I think you might be mixing that up with Himmler’s first speech in Posen:
“Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when 500 lie there or when 1,000 are lined up. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person - with exceptions due to human weaknesses - had made us tough. This is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned. […] We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who wanted to kill us.”
Personally, I think they were both horrible fucking people. Adolf was a bit kookier, Stalin was more rational - who cares. They both sucked mightily.
This depends on how we define “evil”. Are we talking about evil as personal moral deformity, or are we talking about evil as damage to society? I think the person who wants to kill a thousand people but never commits an actual murder is the worse of the two if we’re talking about, say, his chances of getting into heaven. But since we humans can’t read minds, and do have the responsibility to protect our community, it makes sense for us to treat the murderer of ten as the worse person as far as civil law goes.
Stalin has a mixed legacy in Russia today whereas Hitler is almost universally reviled in Germany. I think that says something important but I’m not quite sure what.
By this rule every single culture is evil and every single human being is evil.
The fact is “evil” is what others do. We do the same things and they are not evil because we are doing them. And by “we” I mean whatever group each one belongs to.
The Japanese are evil to the Chinese because of what they did to them. But the Japanese do not think of themselves as evil, rather as patriots.
Every single group, culture and country, specially empire, has done huge amounts of evil. We just don’t call it evil when we’re the ones doing it.
Take Hitler. Do you think he did all that evil by himself? Hitler was immensely popular. Millions of little, lovable old German grannies loved him. And if he had to do some unpleasant things for the greatness of Germany then so be it and let’s not get too involved in the details.
The notion that Hitler was evil and responsible for everything is silly. So, is it that the German people as a whole were evil? Yes, they were racist. So was American and British culture. The Germans took it further but can anyone say for certain Americans would not have taken it that far under some conditions? Think of the Japanese internment camps.
Imperialism is evil by its very nature and yet we do not think of the UK or France or the USA as evil. But they have done the same kind of evil. They went to poorer, weaker, countries and killed and sowed misery in whatever measure was necessary to preserve their interests and sometimes a whole lot more.
The British went around the world killing people so the British could have a better life and damn the natives . Same with the French in Algeria.
The USA is founded on the evil of slavery and the evil done to native Americans. Not content with that America went to Asia and Latin America and did a lot more “evil”. It invaded and killed as necessary so American business interests could exploit whatever could be exploited.
The American people as a whole fully support all this. They want cheap oil and cheap raw materials and if this means some far away natives need to die then so be it.
Humans have a huge capacity to rationalize whatever they want. The other guys do evil and are evil. We are patriots who just want to defend our way of life. And whatever harm we need to do unto others we shield ourselves and rationalize it. we interpose our government, our brave warriors who defend our freedoms… so we do not have to get personally involved. Then we minimize what our side does and exagerate the evil of the other side.
Western powers went to Asia in the 19th century and committed all sorts of atrocities. Killed Chinese because they wouldn’t buy opium. Yeah, we don’t talk about that, we’d rather talk about Hitler or Stalin.
Of course, if you ask some people at the other side of the world then things are the mirror image: America is the Great Satan, the great evil. Americans are baffled by this.
American policies today result in great misery for millions of people. Do Americans care? No, they don’t. They support such policies. The American people, are they evil? Whatever they are they are the same as the Germans, the Japanese, the Russians, the Serbs, the French, the Spanish and all other peoples who have existed under the sun. under the right circumstances we would all support evil unto others. All of us.
Hitler made his actions very personal with respect to identifying and focusing public hate on groups he wanted eliminated. The deaths due to his policies were numerically a fraction of Stalin’s and Mao’s but their genocide was at a slight remove and targeted political affiliations more than just racial or ethnic groups (although these obviously converged in many cases). Hitler’s visceral targeted hate just feels more evil in context.
Different cultures have dealt differently (or have been imposed different ways). Germany has totally disowned Hitler, probably in great part because of Nuremberg and the occupation.
Stalin on the other hand did not lose the war and can still be seen as the savior of the Nation.
In Japan they have also not quite disowned what they did which was pretty bad by any standard.
In China Mao Zedong is still the “founding father” even though his policies were terrible and the government today is doing the total opposite but Mao is a hero to be kept as such and to be venerated.
It is mostly a matter of how later governments have seen fit to treat the historical figure. It is extremely easy to make someone a hero or a villain.
I read the very interesting book Explaining Hitler a while back, and a few things stuck with me:
(1) In addition to all the really big-name evil stuff that came later, Hitler was incredibly ruthless and violent during his rise to political power. Reporters or politicians who opposed the Nazis risked getting the crap beat out of them. It’s not like he was normal in most ways except for hating a few specific groups for some reason
(2) There’s at least some scholarly dispute as to whether Hitler really honestly hated Jews, or whether he was just cynical and evil enough to realize that hated of Jews was something he could harness which would help him rise to power. I think the latter is clearly FAR more “evil” by any usual definition of the term. (Some people apparently think that he started out just pretending to be anti-semitic, and then eventually actually became anti-semitic due to repetition, kind of talking himself into it.)
Imagine Hitler and Stalin living in the US today, where it’s (fortunately) very unlikely they could seize control of the country. I see Stalin ending up as the CEO of Goldman Sachs, while I think Hitler would more likely end up as David Koresh.
No, not really. Japanese society even at its most authoritarian still tended to be very corporatist. Decisions were generally by committee, even if it was of one faction vs. another.