Probably not; he had better technology, and there were simply fewer people to kill per square mile back then. If he was forced to operate under the same constraints as the people of the past, I doubt he’d be more than middling in terms of killing efficiency. Among other things because they typically didn’t bother with the whole time wasting rigmarole of labor/extermination camps and just killed entire populations on the spot. Hitler didn’t kill everyone in France after all; I suspect the Mongols would have considered him an amateur at slaughter.
A big reason he is being singled out is he was our (our = most OECD nations) political enemy, so anything that can demonize our political enemy is going to get endless airtime.
I remember in the buildup to the second war in Iraq, in the months proceeding that the history channel ran endless documentaries about Saddam’s torture chambers, the sons of Saddam, etc. Basically endless stories about how evil Saddam was because he was our political enemy and we were supposed to hate him. But no stories about the evil in nations like Syria, or the congo, or Myanmar.
Stalin, who was our ally, was more evil than Hitler IMO. But his crimes almost never get any airtime.
Also Hitler lost the war, so all his crimes came to light. The Nazis tried to cover up the holocaust, and had they won the war maybe they would’ve been able to. But they lost the war and it was used as a tool to turn people against the Nazis.
So I’d say most of it is political. And the fact that the Nazis lost the war and couldn’t cover up their crimes didn’t help.
Either way, according to Steven Pinker violence levels are declining over time.
USA
Genocide: Native Americans (the Native American Genocide exceeds that of the Holocaust)
Racism: Slavery until 1865, last racist federal laws eliminated in 19–?, Jim Crow laws in effect during WWII and for 20 years after.
Great Britain
Genocide: Lots. Ruling 2/3:s of the world aint easy.
Racist laws: Slavery until 1827 (in the West Indies), last racist law eliminated in the 19:th or 20:th century?
Swedens government institute for race biology was active well into the 50’s.
The Jewish genocide was 6 million people. More people than that have been killed in genocides after the holocaust. The last genocide that the United States supported ended in 1999, in East Timor.
Not quite. I talked about instantaneous communications, which would include the telegraph. Your question was about both scale and time frame. If you want to reliably coordinate lots of people over vast distances to do something quickly, I believe instantaneous communications has to be there. Or you could have subordinates who are very good at acting in a coordinated way with delayed communications.
Perhaps some military history buff will be able to provide examples of very many large units acting in a very coordinated manner with delayed communications. Still doesn’t seem like it could reliably pulled off.
Now, if you take the time frame element out of it and only care about the scale, why not? It would just take more time and be less efficient. All you need is a big enough army that kills everyone it encounters.
I’d guess the difficult part is trying to genocide somebody while looking otherwise civilized, in part by making everything look official and temporary, i,e, Jews aren’t being murdered, they’re being temporarily “evacuated” and here is all the paperwork with every ‘i’ dotted and every ‘t’ crossed to prove it. In the case of a Rwanda, where nobody gives a fuck, you can get a lot of killing done in a short time.
Wrong thread.
The Stanford Prison Experiment wasn’t a study. It was a performance art piece, at best. Even if you believe everything its author claimed (and there’s plenty of reason not to), it met zero scientific standards for ethics, peer review, reproducibility, etc.
From your link:
Seems like the real world has reproduced his findings repeatedly.
Can you give an example of large group disobedience that invalidates the microcosm he artificially produced?
I can’ think of any any large group of citizens that did not conform to a leader’s cruelty toward undesirables? Rwanda? Japan? USA? Israel? Nope.
What the OP seems to be getting at is this. The genocide by the Germans was so bad because they SHOULD’VE known better.
On the face of this, the statement is somewhat offensive to people but that is what is was.
The Germans were a highly developed people. They were highly educated, “Christianized” and had advanced social skills.
It’s kind of like when Marcie Rhodes of “Married With Children” yelled at her husband Steve for giving Al Bundy a loan. Marcie says “And I can’t blame Al for this mess. After all if you give a chimp a gun you don’t blame the chimp if it shoots someone.”
You see the point was the Germans “should’ve known better” than to participate in this type of thing.
Further along this point is the real scary part. If the Germans, who were a highly developed and civilized society could do this, then is anyone safe? Could it happen to anyone?
But humans despite their “civilization” aren’t always so civil. Why do people riot? Because someone who would NEVER think of doing something alone would do it in a group.
If you read about Leopold and Loeb or Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, you find two CLASSIC examples of murderers who, almost certainly, would never have killed anyone on their own. But for some reason their personalities were such that when partnered with the right person, turned them into killers.
There is the shortness of it all. Hitler is still a recent memory in the way there are people alive that remember him.
And finally Hitler was a loser. He lost. On the face of it Stalin was equal to Hitler in his brutality but he WON. OK millions of lives were lost but in the end it was worth it 'cause Stalin WON.
That’s how people look at it anyway
Last point first, no one is claiming - at least in this thread - that the US, Great Britain, or virtually any other Western country has not been officially or unofficially racist in its recent past. So, what exactly is your point regarding the racism?
As for the genocide against Native Americans, this is much different than the Holocaust because it was not centrally planned and instead happened somewhat gradually over the course of a few hundred years. White settlers quickly came into conflict with Native Americans in the 1600s and, through warfare and unequal treaties, pushed the Native Americans farther west. Though the settlers did use biological warfare by exploiting the Native Americans’ lack of resistance to smallpox and other European diseases, it is difficult to say that the goal was wiping out all Native Americans anywhere and everywhere on the continent. Even when the US had that power, during the time of the Trail of Tears and after, it instead appears that the US goal was to control them and wipe out their culture, not their race, by “civilizing” them. Otherwise, the US wouldn’t have bothered to enter even unequal treaties with numerous tribes and instead would’ve launched a war of annihilation.
Even the treatment of the aborigines in Australia, which did become a war of extermination in a few instances such as in Tasmania where there were only a few thousand aboriginals at the start of colonization, resembles the Native American example more than the Holocaust.
What seems to be overlooked, however, is that the technology that enabled the gas chambers, ovens, and other instruments of death in the concentration camps was only good for the Jews and other victims who weren’t close to the front lines. Another significant part of the Holocaust was the Einsatzgruppen and other death squads that operated in Soviet-occupied territory, and they just used bullets to kill their victims.
Actually, he was a good scene painter but was rejected by an arts school. Had he been accepted, the world may have been a different place.
I think Ludovic got it in one. Hitler would have been a monster in any time period.
Nope, that is not what I am getting at. I’m quite direct about what I am getting at: I think we’re judging Hitler in a fantasy context, where he is in a league of his own. When in fact, he wasn’t at all that extraordinary in his real context.
While there might be larger genocides, this one also occurred in the context of whats estimated to be the ‘deadliest conflict in history’ according to Wiki, and he is seen as the primary instigator for it. The Russians certainly viewed their experience as a closer to a genocide attempt rather than simply an invasion, so we are talking a few more than 6 million as well.
The Mongols seem to come next closest as far as European memory goes and are still remembered almost a thousand years later - they werent just viewed as ‘more of the same’. And even they took more like a century to manage 3/4 or so of what was done in 5 years or so.
As stated there is also peoples bafflement at how a ‘civilised’ modern nation could end up doing this, particularly so soon after WW1 where everyone had seen how lethal modern warfare had become, which is why experiments like the Stanford experiment, Milgram effect, bystander effect etc became so famous as attempts to explain how it might have happened.
Then there is of course the issue of modern media - reading ‘30 million’ or whatever doesn’t have the same mental impact of seeing photos of boxes full of hair or shoes, crematoria etc.
Heres hoping that a thousand years from now Hitler and the Mongols will be seen as fairly similar in their historical context, rather than nothing to what came next.
Otara
Because he did it to “us”. Many members of our societies are related to or have met someone who was a victim of the Holocaust or Nazi oppression. It also doesn’t hurt that the worse the Nazis were, the better we are for defeating them.
People outside of the West don’t care about Hitler nearly so much.
That is a good question.
It has nothing to do with killing jews, or killing white people, the number of people Hitler killed, nor the time period.
Stalin was of the same time period, Stalin killed more people, Stalin killed more white people, Stalin killed more Europeans, and Stalin killed lots and lots of jews.
While we pretend to dislike Hitler, at the same time we see photos of Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt sitting at the same table eating, drinking, and laughing together.
The only real reason why Hitler was given bad press is because Hitler lost.
Our history books would be a lot nicer to Hitler if we had allied with Hitler against Stalin in WW2
Indeed. As an adolescent, the wife’s Thai nephew worshipped the man and all Nazis, solely because of the snappy uniforms. Really. (He’s in his 20s now; I hope he outgrew this, but I tend to avoid him.) Posters of Hitler were being sold in a Bangkok department store 20 years ago, and when one local American journalist asked why, the clerk responded: “Because he was a very funny man.” The reporter could only assume Hitler was being mistaken for Charlie Chaplin.
The Stanford Prison Experiment has never been repeated.
How about the Milgram Experiment, then? People tend to acquiesce when people in authority tell them to do inhumane things.
“Stalin was of the same time period, Stalin killed more people, Stalin killed more white people, Stalin killed more Europeans, and Stalin killed lots and lots of jews.”
But didnt attempt to ‘take over the world’.
I certainly would agree that Stalin’s atrocities were downplayed because he was an ally, but triggering World War 2 for Hitler wins in that regard.
The second highest death count from war on Wiki after WW2 was Chinese and was from an internal rebellion, and for similar reasons wont be of much note outside of China. ‘World conquerors’ who meet with some success tend to be remembered more, for obvious reasons.
Otara
I remember that my young son went to the US for a short holiday accompanying a friend of mine as a playmate for his child. He required a US visa for his passport and when I was filling out the application I was surprised to find a declaration that the applicant hadn’t been involved in any war crimes or genocide conducted by the Nazi government of Germany. No reference was made to any other any other regime at all.