Horray, we are the point of "actually, a lot of people were as bad as Hitler".
No, you dickwads. The man murdered 11 million people in 12 years outside of combat action, most of them within the last 5 years of his terror. Thats not counting any of the victims of the war itself: You know, 900.00 People starving in Leningrad alone and so forth. Thats why he is vilified.
Dont know why this reflex to downplay his atrocities is always there.
Oh and i have plenty of hate for the other fucks on that list. And Stalin. And Mao. And Pol Pot. And Idi Amin. And Netanyahu. And Kissinger. Because some people actually managed to dislike genocide as a concept and not just when it hits the people who look like them.
That is absolutely true. It's also amazing how many people are even unaware of their horrific crimes.
I’m not sure why people are struggling with this one. The reason Hitler is at the top of the evil ruler foodchain is because of his ideology and specific intent.
He wasn’t some common racist who thought his own race was superior and others were inferior. He specifically believed that Jews (as well as Roma people, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities and mental illnesses) were vermin. Worse than insects. He openly made it his goal the complete annihilation of all these peoples who he hated with all the virulent, vitriolic, frothing-at-the-mouth passion he could possibly muster. He engineered the industrial killing of over 11 million people.
There is no other person more deserving of the label “enemy of humanity” than Hitler. There is absolutely nothing for which any decent person can relate to him, never mind understand him.
You forgot "Slavs" who he saw as slightly better than vermin iirc.
I can understand that he was fucking nuts.
The saddest part is what Hitler thought/did was commonplace throughout human history. People have been genociding and exterminating people they deem lesser since the beginning.
He's only seen as this abhorrent in modern times.
hitler did to europe what europe had done to the rest of the world for centuries
Hitler did to Europe's poor and downtrodden what Europe's rich and priveleged had done for centuries.
Lest I go down a reading rabbit hole I don't have time for today, what's the TLDR on churchills evils? my history education was lackluster
During WW2, the Bengal region of India was suffering from a poor harvest. Despite having reserves, the British did not release those thinking they may be needed for the war (they were not).
The British also did not acknowledge any famine and provided no relief.
The resulting famine killed somewhere between 800k to 3.8m (according to Wikipedia).
The difference being that one was an act of cruel apathy, their lives were valued less than the war effort (one could even argue that the British hoped to ultimately save lives), while the other actively reveled in and advanced the industrialised mass murder of entire peoples.
Please, do not compare these two. One is cruel and wrong, the other is unfathomable evil.
Edit: King Leopold is for some reason still respected in some places I am told, which is disgusting. But I repeat, one was done to make a profit (at the cost of inconceivable suffering) while the other wasn't even done for profit - suffering WAS the goal.
That's a bit less than half of the people "exterminated" (murdered) in the holocaust according to common estimates. The holocaust also does not include all of the evils committed. It doesn't include civilian slavs dragged out of their home and shot into mass graves, without ever making it to a camp for instance. I understand that there's other things Churchill did, but I think it's hard to do the level of damage hitler did without the belief that the damage was good for its own sake. I think Churchill did some bad stuff of course, but there are differences in magnitude and intent. If Churchill had meant to do the damage hitler had meant to, we'd probably have seen tens of millions of dead Indian people.
The actual reason is the industrial killing. Only the nazis searched for the cheapest and most efficient way to kill as many people as possible
I kinda feel like the rationing of bullets and redemption exclusively for severed human hands in would count as trying to find greatest efficiency.
In reference to King Leopold's reign in the Congo. It was.... Unbelievably brutal and quite modern in their pursuit of "efficiency".
I think physically the most efficient would just be to basically strangle people to death. It's really not physically that demanding to strangle someone to death.
However, it is extremely demanding mentally. Which is why the "most efficient" is usually the "most detached" one.
It should be a tip to these people that they disgust themselves while doing what they claim to think is right. But it fucking isn't. And I don't know why.
I think you’re right. It also wouldn’t be unfair to say that, if you’re in a european/western world country that is likely going to be mostly white and also happens to have taken a big part in WW2, that of course it will be a big part of your history. For the US, it’s our history in Europe, but we don’t seem to claim or learn much about European history elsewhere, like Leopold or Churchill’s Bengal Famine.
I think many people are familiar with at least a few mass killers. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, maybe the Red Terror, Christopher Columbus, you could even count Khan as one of the biggest, but we might view that as a bloody past and the result of Khan’s conquest of other peoples rather than a internal conflict killing millions of a specific group. Columbus’ mass murder was partly out of ignorance when the European diseases spread in the New World, but Europeans didn’t have too much of a problem with killing natives otherwise.
Hitler, OTOH, as you said, turned mass murder into a pointless, cold, indiscriminate killing machine in a way that no other ruler did. People were warehoused until fed to the machine. The Soviets/Russians and Pol Pot (influenced heavily by Stalin) are a pretty close second, they rounded up people and shipped them off to gulags or prisons and worked them to death if they weren’t just outright killed.
So many white people are thinking this is somehow praising Hitler for stating "Murdering millions is bad when it happens to anyone or is done by anyone, we don't see it talked about because it wasn't to Europeans."
Fuckin' bizarre. Murder is bad. When European powers did it to Africa, no one remembers who did it because everyone did it. We know Hitler because he used the same imperialist justification on Europeans. "I will improve your lives and civilize you the German way."
If Hitler did it to Africa, no one would have complained or had a leg to stand on without being hypocritical. Italy, France, England, Portugal, Denmark, all did the same heinous acts to who was justified towards.
Good time to remind everyone that the Nazis were inspired by Jim Crow laws and the poor treatment of African Americans that was prevalent for the time, especially in the southern US.
And that the British were one of the first to run national concentration camps https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War_concentration_camps
Leopold was rightfully viewed as a monster by his racist contemporaries. I don't think anybody sane is lionizing that guy.
Edit: They do and did lionize Henry Morton Stanley who helped set up Leopold's death machine. And his contemporaries made him persona non grata over it as well, even though history somewhat gave him a pass and made movies about him.
And he isn’t mainstream taboo in the rest of the world because he only killed Europeans. What’s your point? People cosplay as Nazi for shits and giggles in places where the Nazi had no impact at all. But go cosplay as emperor Hirohito in China while waving the Japanese Naval flag and see how well you’d be treated. While nobody outside of the Asian pacific would give a damn or even know who he is.
I just walk around with a unit 731 patch when I'm in the Asian pacific...
No, because the Nazis are the biggest losers in History.
Their claim that their people and army were superior, while not even being able to win a single war made them so.
I guess Mao and Pol Pot aren't mainstream?
In my experience (American) people might know the name Pol Pot but not know anything about him. And I feel like my experience is skewed because I had a high school teacher who was a refugee who fled the Khmer Rouge.
Most just know such Cold War figures as 'enemy' but not really much in regards to how or why.
Comparatively the linking of Hitler and the Nazis to the Holocaust is unparalleled in political discourse.
I'll probably (and rightly) get downvoted for asking this but was Churchill's crime. Does it have to do with how he treated Ireland?
Instituted policies that led to mass famine / genocide in South Asia.
No, it's because Hitler pretty much conquered Europe. None of the other people managed to do that.
Napoleon is not taboo last time I checked
Napoleon was from a time when monarchies were still the mainstream. Hitler is post 1848 revolutions and series of reforms that gradually changed perceptions and general education of the populace.
Though Napoleon's wars caused a large amount of destruction and received appropriate criticism, it was still considered pretty much the norm at that time of imperial dominance.
Hitler on the other hand acted when democracy and civil rights were heading towards full growth. The people's thoughts and general knowledge were very different from Napoleon's era.
As a side note, France before and during Napoleon lost most of its foreign colonies. So his wars in large majority had European victims. Yet that wasn't enough to make him taboo, which means having European victims isn't the main issue that caused Hitler to be taboo.
Yes, this is why we all adore the Japanese Empire. /s
It's fucking ridiculous that we're trying to "EVERYONE ELSE WAS JUST AS BAD" Hitler now.
"I literally see no difference between the Nazis and the anti-Nazis" - words of the fucking deranged.
I agree with the other commenters that Hitler was extra, super "special" evil. But Black Autonomist has a point. Popular history is a bit selective sometimes.
