Hey guys it's that age-old debate.

Stalin's regime played a pivotal role in stopping Hitler, so he has that going for him I guess. I think Hitler and the Nazis have given more for western pop culture, but it wouldn't really make sense to consider that in the "who was worse?" tally.

They both had a lot of people killed, which is clearly a bad thing to have done. I suppose the Nazi regime was more methodical in this, though it's not like Stalin's persecutions and whatnot weren't systematic at all. Then there was that Holodomor stuff. I mean, we're talking responsibility for millions of deaths with both of these dudes here.

I don't know. I feel like you could make a pretty strong case either way. And people have been doing that since the dawn of the internet and of course before there was an internet. I guess back then they'd have their Hitler vs. Stalin evil dictator debates via letters or something.

Man, these guys both pretty much sucked, I imagine we can all agree on that.

Actually, I think Hitler was not only less bad than Stalin, but in fact was a net positive for the USA. Just like American fascism will be a net positive for some other country.

...but that's a different discussion, of course.

Stalin was in power for three times as long as Germany, so maybe he was 3x as bad?

Also, while Europe was happy to see Stalin stop Hitler, if you look at it from the Russian point of view, didn't they basically send their own to the slaughterhouse in an all out attempt to win the war? Much like the generals did in the first world war. That said, German rule strikes me as something very few Russians were looking forward to.

Also, much like the callousness of world war one generals, the expansionist Soviet Union precipitated the proxy wars of the 20th century that would see millions of unnecessary deaths. The USSR also extracted wealth from within the borders of its own empire through COMECON, which inevitably did more to enrich Moscow and ethnic Russians than to fulfill its supposed purpose of mutual economic cooperation.

If you want to see communism done right, check out Josip Broz Tito's work in Yugoslavia. Note that Stalin expelled the country from COMECON, but they seemed to get on pretty well without Moscow. Stalin's numerous attempts to assassinate Tito certainly showed that something prosperous was going on in the country that Moscow was anxious to get its paws over.

Koobie

I should also add that I still think Hitler was more dangerous than Stalin, more unhinged. I think one could have made the case that Hitler would have been much, much worse than Stalin, if it weren't for the fact that his own insane delusions didn't stop him first by causing Germany to be utterly destroyed.

Hitler was terrible for the Jewish people, for Germans, Poles, the French, Brits, Russians, etc., and it all happened so fast. It's hard to say what an actual Nazi empire would have looked like. I'm guessing it wouldn't have lasted more than a decade, but who knows?

Eh, that's a low bar for "communism done right" then from what I just read. The country's economy was unsustainable, and political opposition was thwarted violently. They had a police state with a secret police modeled after the KGB and more political prisoners than all of the rest of Eastern Europe excluding the Soviet Union. This is all from Wikipedia, by the way, as I'm not actually informed on Tito's Yugoslavia. He seemed to have done a bunch of good too, though, and apparently wasn't bat**** crazy.

Oh, there's no doubt that Tito was brutal. My main point there was to highlight the evils of the USSR and its economic dominion over its satellites. Yugoslavia was somewhat economically prosperous and socially stable, despite the inherent ethnic tensions, thanks to a fairly autonomous government.

“Communism done right” is basically what the Hutterites are doing.

He did a much better job than Saddam Hussain, another strongman who similarly checked ethnic / religious tensions through brutal suppression.

Of course, in the end the ethnic / religious tensions exploded in both cases. So I don't know what kind of "communism done right" can really exist in the long run when it's shoved down the throats of a heterogenous, multiethnic society. What I will say is that the USSR was communism done wrong. It was basically a Russian empire.

Basically this.

Stalin was a complicated man. Hitler wasn’t.

Stalin was incredibly ruthless and rose up through crime, much of which was committed to finance the Bolsheviks. He had a pretty tough life, and spent his formative years in prison or exile. At the same time, he was an absolute, quasi-religious devotee of Marxism, and justified many of the things he did as upholding global revolution until it was complete. Many of the other people in the communist party at the time were satisfied with market socialism, so he felt he had to purge them to keep the revolution going.

Hitler was basically an army loser who got pissed off at how Jewish the government was, who started a political party with his drunk army buddies.

The main difference, I guess, is that if Stalin killed you, it was for the sake of the revolution. Maybe it was because there wasn’t enough food for you, or maybe it’s because you weren’t communist enough.

If Hitler killed you, it was because you made him feel bad.

I just wanted to clarify one thing that Kroko led me to look into: Tito was definitely a killer and was no better than Stalin in that regard. In fact, if I am to believe one quora answer, he was even more cunning about hiding the fact that he did it (apparently Stalin openly bragged about it). But, for example, so much as supporting the USSR in 1940's Yugoslavia would have been enough to seal your fate.

Tito’s brutality was more of a survival strategy than Stalin’s was. It was necessary to remove the subversive elements and suppress sectarian and ethnic violence.

A different way of viewing Tito’s killings is, perhaps, a Bosnian War in slow motion?

Koobie

I watched a BBC documentary and read some stuff on Reddit. Apparently both Hitler and Stalin fumbled chances to stop Tito from forming an independent Yugoslavia. Hitler ordered 100 Yugoslav civilians be executed for every dead German soldier. Rather than subduing the resistance, it terrorized the Yugoslavs so greatly that they went and hid in caves, and joined the communists. And Stalin (now after the war) let Tito slip through his fingers, amassing tanks on the Yugoslav border, calculating that Tito would acquiesce and submit to Soviet rule. Far from it, Tito went to Harry Truman and secured a pact with the West, making it impossible for the invasion to take place without triggering a larger conflict.

Then Stalin tried to kill Tito 21 times.

So basically, Hitler was an idiot.

I think it wouls go to Hitler, but I fully see why people might choose Stalin.

One of the biggest reasons: Hitler started WW2, which was a huge humanitarian catastrophe. Depending on how you count it, WW2 resulted in 50-90 million deaths, and resulted in Britain needing grain so bad they starved to death millions of Indians, for example. Hitler also, you know, also ended up going through with a mechanistic, widespread genocide.

The Holodomor is a complicated topic. For one, there's no consensus that Stalin intentionally did it because he hated ethnic Ukrainians. That's the charge at hand, which would elevate it from a distinct, cruel famine and bad policy not unfamiliar to many regimes at that time (as I've commented, some 4-5 million deaths can be pegged on Britain for similar famine-deepening policies). But you basically have three sorts of people on this question: people with a bone to pick with Stalin, people who appreciate historical complexity, and people who are tankies. I tend to disregard the people who are really intent on proving or disproving Stalin's intentionality with the Holodomor because it's clear they're just fighting for rhetorical talking points, and the mean suggests "we don't know for sure (and there are good historians who also say this, mind you, as take both sides above).

In general, though, the right of the world has a bone to pick with Stalin and like to exaggerate his crimes. Which is silly, because his crimes stand on their own and condemn him wholly just the same. But take Solzhenitsyn. The famous Gulag Archipelago author. His first hand account of of the Gulags is taken as gospel by more right-leaning people. But people should take more into account: why was he sent to the Gulags? It's because he wrote a letter expressing sympathies for the Nazi cause. He then served ten years, where he was cured of his cancer, and set free.

What does that say? Does it say the contents of the Gulag Archipelago are false? Well, no, you could maybe dispute individual accounts but each of the stories have to be based at least somewhere in fact. But the reality of the Gulags was often like what Solzhenitsyn went through, much moreso in fact that a place to "disappear" people. The point being that, trying to compare Gulags to Nazi camps is utterly shameful, for as awful as the experience was, most people actually left.

Also, apparently Solzhenitsyn's first wife once said the book was "campfire tales" and shouldn't be taken seriously, but people have also claimed that this was KGB disinformation. Who knows? Point being, Solzhenitsyn was a guy who at times expressed a bit too much sympathy for fascism, and collected eye witness accounts for the direct purpose of making the Soviets look bad, so it's as accurate as such a thing can be.

I'm not sure though if this paints a complete picture but hey.

My point about Solzhenitsyn is really this: many people think that the gulags were the place where political opponents were sent to become slaves until death. That's certainly true of some people, for most it was an overly long sentence in a prison facility with poor treatment, forced labor and underfunding.

That probably makes sense, but just to be clear, I've commonly heard Holocaust deniers say the same thing about Nazi death camps.

Did I say death camps? I meant happy camps.



Now go kill some Canadian scum.

Funny story: I once started a heated debate with a family member when I called the Japanese internment camps concentration camps.

what else did they think "concentration" meant? It's not like you called them death camps.

Precisely!

The phrase "concentration camp" has come to be associated so strongly with the Nazis. I imagine that for some, holding onto a euphemistic alternative like "internment" creates some distance.

It's interesting how language is so closely tied to tribal instincts. Pick the wrong word to refer to something socially consequential, and suddenly you're in somebody's outgroup.

Maybe. I would assume it’s more about confirmation bias, though. Most people are dead set on the way they view the world; they believe exactly what they were told to believe as children, and don’t question anything except in the direst of circumstances. Anything that threatens their preconceptions is wrong-think.

Ours are “internment camps”, theirs are “concentration camps”.

Ours are “job creators”, theirs are “oligarchs”.

Ours is “lobbying”, theirs is “corruption”.

Ours is “news”, theirs is “propaganda”.

Ours is “justice”, theirs is “persecution”.

Ours is “gerrymandering”, theirs is “election rigging”.

Ours are “tax benefits”, theirs are “government subsidies”.

Ours are “jobs”, theirs are “compulsory labor”.

Our free speech has “reasonable limitations”, and their free speech is “unfree”.

Scratch em and they smell the same, but good luck explaining that to someone who was brought up that way. This goes beyond simple euphemism; their mental model of what makes them different is broken, but very clearly tells them they are different even if they can’t explain it. For people like this, you’re best off just nodding and say “capitalism is great and America is a democracy” and move on.

Oh I am so looking forward to Thanksgiving. :downs:

Playing devil's advocate here: despite all the ways that the Japanese internment camps were racist and resembled the Gulags or Nazi concentration camps, I can also see why someone would want to point out that what the Americans did was still fundamentally different from what the Nazis and Soviets did (no, or at least less, slave labor, no mass murder), and thus warrants that calling the American Japanese camps by a different name, because calling them by the same thing would be misleading (given that, in the popular imagination, "concentration camp" does evoke both slave labor, mass murder and living conditions so poor and medical care so lacking that many died from exposure).

Just to be clear, TL;DR: even though it's clear that the Japanese interment camps were concentration camps (in that they entailed the forced migration and consolidation of a geographically dispersed ethnic group into camps), isn't there a case to be made that it's hyperbolic to equate Japanese internment in the States with what the Nazis did, or to what the Soviets did?

That was the point of view taken by one caller to an NPR broadcast. He objected to the term:



Neil Conan's response:



https://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2012/02/10/146691773/euphemisms-concentration-camps-and-the-japanese-internment

In particular, I like the attempt to return to neutral language. Frankly, neutral language is one of the big secrets to greater intellectual thought. Basically all of science is about this, to a certain degree. Once you remove belief attached to a word, you need something else instead, like logic or the scientific method. Of course as Jon`C pointed out, it might just as well be characterized as confirmation bias, but this goes well with this interpretation too, since science tries to solve that problem as well.

It's interesting to wonder how much of what's wrong with the way people use the web has to do with confirming your biases by selective browsing, or the encouragement of biased language. In a lot of ways the two forces of darkness and ignorance seem to be working together in powerful ways to damage the quality of discourse and hurt scientific causes.

Economically I guess the USSR was positive for Germany. Their occupation of Eastern Germany led to the USA pumping a ****load of money into Western Germany. So I guess that was a joint effort of Hitler and Stalin. Hitler was needed to start the war and Stalin to end it.
The downside is that now we're deep in the USA's ass. And also Eastern Germany is still trying to recover from Soviet Union. Although the parties that tried (and failed) to form the next German government all agreed to end the special tax people in Western Germany pay to support Eastern Germany, so I hope they thought this through and Eastern Germany is now actually a bit better off. Last time I looked they were not and I guess this will give rise to even more supporters of the right wing.

Even comparing what the Americans did to the British concentration camps established during the Boer War seems to exaggerate the moral toll of Japanese internment. 10% of the people sent to British concentration camps died while in the camps.

That's a fair point, but then again the whole point of neutral language is that it would be a moot one. Of course this just begs the question, since we still need some way to decide what is neutral and what is not. One way to "solve" this problem is to form a community of language users who choose not to mind this leap of faith. Example: mathematicians (search for Lewis Carroll's passage where Humpty Dumpty chides Alice about this point).

OTOH a counterexample of this is gender pronouns: in 2017, a canonical choice of "he" doesn't seem neutral at all anymore.

Maybe the real test is related to the details of the particular reason the language is not neutral for some subset of readers.

One way out is to look at history: e.g., how was the term "concentration camp" originally used? And then consider whether or not the new usage breaks it beyond hope.

Interestingly enough, I've read some socially liberal commentary claiming that the neutral "he" was in fact quite arbitrary, and that a singular "they" used to be quite alright.

Finally: maybe we only have to ask ourselves, "who would we rather offend or spare offense? Those apologizing for crimes of the US government, or those who empathize with or grieve for the victims of past crimes?"

I would argue that calling a spade a spade is the right choice as long as you are offending people who ought to be offended, regarding contemporary affairs. Now, Nazi Germany is gone, but the United States government, while clearly not even comparable, is certainly not gone, and still has its apologists. OTOH, many Jewish groups surely want to avoid trivializing of the Holocaust, and since genocidal hatred is always a concern throughout human history, one could argue that it's never acceptable to trivialize the crimes of the Nazis, even as indirectly as this. I can see that point too, but I think the term concentration camp is descriptive enough to merit literal, neutral use.

I've often thought that when trying to have a neutral discussion, it's better to avoid using incendiary terminology in the first place. For example, actually describing what a regime is doing/did, rather than slapping it with the term "ethnic cleansing" or "racism" or whatever, which are invested with all sorts of emotionality, makes it possible to have a more dispassionate, reasonable discussion. The idea of creating some kind of new, neutral language seems to my mind unnecessary and unrealistic goal.

Ultimately, whether it's better to call what the United States set up to forcibly relocate Japanese citizens and non-citizens "internment camps" or "concentration camps" is ultimately a semantic consideration. If you want to move past it, it seems the best way is to have a discussion about what the United States actually did, and then go onto a moral consideration about just how bad it was, and leave the terms out if it altogether. I think that method is suitable for a lot of emotionally explosive topics.

(in response to my own post)

I would perhaps then suggest we ought to just flat out call the Nazi camps death camps. Of course concentration camps are a superset, but maybe using the more extreme term as a synecdoche would free up the more general term.

What I'm saying is that we need a committee to refactor language. Hey, doesn't Germany do that every decade or so?

But I don't see why you'd privilege contemporary affairs in that way. It's difficult to disassociate history from contemporary concerns. How to memorialize the Holocaust is a contemporary issue in its own right, leaving aside the state of antisemitism today.

Context matters. I don't think anyone can say that anyone can give a completely authoritative definition of what any term means. And even if there were, say, complete consensus amongst academics and experts that a certain term meant something, I don't think you could hold non-professionals and uninformed people accountable for not already knowing it (or for disagreeing with it, for that matter). I think the way to get around this is for someone to define what they mean what they use a term like "concentration camp" when they're talking to the uninformed, and then people can either agree or disagree with the definition.

(In response to your second to last reply)

That makes a lot of sense, Eversor.

However, I smell a slippery slope argument just around the corner: if we are to involve the stakeholders in the discussion about acceptable language, does this well-intentioned road end with silly trigger warnings and corporatese? George Carlin would spin in his grave, and George Orwell would be having some kind of reaction.

Your point about the Holocaust still being a contemporary issue is a good one. Also, a history professor told me once that nothing in the last 100 years is yet part of history. Not until every connected party is no longer alive to sway the narrative and documents and letters are still being interpreted.

It just doesn't matter. Nobody has the power to regulate what words mean because individuals constantly use language creatively to generate new meaning. It's kind of like what Spinoza said about free thought: laws regulating independent thought are not only an injustice, but they literally don't make sense. You literally can't stop a person from thinking what they want. Thinking is inherently free. I think language is similar. Meaning is incredibly flexible, and people can assign new meaning to words and there's nothing to stop them from using language in an idiosyncratic way, even if what they're trying to communicate is misunderstood because of it.