shrugs Unless you’re Jewish.
Try “Ordinary Men”. The book is exactly as it sounds - ordinary folk who end up contributing to the most horrendous of crimes.
what book should I read if I want to read graphic descriptions of atrocities
The Soviets might kill adult Jews but they would take the children and put them into orphanages. The idea was that they’d be raised by the state and they’d grow up as good Soviet Communists not Jews. cite cite
Evil? Certainly. But at least the children were not killed for having some assumed genetic liability.
You know how you know some guy, a mechanic, your barber, the guy you went to high school with? He says crazy things about Jews, Blacks, Cree Indians or whoever? OK, so you think he is just trying to get a rise out of you, just trolling.
Some of them are not. Their point of view is so strange that you cannot even imagine that is honestly held. My ancestors honestly thought it was OK to buy and sell people because of the color of their skin. They really thought Black people were… whatever.
We now make economic or social justifications for people who tormented Blacks. We figure they did it for reasons we can understand.
The truth for at least some of these people is that they really believe what they say. They are not joking, looking for an argument or just letting off steam.
Hitler was one of these people and somehow he gained the power to do something about it.
Nah, I didn’t say it was the same thing. I’m just adding that being Jewish was a liability in itself. (:
They did that sometimes. Other times they intentionally starved to death populations of millions, including women and children, also in the name of class warfare. See the aforementioned Bloodlands for cites. (Though it is both an incredibly depressing book and an incredibly poorly written one so tread into it with care…)
FWIW, Americans did the same with Native Americans in some parts of the country, either killing the tribe and sending the kids to Christian orphanages to raise them “right” or plain kidnapping kids.
I offer his only as a way to say the Soviets weren’t uniquely evil in that regards. Men are men wherever they come from, and men is bastards.
Shrug. The communists thought that they had discovered a scientific theory which enabled them to create a utopian society. You can call this “economic” if you like, but it went far beyond the traditional concerns of economics and into anthropology/sociology. It is true that they did not adopt the scientific racism of the Nazis, but their victims could be forgiven for not noticing such nice distinctions … and Stalin absolutely did target specific ethnicities for elimination. For example, Ukranians were denounced as “kulaks” and forcibly starved by the millions in order to break them as an ethnic nationalism (no real distinction between “kulak” and "non-kulak"Ukranian peasantry was made). While Stalin also killed many ethnically Russian “kulaks”, the main weight of his oppression was clearly targeted.
This was not the end of his ethnic cleansings - he also targeted ethnic Poles prior to WW2, and Crimean Tatars (and many others) during trhat conflict.
Stalin had no problems killing whole peoples, down to the last grandchild - for example, the great Ukranian famine was most indiscriminate and children were less likely to survive than adults.
This is sort of like someone denouncing Jews as “moneylenders” and then killing them all - then claiming the killer was not targeting Jews, but only moneylenders. The Marxist “class target” was the thinnest of veneers over pure empire-building ethnic cleansing.
I’d say this for Stalin though - brutal and evil as he was, at least his murders had some sort of ostensible point: Ukrainians were, as a nationality, unhappy with Soviet rule, and were prone to attempt to shake it off; also, stealing all of their food, and selling it, did create a surplus for the Soviets to invest in industry. Hitler’s killings often had no point at all.
Also, Stalin did not of course wholly eliminate the peoples he was targeting - he was satisfied if they were broken.
The Hitler that can be described is not the true Hitler.
Lao Tze is gonna whup your ass for that.
Edit: actually, through non-action, he’ll simply allow your ass to whup itself.
“A leader is best when the people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we solved the Jewish Problem ourselves.”
– from Mein Tao
I know that, (misremembering more than not) that part of Hitler’s propaganda against the Jews was to reinforce the humiliation of signing the armistice (my mistake on terms) in such a place as a railroad car. Hell, when the pastor told the wounded at Pasewalk about the impending defeat, he says he went blind.
Calling it the November Crime, I could swear he made the rail car much worse than a converted one. I know the reality of it, just curious about how it was propagandized.
I don’t understand Hitler either, my German is crap, and when he goes all gutteral and starts waving his arm about, then for me its goodbye Nuremburg rally.
(I’ve always wondered,why did he only get all "foregn "with"just the one arm ?
was he scared to commit himself?
Oh yes I’m a fanatical Nazi but I’ve got my feminine side aswell, we’ll never know now dammit)
I second this nomination.
I never could believe that everything (the war, the holocaust) can be laid at Hitler’s feet. It’s unfathomable that 60 million people can be “forced” by one man into doing things they don’t want to do.
This seem to me somehow as a good analogy for my outsider view of the difference between conservatives and liberals on some levels.
Hitler: Nobody does. I’m das wind, baby.
While you have a point there–a good point and, yes, the times were ready and right for a Hitler–that doesn’t mean that a Hitler was inevitable. Those things would never have occurred under Strasser, or even Goering or Rohm or Drexler.
Wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
**I don’t understand Hitler
**
You can’t process Hitler with a normal brain. It’s called siegen. Boom.