Eastern Europe: Olivier's sphere of influence

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Eastern Europe: Olivier's sphere of influence

nurmie: Dec 8, 2019

crepeface posted:

I actually don't know. What are the numbers killed by Stalin's regime? You said there was no rhyme or reason under Stalin's rule, how do you think they were able to catch up with the US after enduring massive losses in their victory over the Nazis under such a system?

Also, what do you think of mpreg pornography?

I mean, this is exactly the problem with the whole "watchmojo top 10 dictators by killcount" approach to history - I honestly think Stalin and the system he and his allies had built killed enough innocent people to be horrifying without comparisons to Hitler. Even if we discount every single death from famines, war and so on - the Great Purge alone with its ~1 000 000 (well-documented, well-recorded) executions and however many additional deaths in the labour camp system is really loving horrific, and sufficiently atrocious to ward off any desire to "hand it to Stalin", imo.

We could also add the complete mismanagement of the foreign policy (already mentioned upthread), the failure of strategy in the crucial first weeks of operation Barbarossa and numerous other data points that do not build a flattering picture of Stalin - and we wouldn't even have to touch Holodomor and other assorted Really Horrific poo poo to do so!

also, that guy was into pedo mpreg pornography

nurmie fucked around with this message at 11:59 on Jan 8, 2022

# ? Jan 8, 2022 11:55

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# ? May 23, 2024 15:58

FishBulbia: Dec 22, 2021

It's very telling that the Ukrainian famine gets the attention, and not the famine of equal scale occurring in central Asia at the same time. It's indicative in just how much interest groups can shape the conception of history.

That's the great thing about dead people, you can use them for whatever political purpose you need and they can't protest. We can keep weighing out the bodies in this nice perverted game of "who was the greater criminal," it's okay, the people with actual power have been doing it forever.

# ? Jan 8, 2022 11:55

Rust Martialis: May 8, 2007; At night, Bavovnyatko quietly comes to the occupiers’ bases, depots, airfields, oil refineries and other places full of flammable items and starts playing with fire there

Red and Black posted:

Equating the Ukrainian famine to the Nazi’s deliberate extermination of the Jews through mass murder is essentially Holocaust denial

Or maybe *both* genocides are bad.

Also Churchill for Bengal.

# ? Jan 8, 2022 11:56

Qtotonibudinibudet: Nov 7, 2011; Omich poluyobok, skazhi ty narkoman? ya prosto tozhe gde to tam zhivu, mogli by vmeste uyobyvat' narkotiki

Paladinus posted:

I don't know if he's fled, just poorly or something else, but it's very clear that if everything was fine, the father of the nation would have recorded an address to his loyal subjects.

the latest eurasianet (which also covers the press secretary tweet) is that the dismissed Nazarbayev-era security chief/former PM has now been charged with treason

https://twitter.com/joannalillis/status/1479763852057321472

between that, the other dismissals, and no comment on being replaced as head of the security council, i give it a fair chance Tokayev has politely told Nazarbayev that he's taking over, and that Nazarbayev best keep more or less quiet if he doesn't want to end up on trial for treason himself

# ? Jan 8, 2022 11:59

ThisIsJohnWayne: Feb 23, 2007; Ooo! Look at me! NO DON'T LOOK AT ME!

steinrokkan posted:

Probably reference to this
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=1&threadid=3788502&pagenumber=367&perpage=40#post520395179

I don't know what I expected but it wasn't that

# ? Jan 8, 2022 12:03

cinci zoo sniper: Mar 15, 2013

CMYK BLYAT! posted:

he is also still allegedly (according to his own PR person) still in the country, and in support of Tokayev!

https://twitter.com/leonidragozin/status/1479751093324242944

there was one "has fled" story from some minor Russian media source yesterday, but it seemed like they were the only ones reporting it

https://rtvi.com/news/otets-natsii-propal-iz-vidu-kuda-ischez-nazarbaev-na-vremya-protestov-v-kazakhstane/

This summarises the ongoing speculation, which is slightly less conclusive than what Latvian media presented it to be last night.

# ? Jan 8, 2022 12:07

Tuna-Fish: Sep 13, 2017

Red and Black posted:

Equating the Ukrainian famine to the Nazi�s deliberate extermination of the Jews through mass murder is essentially Holocaust denial

I hate to get into the oppression olympics here, but talking about the Ukrainian famine as if it was not deliberate is Holodomor denial.

During the Holodomor, the Ukrainian peasants did not die because they couldn't grow enough food to feed themselves. They died because they failed to meet production standards (which were set unrealistically high), at which point a bunch of party goons came in to their farms or kolhozes, confiscated literally all the food, and set up blockades to make sure the starving people couldn't leave to seek food elsewhere. Once the people inside were weak enough they couldn't really do anything but die anymore, the thugs would leave and do the same to the next kolhoz, and expand the blockades. During Holodomor, people didn't die because of a famine, they were actively murdered through the use of hunger. (But also a lot of bullets, because desperate people often fought back.)

This is extremely well documented, from the original laws and orders, signed by Stalin, to all the times the people on the ground sent back explanations of what the orders were resulting in the ground and asking for clarification. Russian education contorts the facts to a pretzel trying to make all this sound like a some kind of natural disaster or something, but that is simply a lie. The Holodomor was a systematic, deliberately orchestrated genocide against the Ukrainian people.

(And just to get the oppression olympics part out of the way, I actually think that Hitler was worse than Stalin. But, being less bad than Hitler is a very low bar to clear, and you can be better than Hitler while still being a genocidal monster.)

# ? Jan 8, 2022 13:45

FishBulbia: Dec 22, 2021

I really suggest the Hungry Steppe, which someone else here recommended. Polemical discussion of the Ukrainian famine can lead to erasure of other famines, especially as examining them suggests that Stalin was not actually acting on the basis of nationality as it is understood today.

quote:

Much of the scholarship on the Ukrainian famine has focused on the question of whether the crisis was used by Stalin to punish Ukrainians as an ethnic group, and the debate surrounding this question has frequently turned polemical, inflamed by ideological divisions as well as present-day political tensions between Ukraine and Russia. Some Ukrainians have called upon the international community to recognize their famine as a genocide, and they have demanded retribution from Russia for their suffering. To bolster the claim that the famine was used by Stalin to punish Ukrainians as an ethnic group, some scholars have sought to emphasize the �uniqueness� of Ukrainians� suffering, downplaying or even neglecting to mention the horrors endured by other groups, such as the Kazakhs, during the same period. But the charged debate over the Ukrainian famine has eclipsed other aspects of the story. The Don Cossacks and the Volga Germans also suffered disproportionally from famine. Pockets of the Russian heartland, such as the province of Saratov, had high rates of famine mortality. In Kazakhstan, famine deaths were sharply ethnicized: though Kazakhs constituted just under 60 percent of the republic�s total population on the eve of the famine, some 90 percent of those who died in the Kazakh famine were Kazakhs. The famine claimed the lives of more than a million Kazakhs, approximately 40 percent of all Kazakhs in the republic. Ultimately, the Kazakhs would lose a greater percentage of their population due to famine than even the Ukrainians.

The nationality framework is over simplistic, as is perhaps viewing the famines as strictly a classicide.

quote:

This feature reframes the long-running debate over the Ukrainian famine. Most scholarship on the Ukrainian famine can be divided roughly into two opposing camps, �nationality� and �peasantry.� Scholars holding the latter view argue that the Soviet collectivization famines were part of a broader assault on a social category, the peasantry, and they conclude that Ukrainians suffered disproportionately not due to any specific intent to punish them as a group, but rather because most Ukrainians were peasants. Scholars holding the former view, by contrast, point to Ukrainians� historically troubled relationship with the regime, and they see nationality, or Stalin�s specific intent to punish Ukrainians, as instrumental in creating the horrifying death toll. In Kazakhstan, as in Ukraine, there was a clear overlap between national and social identities. Most Kazakhs were nomads, while in Ukraine, most Ukrainians were peasants. The �nationality� vs. �peasantry� debate assumes that Moscow used these two categories, national and social, to pursue different goals. Either Moscow sought to use famine as a weapon to punish Ukrainians as a national group or Moscow sought to use famine to punish peasants. But as the Kazakh case reveals, national and social categories were not necessarily in opposition to one another but might serve overlapping, mutually reinforcing goals.

FishBulbia fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Jan 8, 2022

# ? Jan 8, 2022 13:58

Grouchio: Aug 31, 2014

Tuna-Fish posted:

(And just to get the oppression olympics part out of the way, I actually think that Hitler was worse than Stalin. But, being less bad than Hitler is a very low bar to clear, and you can be better than Hitler while still being a genocidal monster.)

As an aside: I'd rank Mao as the third worst; in that when he executed his Great Leap Forward, nobody had the guts to tell him that his steel quotas would result in mass starvation reaching 8 figures. (At least, that's what I gathered from reading The Private Life of Chairman Mao)

# ? Jan 8, 2022 14:23

FishBulbia: Dec 22, 2021

could we actually put a moratorium on top ten bloodiest dictators, its up there with best tanks of ww2 as ways of talking about history which cause me physical pain

# ? Jan 8, 2022 14:25

cinci zoo sniper: Mar 15, 2013

FishBulbia posted:

could we actually put a moratorium on top ten bloodiest dictators, its up there with best tanks of ww2 as ways of talking about history which cause me physical pain

The best tanks debate at least is easy, after 140 hours of playtime with КВ-2 in World of Tanks the truth is hard to deny.

# ? Jan 8, 2022 14:28

FishBulbia: Dec 22, 2021

cinci zoo sniper posted:

The best tanks debate at least is easy, after 140 hours of playtime with КВ-2 in World of Tanks the truth is hard to deny.

wrong wrong wront

this was the best tank of ww2

# ? Jan 8, 2022 14:33

Abongination: Aug 18, 2010; Life, it's the shit that happens while you're waiting for moments that never come.; Pillbug

# ? Jan 8, 2022 14:36

Mokotow: Apr 16, 2012

Conspiratiorist posted:

High level defense US-Russia talks on the 10th, NATO-Russia on the 12th, and OSCE meeting on the 13th.

This coincides with the end of the freezing spell that just settled over Ukraine, meaning the ground should be firm enough to mobilize armor.

Frozen ground is good for armor; thawed ground is what you don�t want for heavy equipment. Infantry, on the other hand�

# ? Jan 8, 2022 14:49

Red and Black: Sep 5, 2011

Tuna-Fish posted:

I hate to get into the oppression olympics here, but talking about the Ukrainian famine as if it was not deliberate is Holodomor denial.

During the Holodomor, the Ukrainian peasants did not die because they couldn't grow enough food to feed themselves. They died because they failed to meet production standards (which were set unrealistically high), at which point a bunch of party goons came in to their farms or kolhozes, confiscated literally all the food, and set up blockades to make sure the starving people couldn't leave to seek food elsewhere. Once the people inside were weak enough they couldn't really do anything but die anymore, the thugs would leave and do the same to the next kolhoz, and expand the blockades. During Holodomor, people didn't die because of a famine, they were actively murdered through the use of hunger. (But also a lot of bullets, because desperate people often fought back.)

This is extremely well documented, from the original laws and orders, signed by Stalin, to all the times the people on the ground sent back explanations of what the orders were resulting in the ground and asking for clarification. Russian education contorts the facts to a pretzel trying to make all this sound like a some kind of natural disaster or something, but that is simply a lie. The Holodomor was a systematic, deliberately orchestrated genocide against the Ukrainian people.

(And just to get the oppression olympics part out of the way, I actually think that Hitler was worse than Stalin. But, being less bad than Hitler is a very low bar to clear, and you can be better than Hitler while still being a genocidal monster.)

No, sorry. You should probably stop reading Anne Applebaum. As historian J. Arch Getty notes here: "The overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars working in the new archives (including Courtois's [Editor of the Black Book of Communism] co-editor Werth) is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of Stalinist bungling and rigidity rather than some genocidal plan". And Getty is no sympathizer of Stalin, as should be evident from the article. The famine in Ukraine was a result of the USSR's industrialization drive. Stalin needed to trade commodities (especially grain) to the West in order to buy machinery. This is why his government set draconian grain collection quotas. It was not a plan to exterminate Ukrainians.

Aside from that, Getty's article is worth reading for its commentary on exactly what's happening right now in this thread. The flattening of all deaths as equivalent, making those who died from famine the same as those who were gunned downed or gassed in death camps in order to create some "objective" ranking of history's greatest monsters.

quote:

No sane person can rise to the defense of mass terror. The moral point has been clear for decades, although some may be troubled that Courtois relates the problem to ignoring the ideals of "Judeo-Christian civilization," which has no monopoly on morality. To frame our understanding of these events as numerical counts attributable to particular ideologies is even more problematic.

Courtois writes that he is not trying to present a "macabre comparative system for crunching numbers, some kind of grand total that doubles the horror." Yet there is a lot of arithmetic in his presentation, and one gets the impression that he is including every possible death just to run up the score. That impression troubled his distinguished co-authors; Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin sparked a scandal in Paris when they publicly disassociated themselves from Courtois's opinions about the scale of Communist terror, asserting that his introduction was more a diatribe than a balanced scholarly treatment. They felt that he was obsessed with attributing a body count of 100 million to communism, and like several other scholars, they rejected his equation of Soviet repression with Nazi genocide. Werth, a well-regarded French specialist on the Soviet Union whose sections in the Black Book on the Soviet Communists are sober and damning, told Le Monde, "Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union."

Stalin's camps were different from Hitler's. Tens of thousands of prisoners were released every year upon completion of their sentences. We now know that before World War II more inmates escaped annually from the Soviet camps than died there. Research shows that Stalin's camps and deportations, unlike their Nazi extermination counterparts, were planned components of the Soviet economy, designed to provide a stable slave-labor supply and to populate forbidding territories forcibly with involuntary settlers. Rations and medical care were substandard, but were often not dramatically better elsewhere in Stalin's Soviet Union and were not designed to hasten the inmates' deaths, although they certainly did so. Similarly, the overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars working in the new archives (including Courtois's co-editor Werth) is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of Stalinist bungling and rigidity rather than some genocidal plan.

Are deaths from a famine caused by the stupidity and incompetence of the regime (such deaths account for more than half of Courtois's 100 million) to be equated with the deliberate gassing of Jews? Courtois's arithmetic is too simple. A huge number of the fatalities attributed here to Communist regimes fall into a kind of catchall category called "excess deaths": premature demises, over and above the expected mortality rate of the population, that resulted directly or indirectly from government policy. Those executed, exiled to Siberia, or forced into gulag camps where nutrition and living conditions were poor could fall into this category. But so could many others, and "excess deaths" are not the same as intentional deaths.

Such arithmetical history sacrifices historical accuracy by lumping different events into the same category. Jerry Hough, of Duke University, has suggested just how ambiguous such calculations can be. Using the dramatically rising death rates in Russia in the 1990s, and with perhaps a bit of tongue in cheek, Hough calculated that 1.5 million "extra deaths" occurred in Russia in just the first four years of Yeltsin's tenure -- a total that, Hough points out, is "considerably larger than the number Stalin killed in the Great Purge" of the 1930s. The real problem with the books under review is a facile categorization in order to fix blame or make political points. It would be more polemical than accurate to equate famine deaths, victims of police terror, and deaths in Nazi gas chambers with the plight of Russians unable to buy food and health care today. One could place many of the century's deaths in any of several categories, according to the political point one wanted to make. Should we blame premature deaths in Russia today on the legacy of communism or on the failed policies of reformers? For how many deaths under Stalin should we blame communism? Stalin's personal paranoia? Backwardness or ignorance? We might do better to try to understand these grisly statistics in their contexts, rather than positing large polemical categories and then filling them up with bodies. Good history is about balanced interpretation and is usually more complicated than categorization or blame.

# ? Jan 8, 2022 15:05

Judakel: Jul 29, 2004; Can't post for 9 years!

Nenonen posted:

Stalin was a genocidal, egoistic, sadistic piece of poo poo. Millions of Soviet citizens died in the famines he caused in the thirties. He doesn't deserve to be excused just because he managed to fight off an even more genocidal, egoistic, sadistic piece of poo poo dictator coming for him. Death to all dictators.

Death, even, to a dictatorship of the proletariat?

# ? Jan 8, 2022 15:16

Truga: May 4, 2014; Lipstick Apathy

FishBulbia posted:

wrong wrong wront

this was the best tank of ww2

that's a p-47 and not an il-2 you dummy

# ? Jan 8, 2022 15:28

Somaen: Nov 19, 2007; by vyelkin

Good poo poo as always from American genocide explainers

The Bengal famines were very bad and a condemnation of capitalism, because it was the British following the market forces and shipping out grain to sell instead of feeding starving people. But Stalin selling grain and gold to build factories instead of stopping to feed starving people... Well who hasn't made an oopsie while building paradise on earth

# ? Jan 8, 2022 15:51

Truga: May 4, 2014; Lipstick Apathy

yes, a deliberate murder of tens of millions and a famine caused by gross mismanagement aren't the exact same thing, i'm glad you understand

# ? Jan 8, 2022 15:59

Somaen: Nov 19, 2007; by vyelkin

Do you think supporting the guy that killed millions of people deliberately( ignoring the famines) and outside of gas chambers makes you not a freak idiot just because it's less worse than what Hitler did?

# ? Jan 8, 2022 16:03

Red and Black: Sep 5, 2011

Somaen posted:

Do you think supporting the guy that killed millions of people deliberately( ignoring the famines) and outside of gas chambers makes you not a freak idiot just because it's less worse than what Hitler did?

Are you just jumping into this conversation having read nothing at all? Also you're the dude who unironically wants Europe to colonize Russia, why should we care who you think is a freak idiot?

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ? Jan 8, 2022 16:07

Truga: May 4, 2014; Lipstick Apathy

i thought liberalism was all about supporting the lesser evil

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ? Jan 8, 2022 16:07

Somaen: Nov 19, 2007; by vyelkin

Red and Black posted:

Are you just jumping into this conversation having read nothing at all? Also you're the dude who unironically wants Europe to colonize Russia, why should we care who you think is a freak idiot?

That's more engagement than your yanksplaining horseshot deserves. If the only thing on the topic of eastern Europe you can contribute is comparing Stalin's atrocities to Hitler, which you do by your 3 whole posts, at the very least reconsider where your life choices took you

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ? Jan 8, 2022 16:17

steinrokkan: Apr 2, 2011; Soiled Meat

Truga posted:

i thought liberalism was all about supporting the lesser evil

Hah, I know how to own all these morons who can't see why genocide is good and necessary - I'll call them libtards! That will show them

# ? Jan 8, 2022 16:22

Somaen: Nov 19, 2007; by vyelkin

Nothing gets American politics understanders hornier than two topics: talking about the United States and all its crimes against the world and the responsibility for endless suffering and also that Stalin? Not so bad

Edit: oh my god it's the loving idiot who was calling out "Navalny's hypothetical genocide against Muslims" in the China thread while minimising Xinjiang atrocities as not genocide because "it's not Auschwitz" on the same page. Of course.

Somaen fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Jan 8, 2022

# ? Jan 8, 2022 16:25

nurmie: Dec 8, 2019

imo you can be a leftie and not like stalin. you don't have to be a liberal to not like stalin

like it's even totally possible to be communist and not like stalin. no one really has to like stalin for any reason, really

and, it's even entirely possible to not like stalin and not like hitler and nazis too. maybe even not like hitler and nazis in a more visceral way. or the other way around. you don't have to pick a team though. you don't have to engage in "top ten dictators by death toll, number seven WILL surprise you" type of posting too - it's tedious and boring and obnoxious and a sure sign of yankposting

# ? Jan 8, 2022 16:56

Red and Black: Sep 5, 2011

Nobody is talking about liking or not liking Stalin. The question is can Hitler and Stalin be equated? Can the Holocaust be equated to the famine in Ukraine? It's just that Somaen's pea-brain fundamentally can't comprehend this discussion on a level beyond liking or not liking historical figures.

# ? Jan 8, 2022 17:03

nurmie: Dec 8, 2019

Red and Black posted:

Nobody is talking about liking or not liking Stalin. The question is can Hitler and Stalin be equated? Can the Holocaust be equated to the famine in Ukraine? It's just that Somaen's pea-brain fundamentally can't comprehend this discussion on a level beyond liking or not liking historical figures.

I mean, those are the kind of questions that essentially boil down to "WatchMojo's Top 10 Tyrants", just with extra steps and wrapped inside some Big Brain rhetoric. The right questions, IMO, are "What were the historic material conditions, the political factors and the decision-making processes that led to Holodomor happening?", "What were the historic material conditions, the political factors and the decision-making processes that led to the Holocaust happening?", "Are there tangible, material effects of both of these events that still persist even to this day? What are they? How we can mitigate/quell them?", "Can we learn something from either?" - and so on, and so forth.

Whether these events can be equated or not, and whether Hitler and Stalin can be equated are entirely rhetorical points - entirely divorced from anything tangible or material. Who loving cares lol

nurmie fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Jan 8, 2022

# ? Jan 8, 2022 17:26

Red and Black: Sep 5, 2011

I think those are good questions to ask.

I also agree that the �WatchMojo Top 10 dictators list� discourse is dumb, but to understand why it�s dumb we have to examine how different atrocities are flattened to be comparable with one another and why that process robs us of understanding the history

# ? Jan 8, 2022 17:36

Somaen: Nov 19, 2007; by vyelkin

Very serious atrocity researcher here and folks and what's happening in Xinjiang is not genocide because there are no gas chambers, the only metric of genocide

Now let me explain the Holodomor

# ? Jan 8, 2022 17:43

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

Doctor Malaver posted:

What I'm not sure is that people are equally aware that Stalin's regime killed by conservative accounts as many people as the Holocaust.

I'm not sure that's an apples to apples comparison. Hitler didn't "just" perpetrate the Holocaust, he also kicked off WW2 in Europe. That's like 50 million additional deaths, nearly all of them attributable to him. And it's not even like it was an "unfortunate consequence" of trying to conquer Europe, his ideology was pretty clear on war and death being cool. Plus he did it all in a little over a decade, while Stalin needed three. Even attributing every excess death under Stalin entirely to malice, the sheer number of deaths per year Hitler achieved still puts him in a category of his own.

# ? Jan 8, 2022 17:47

Dreissi: Feb 14, 2007; College Slice

Also fun to think about what Hitler would�ve done to the former USSR had he won. The genocide of people like slavs and other non-Germans to the Volga would have been unspeakable.

And I firmly believe he would�ve done it, or at least tried to do it.

# ? Jan 8, 2022 18:06

WAR CRIME GIGOLO: Oct 3, 2012; The Hague
tryna get me
for these glutes

Dreissi posted:

Also fun to think about what Hitler would�ve done to the former USSR had he won. The genocide of people like slavs and other non-Germans to the Volga would have been unspeakable.

And I firmly believe he would�ve done it, or at least tried to do it.

According to some of the threads posts it would have been less bad than Stalin's crimes.

Doesn't anyone loving remember that when Germany invaded the soviets, many Soviet citizens turned to them as liberators, and after a few months of the Germans running around in Ukraine they quickly realized they were better off with Stalin?

# ? Jan 8, 2022 18:08

Nenonen: Oct 22, 2009; Mulla on aina kolkyt donaa taskussa

Judakel posted:

Death, even, to a dictatorship of the proletariat?

A "dictatorship of the proletariat" where the proletars don't get to vote in free elections, form and join parties and unions etc. is just dictatorship.

# ? Jan 8, 2022 18:13

Judakel: Jul 29, 2004; Can't post for 9 years!

Nenonen posted:

A "dictatorship of the proletariat" where the proletars don't get to vote in free elections, form and join parties and unions etc. is just dictatorship.

Anything that is not a liberal democracy is a dictatorship.

# ? Jan 8, 2022 18:52

Doctor Malaver: May 23, 2007; Ce qui s'est pass� t'a rendu plus fort

A Buttery Pastry posted:

I'm not sure that's an apples to apples comparison. Hitler didn't "just" perpetrate the Holocaust, he also kicked off WW2 in Europe. That's like 50 million additional deaths, nearly all of them attributable to him. And it's not even like it was an "unfortunate consequence" of trying to conquer Europe, his ideology was pretty clear on war and death being cool. Plus he did it all in a little over a decade, while Stalin needed three. Even attributing every excess death under Stalin entirely to malice, the sheer number of deaths per year Hitler achieved still puts him in a category of his own.

That's a fair point. I was maybe overly affected by reading about stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazino_tragedy . :nms:

It's an operation where the Soviet state tortures and kills thousands random citizens, to achieve nothing. And it's not even a part of the Great Purge, just one of who knows how many similar operations whose documents didn't make it to the post-soviet era. There's a psychopathic cruelty in it that I think is uniquely Stalinist. There was no hate towards those people, that's just how the system worked.

# ? Jan 8, 2022 18:54

Randarkman: Jul 18, 2011

Doctor Malaver posted:

That's a fair point. I was maybe overly affected by reading about stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazino_tragedy .

Interestingly that's during the Kazakh famine and that's one of several exampels of peopel being forcibly resettled in Kazakhstan at a time when the republic was wracked by crushing famine, stuff like this and the mining operations connected to the KARLAG complex essentially just gave no priority to Kazakhs afflicted by famine, forcing them to attempt to flee (thousands were shot as they attempted to flee into China, and other Soviet republics did not want the responsiblity for a mass of starving refugees) or starve as they were ranked below even brutalized GULAG prisoners in importance at the height of the famine.

# ? Jan 8, 2022 19:01

steinrokkan: Apr 2, 2011; Soiled Meat

Judakel posted:

Anything that is not a liberal democracy is a dictatorship.

Dictatorships are good as long as I can use them to call others libs, which is the only reason to call about politics, apparently.

(also as long as I don't have to live under them)

# ? Jan 8, 2022 19:02

Judakel: Jul 29, 2004; Can't post for 9 years!

steinrokkan posted:

Dictatorships are good as long as I can use them to call others libs, which is the only reason to call about politics, apparently.

(also as long as I don't have to live under them)

I find it odd that people in China feel that they live in a more democratic society than the US and yet we're sitting here talking about how they live in an awful dictatorship.

# ? Jan 8, 2022 19:05

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# ? May 23, 2024 15:58

ThisIsJohnWayne: Feb 23, 2007; Ooo! Look at me! NO DON'T LOOK AT ME!

Red and Black posted:

I think those are good questions to ask.

I also agree that the “WatchMojo Top 10 dictators list” discourse is dumb, but to understand why it’s dumb we have to examine how different atrocities are flattened to be comparable with one another and why that process robs us of understanding the history

Excuse me, was that these questions?

quote:

Whether these events can be equated or not, and whether Hitler and Stalin can be equated

Why do you think that? On top of that, doesn't it also detract from sharing news about kind of acute current events in Kazakhstan?

# ? Jan 8, 2022 19:15

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Eastern Europe: Olivier's sphere of influence

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