I could not find the article and Polish kept flashing into my mind. I would say your correct on that is the incident, I never was told about in school.
I like your system.
Based on the arguments so far, I believe we can safely say that the Nazis were very, extremely evil (as was Stalin, etc.). But that’s sort of the point - while they might be a good standard for the ultimate evil, or at least the closest we ever need to come, it’s problematic to use the Nazi example so liberally. As a clear example, comparing Islamic fundamentalism (and, in enough people’s minds, Islam) to Axis fascism is likely to be counterproductive. Whatever the parallels, surely there are important differences to keep in mind? [/ world affairs hijack]
Getting back to the OP, I’m about as anti-Nazi as anyone, but yeah, I’m getting kind of bored with it. Given a choice for referring to a mass murderer I’ll always choose either Stalin or Mao to make my point.
There you go, making me laugh.
To be frank, I do think that we’ve accidently whitewashed a lot of horriffic (sp?) events by focusing so much on the nazis. And, as I think someone noted, there is valuable nuance in motivations & whatnot. Furthermore, I do tend to see other crimes as possibly being worse that what the nazis did: for example, Stalin’s attempt to horribly oppress all of humanity seems arguably on par with trying to get rid of a small minority. And the Khmer Rouge notion that creating an ideal society meant killing everybody old enough to remember the old ways certainly strikes me as being, to at least some degree, insanely fucking evil.
These nuances certainly would add depth to the name calling and mud slinging…
Candidate X: “My opponent is a bloody nazi! Making war against immigrants!”
Candidate Y: “Well my opponent is a bloody Stalinist, who wants to make war against all citizens!”
Candidate Z: “Oh, yeah? My opponent wants to bring back the Spanish Inquisition!”
Candidates X & Y: ::in unison:: “That joke has been done in this thread already, you knob!”
Candidate Z: ::stroking his mustache:: “Curses! Foiled again.”
Ah, so in addition to all the other evil that the Nazis have perpetrated, they’ve also stolen attention from the other evil in the world.
Those damn Nazis!
the problem is the natzis were people that believed what their government said and followed the orders given. What makes anyone secure that it can not happen again.The actions and stories given were horrible ,yet they did it. sleep well
I think that’s the key. Stalin killed a lot more people, but he was the ruler of Russia. He had a lot more people available to kill. Hell, you don’t even have to work at it that hard to be a mass murderer in Russia. You can get bodycounts that rival most other dictators just by being inattentive. Germany, on the other hand, is not all that large. To kill on the scale that Hitler did, with such a relatively small population base, takes some serious dedication to evil-doing.
Germany was the most populous Country in Europe in the 1930’s. I do not think your wag is all that valid.
The Soviet Union Census of 1939 showed a figure of approximately 162 million.
Following the annexation of Austria in 1938 and the Sudetenland (part of Czechoslovakia) in 1939, German territory and population encompassed 586,126 square kilometers and 79.7 million people, according to the 1939 census. The census found that women still outnumbered men (40.4 million to 38.7 million), despite a leveling trend in the interwar period.
So the USSR was roughly twice as populous, but in short order Germany also controlled Poland and France.
Jim
I previously stated that I think Bush’s cry of Weapons of Mass Destruction sounds a lot like the trick played on the German citizens by the German leadership to start WW II. I don’t wish to take this into a debate. I’m pointing out that nothing prevents a government from tricking it’s citizens into starting a war. The chance lessens when you know the news is by a repuatable organization that will check the facts and report what they find with out government influencing them. I can’t say that we have a news agency in the US that I would credit with that much integrety to only report after the facts are in, and power to resist a government gag order.
I think it’s because they are well known and undisputed evil.
Not Well known:
The Khmer Rouge. They somehow leave me with a worse taste in my mouth than the Nazis. I think it’s because if you lived in nazi Germany, you were pretty much save, unless you were a Jew or a homosexual or so on. In Cambodia, I would probably be dead. But many people won’t know what I’m talking about if I say Khmer Rouge.
In a more extreme example, the Assyrian king Ashur-nasir-pal II, completely wiped out the population of any city he fought and conquered. Pretty damn evil, but of course totally unknown.
Not undisputed:
Here in Denmark we have a lot of radical socialists, some of whom will defend even Stalin.
Again, in a more extreme example, we have the OT God. I would say we could easily use him as the standard of evil instead of the nazis. But I think there are people who would disagree with me.
That’s about the best damn argument for preemptive war ever…
(Is it ok to link to copyrightet youtube videos here?)
This Daily Show clip is quite relevant:
link
Er, the Gulag Archipelago ring any bells?
The Nazis get the prize as most evil 'cause they were a) stylishly evil, b) good at documenting their own deeds, and c) were held accountable for their crimes. Contrast to the Communists of the Soviet Union or the PRC who got away with more murders by isolation and apologism on the part of earnest, dedicated, and often articulate left-leaning intellectuals. Contrast that with Nazi supporters, who embraced blatant nationalism and racism instead of some nominally eglatarian notion about the plight of the working man, et cetera. (The Khmer Rouge and the Hutus get away without earning title of Most Evil by virtue of committing their particular follies in remote locales and against non-white, funny speaking tribal groups.)
Before Hitler, it was Napoleon (at least as far as Europe was concerned) as the measure of unspeakable evil. But as Hannah Arendt adroitly observed (her apologism for the unrepentant Nazism of Martin Heidegger aside), systematic “evil” activities are actually quite banal. It’s not as if any but the most depraved members of the SS were pitchforking babies and making lamps out of human skin day in and day out; mostly, it was just the assembly-line like business of making mass murder as efficient as possible and become inured, even amused, by the pleas for commutation. The truly frightening thing about the Holocaust is how easy it was…and that this wasn’t due to any intrinsic aspect of German society or culture. The same could–and often enough has–happened anywhere, given the right conditions.
And yeah, comparing someone who opposes socialized medicine or educational vouchers to genocidists (of any affiliation) is hyperbolic and absurd. But that’s politics in a nutshell, in’it?
Stranger
I would like to point out that The Gulag Archipelago doesn’t really count as Soviet documentation.
I believe that your quoted poster is referring to the archive material contained in the various former ministries of the Soviet Union, some of which has been made public since the collapse of said Union.
In just the last week or so, I saw a documentary about the SS, and it argued that the emotional toll taken on the SS members themselves was a big reason to industrialize the killing, thus separating the killers from the victims a little bit more. IIRC, there were high rates of “illness” before the killing and high rates of suicides after the killings, so much so that using more impersonal methods became a means to reduce the problems.
It was interesting to hear a couple former SS fellas talk about their experiences.
Damn you, Hitler! I swear, that guy is so evil, he’s like some sort of nazi!
Wasn’t there a Tom Clancy novel where the villians were changed from terrorists to Nazis?
Once the truth about Soviet crime became undeniable, only the most self-deluded Western Communists still supported them. I vote for the systematization and idealism as the reason why Nazis are the standard of evil, although as others have made clear in this thread, the carrying out was ultimately banal so I still in my mind give the prize to Stalin for his more completely totalitarian framework and higher bodycount.
I think the reason the Nazis still reign supreme in the pantheon of evil is that they were Western Europeans, with therefore a more ominous message for us all.
Ethnocentrism and racism can dismiss other despotic, murderous regimes as simply being endimic to the cultures in which they sprang up. Indeed, it is my impression that this was the going logic before the 1930s.
The Nazis gave the lie to that. Given that Germany and Austria, the two nations that took to Nazism most devotedly, were undisputed cultural leaders not a mere few decades before, it makes their descent into barbarism that much more unthinkable and worrisome.
That the region of the earth that gave us Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, the Viennese waltz, Klimt, Rilke, Godel, Schrodinger, Mendel, Freud, Goethe, Hegel, the automobile and pharmaceuticals could so quickly descend into savagery simply reminds us that we are always a stone’s throw away from it, no matter where we live.
Great point, sometimes it is easy to forget that German was the “Most Common Language of Science” before WWII. I never really thought about the way you brought up, but it fits so well.
Jim
By those standards, the Japanese Army of WWII is the clear winnah. The Rape of Nanking was all about individual soldiers bayoneting women and children – it was conceived of by the Japanese leadership as a toughening exercise for the troops. All the troops participated. I’m helping a relative of mine publish his memoirs of his time as a Japanese POW. He was on the Bataan death march. He will always have problems with the Japanese. Comes from seeing his buddies strung up and beaten to death with baseball bats regularly for no reason in particular. The Japanese in WWII were fucking evil scum, no two ways about it.