone. In a perverted way, in the USSR and PRC everyone was given a "chance" to be the reddest of the red, while in Germany if you were a Jew, you were dead.
What looks scarier, Hitler yelling before a hysterical crowd while Panzer divisions roll east and west, or Stalin calmly sitting in a dull office checking off figures (people's names) from a list while smoking a pipe?

Now looking at the Holocaust and comparing it to the artificial famines, purges, and other atrocities of Communism, the Holocaust may look more brutal and purely evil, but perhaps it is because of this that it died out so easily. It was so repulsive on a gut "holy shit those guys will kill us!" level that everyone banded together to fight them and so after 12 years Nazism was done for. But what of the Communists? They did not actively invade other nations to export their purges, in fact, they killed millions in secret whilst resting much of their cause on the universal solidarity between all working men (which, ideally, was everyone). They did not preach the racial hatred that the Nazis did, but instead justified their killing as "being revolutionary". We all hear about stories from the Holocaust like Anne Frank's diary and the evils of Auschwitz, but who learns about the 40+ million victims of the Great Leap Forward? Even today many people believe the fiction that it was an accident. Who cares about the loyal Communists who were murdered by Stalin? Nobody does, and partly because many of those Stalin murdered were murderers themselves. Again, it does not conjure the same heart-wrenching mental image like what the Nazi Holocaust does.

In the end, my view is that the Communists are latent corrupters and killers of men, while the Nazis were the villains were worked with a high profile. Thus, it is Nazis who we think of as the universal evil and not the Communists even though the latter has created more deaths and arguably more suffering and civil deterioration around the world, over a greater time period.

 

[LeX]

They don't count as Hungarian? Really? No, REALLY?

Well, you don't count as member either.

Banned.

I think that was a bit fast. It's not like he supported Nazis or his posts were incoherent.

 

[Wolfpaw]

Well, the insane ravings of "Dr." Antonio Vallejo-Nájera linking Marxism to inherent biological deficiencies are more likely to find a wider audience.

 

[Aelita]

Well, the insane ravings of "Dr." Antonio Vallejo-Nájera linking Marxism to inherent biological deficiencies are more likely to find a wider audience.

Maybe. On the other hand, Marxian revolutionary socialism might be a powerful political current in the west due to the fact that it was the one consistent opponent of the Nazi regime and their acolytes and collaborators around Europe.

 

[Mike Stearns]

I think the reason why the Nazis seem more evil than the Soviets is because we never went to war with Russia in the same way that we did with Germany. During the early stages of the war we had inklings of what was coming thanks to people who had managed to escape for the camps and at the end of the war we were confronted with the full extent of the Nazis' attrocities, which percipitated a full scale investigation and a formal trial. Because we never went to war with the USSR, we don't have the same frame of reference. As a result, Communism tends to be regarded more as failed experiment, but if we had invaded the Soviet Union, we might have heard eriely familiar stories, and put the senior Soviet leadership on trial.

 

[Wolfpaw]

I think the reason why the Nazis seem more evil than the Soviets is because we never went to war with Russia in the same way that we did with Germany.

I think that it's more that the Nazis took badly-needed resources out of an apocalyptic war (that they started) to create murder factories with the sole intent of annihilating entire peoples because it's The Führer's Will.

Which, you know, even Stalinists thought was fucked up.

 

[Snake Featherston]

But you can only vote for one party, and electoral politics were not the only, or even the most important way of organising and contesting power in Russia by a long way.

This isn't a society where polling data means what it does in an urbanised country with an established democracy, remember. Villages would frequently vote as a unit for the party decided on by the communes, who had long been used to working with the SRs through agricultural co-operatives and so on. So the soldiers at the front, who in 1917 were utterly overrun with 'trench-bolshevism' (which was basically peace-activism and mass-fraternisation, creating fertile soil for the only party promising peace at once), returned to their villages and transformed into SRs. A great many working people didn't fully understand the distinctions between the socialist parties, who were far less divided outside Petrograd anyway, and these voted for whoever was best at speaking to them in their own language and gaining their trust.

In short: the peasant masses preferred the kind of socialism represented by the SRs, yes, but this wasn't a party-political society and they would more probably have thought in terms of 'the revolution' (on the land) against 'the counter-revolution' (which they knew all about from 1905-7). And they were revolutionaries almost to a man.

True, though I highly doubt any of them cared very much about the Leninist idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat as much of what made Leninism Leninism only appealed to urban Russians, as opposed to the rural ones. They were all revolutionaries, yes, but not all of them remotely agreed on what the RevolutionTM was supposed to be.

 

[wcv215]

I think the reason why the Nazis seem more evil than the Soviets is because we never went to war with Russia in the same way that we did with Germany. During the early stages of the war we had inklings of what was coming thanks to people who had managed to escape for the camps and at the end of the war we were confronted with the full extent of the Nazis' attrocities, which percipitated a full scale investigation and a formal trial. Because we never went to war with the USSR, we don't have the same frame of reference. As a result, Communism tends to be regarded more as failed experiment, but if we had invaded the Soviet Union, we might have heard eriely familiar stories, and put the senior Soviet leadership on trial.

If you believe that please look up Generalplan Ost, which called for the total and complete annihilation of almost every man, woman, and child in the East, the total destruction of their culture, and turning any who survived into slaves. You have the gulags which were bad on the one hand, versus the German slave-labor camps which were nothing more than an excuse to work anyone inside to death.

 

[Mike Stearns]

If you believe that please look up Generalplan Ost, which called for the total and complete annihilation of almost every man, woman, and child in the East, the total destruction of their culture, and turning any who survived into slaves. You have the gulags which were bad on the one hand, versus the German slave-labor camps which were nothing more than an excuse to work anyone inside to death.

But that is my point thought. We know EXACTLY what the Nazis were planning to do the Slavs after the war because the Nazis' internal planning documents fell into our hands, so we know from that and from eye witnesses that the war, and specifically the war in the east, was a war of genocide, but we avoided having to fight a pitched war with the Russians directly, so while we know that Russians denied their own people's basic freedoms and disappeared dissenters among other things, the Nazis are far more evil than the Communists because we had to fight a cataclysimically violent war to stop the Nazis. We saw the results of their crimes first hand and heard directly from their victims. We never had to do that to the Soviets, so the Soviets don't seem to be as evil as the Nazis, even though the probably are. As I said in my previous post, if we had had invade the Soviet Union, we'd have seen EXACTLY what the Soviets were doing to their own people, and we'd probably see them as being no better than the Nazis.

 

[I Blame Communism]

True, though I highly doubt any of them cared very much about the Leninist idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat as much of what made Leninism Leninism only appealed to urban Russians, as opposed to the rural ones. They were all revolutionaries, yes, but not all of them remotely agreed on what the RevolutionTM was supposed to be.

Yep: there were of course numerous kinds of resistance to the Bolshevik regime, war communism, and the beaurocratic state from peasants, soldiers, and workers who wouldn't be seen dead with the White.

Although another piece of the puzzle is what you might call the tsarism of the instincts. "We need a democratic republic under a just tsar!" This lingering conception that the 'state' - about which rural Russians seldom thought except when it was harassing them - should be represented by a superhuman leader was tapped into by Kerensky, Kornilov, Lenin, and Stalin (indeed it seems that the canonisation of Lenin was done by the other senior Bolsheviks partly against his will as he recovered from Kaplan's shot): nobody likes having their mum shot, but that doesn't always translate into a politicised opposition to dictatorship as we'd understand it now.

But yeah, the more you go into the details, the harder it is to arrive at satisfactory answers; at some point one must generalise. Most people were for the revolution, against the foes of the revolution, and against the direction in which it was taken by the Bolshevik party in that order.

As I said in my previous post, if we had had invade the Soviet Union, we'd have seen EXACTLY what the Soviets were doing to their own people, and we'd probably see them as being no better than the Nazis.

Have you read the Hunger Plan? That's not what the Soviets were doing to their own people. Their own people got a tragicomic state under an privileged beurocratic caste that treated them as numbers in its economic plans, denied them civil and political rights, and sometimes uncaringly watched a couple of millions of them starve. So, somewhat worse in certain ways than the vast tracts of the non-European world under the rule of us, The Good Guys. But not remotely in league with the organised destruction of civilisation.

Which concentration camps were awaiting discovery, exactly?

 

[Snake Featherston]

Yep: there were of course numerous kinds of resistance to the Bolshevik regime, war communism, and the beaurocratic state from peasants, soldiers, and workers who wouldn't be seen dead with the White.

Although another piece of the puzzle is what you might call the tsarism of the instincts. "We need a democratic republic under a just tsar!" This lingering conception that the 'state' - about which rural Russians seldom thought except when it was harassing them - should be represented by a superhuman leader was tapped into by Kerensky, Kornilov, Lenin, and Stalin. Indeed it seems that the canonisation of Lenin was done by the other senior Bolsheviks partly against his will as he recovered from Kaplan's shot.

But yeah, the more you go into the details, the harder it is to arrive at satisfactory answers; at some point one must generalise. Most people were for the revolution, against the foes of the revolution, and against the direction in which it was taken by the Bolshevik party in that order.

I agree with the last paragraph as a good summary.