Who do you hate more?

[Heraclitus]

Also tell me would you rather live in Nazi Germany or Tito's Yugoslavia?

[David Floyd]

Quite simply I consider killing 20 million jews to be more evil than killing 20 million Chinese. One nearly eliminates a culture , the other doesn't even weaken it.

Since there are so many Chinese and so few Jews, then the Chinese must be worth less individually? WTF is wrong with you?

[David Floyd]

Nazi Germany was certainly more advanced. If we aren't debating relative morality, I'd probably prefer to live in Nazi Germany from a pure "creature comforts" point of view.

[Heraclitus]

Originally posted by David Floyd


Since there are so many Chinese and so few Jews, then the Chinese must be worth less individually? WTF is wrong with you?

Killing a single Chinese is just as wrong as killing a single Jew.

But killing a culture is also wrong.

Killing 20 million Jews= 20 mil dead, dead culture
Killing 20 million Chinese= 20 mil dead

Clearly killing 20 million Jews is worse.

[Heraclitus]

Originally posted by David Floyd
Nazi Germany was certainly more advanced. If we aren't debating relative morality, I'd probably prefer to live in Nazi Germany from a pure "creature comforts" point of view.

Your comparison is compeltly out of place, unless you are flaunting your ignorance.

Tito's Communist Yugoslavia was only formed after WW2 and so almost by definition of more advanced technology had a higher standard of living that Nazi Germany except from 1945-1950, while the next 30 years saw major increases in living standards. Car ownership, the average life span and work conditions where superior.

It also had not extermination camps or millions dead, the only mass crimes I can think off where the executions of tens of thousands of collaborators after WW2 and perhaps the nationalization of most private property.

Wiki article

Are you certain about your response?

[David Floyd]

What's wrong with killing a culture? A culture isn't alive, it doesn't have rights. Tell me how killing a person is less wrong than killing a culture?

It also seems vaguely racist to posit that killing every Jew is more wrong than killing an equal number of Chinese.

[Heraclitus]

Originally posted by David Floyd
What's wrong with killing a culture?

Are you serious? You see no problem with eliminating or suppressing languages, religions or world-views? If not anything else, the member of the oppressed culture's rights are violated, that should be a reason why it is wrong I hope anyone could appreciate.

Originally posted by David Floyd
A culture isn't alive, it doesn't have rights.

Species don't have rights, yet we all agree that killing off a species that isn't directly harmful to humans to be wrong.

At least I hope we do.

Tell me how killing a person is less wrong than killing a culture?

Where did I say that? If you remember I choose equal numbers of Chinese and Jews to demonstrate my point. The only person who could say that killing 20 million Chinese is not marginally less evil than killing 20 million Jews with the intent of whipping out all Jews, must

It also seems vaguely racist to posit that killing every Jew is more wrong than killing an equal number of Chinese.

I have no problem being called a racist if you define racism as opposing the extermination of a race.


In any case neither the Chinese or the Jews constitute a race. I will take a different example: Killing 60 million Britons is worse than killing 60 million Americans.

Thought that is a border case since both cultures are closely related. Replace Britons with Frenchmen and Americans with Russians.

As you see the example has no racial connotations you seem to be (purposefully?) reading into my post since all nations mentioned are "white" or at least mostly white with significant Black & Asian admixtures (USA, Britain and France).

[Heraclitus]

Also, I've just remembered that my original example was flawed, because China has several smaller ethnic groups. Killing 20 million Chinese is the lesser evil only if they are Han Chinese and not some smaller ethnic group. It is quite possible to hand pick 20 million Chinese so that you end up killing several cultures. In that case killing all the Jews is the lesser evil.

Off course one might argue that killing all the ethnic Jews would also kill Judaism, a religion. But I think that there are enough converts to keep the religion alive.

[David Floyd]

Personally, I'd rather just stick to the theory that killing people is wrong, regardless of what cultural, ethnic, or racial group they belong to. I mean, are we really having a debate in which someone is trying to argue that there can be a situation in which it is relatively more or less wrong to kill people from one cultural, ethnic, or racial group than another group? It just seems ridiculous.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by David Floyd
Erm, you should check out the history of the PRC's occupation of Tibet. I lot of the reasoning was very similar to "White Man's Burden" - the poor backwards Tibetans were unable to govern themselves and needed the Chinese to do it for them.

Have you ever met a Chinese person or studied Chinese history aside from the PRC at all? I'm not being facetious when I say that PRC may have been less racist than previous Chinese regimes.

First of all, check your stats. I'd rather suspect that 30 million individuals DID do time in the gulags, especially given that the gulag population ranged between .5 million and 1.5 million for any given year between 1934 and 1951. True, 30 million may not have died in the gulags, but that isn't what you said.

Some numbers say 18 million spent time in the gulags from '29 to '53 and I'm thinking going to prison and not dying is probably better than, well, getting exterminated. The difference was that the Soviets were happy to work you as much as they could, where the Nazis decided the Hell with that, we'll just put these people in ovens.

At the end of the day I'm not going to care if I starved to death in the Ukraine or was gassed in an extermination camp. I'll be just as dead either way, and that's what I'm getting at.

And you aren't going to care if you died while fighting in a revolution for your rights or being hung as a Quisling, because you are dead either way right?

If I'm going to die anyway, I'd rather be on a more moral footing.

Well, Lenin killed his fair share, but yes, you are largely right. Stalin was by far the worst of the bunch. But then again, there was also Mao, Pol Pot, and Kim Song Il/Kim Il Jung. Stalin wasn't exactly the only brutal dictator in the history of communism. In fact, compared to Mao and Pol Pot, he might not even have been the most brutal.

Pol Pot was brutal, but Mao? The policies of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution may have been disasterous and caused famine, but that's hardly the same as being brutal. After all, as I've pointed out, intent matters.

As I pointed out in another thread, the Soviet Union bears a lot of the responsibility for enabling Germany to conduct aggressive war.

Who is worse, the aggressor or the one who helps out the aggressor? Yeah, I think a vast majority would say the oppressor.

Also, perhaps the only reason the Soviet Union survived the war was because of MASSIVE US aid. So, is the US as bad as the Commies because it funded them in order for their survival?

But we aren't debating the US legal system. We are debating legal systems that allowed one country to pack Jews into extermination camps just because they were Jews, and systems that allowed another country to allow millions of Ukrainians to starve just because the Ukrainians didn't want to collectivize. In this situation, who cares about intent? Not the Jew killed at Auschwitz, and not the Ukrainian who starved to death in the 1930s.

Are you ****ing insane? Who cares about intent?! What about people who actually believe that the end doesn't justify the means? You know, people who believe in morality.

Hold on, though. Imperialism didn't exactly take productive, advanced countries and turn them into ****holes.

See: India.

I am saying that it did have some positive effects.

It also had absolutely horrid effects and has created problems that will last for generations (ie, the borders drawn in Africa and the Mid East for one).

I just strongly dispute the notion that Africa is in the state it is in today because of imperialism. There are a number of reasons, but I don't think imperialism ranks very high on the list.

That's because you don't know much about the imperialist period in Africa and the border drawing of the Europeans. Its like someone coming along in the 1600s and dividing countries with absolutely no accounting for differences in ethnicity or religion... you see what happened in Yugoslavia after the fall of Communism... now extrapolate that to entire continent.

or for that matter, the Cambodian Civil War, which was basically caused by the Communists.

... which also was overthrown by the Vietnamese, who were Communists too.

Yet both had death tolls in the tens of millions. Actually, communism's death toll, estimated at 100 million, is really an order of magnitude higher than the Nazi death toll.

Like I said, lets compare the years and percentage of the population as well as the intent. Asia has far more people and most of the people died due to dumb economic policies, NOT because they wanted to exterminate a whole group of people.

Intent always matters in moral judgements.

Except for the minor fact that before the Nazis ever invaded, the Soviets used their military machine to invade Poland in the 1920s, followed by Poland, the Baltic States, and Finland in 1939, as well as the threat of the military machine to gain control of Bessarabia and Bucovina from Romania in 1940.

When the Soviets were gearing up for war, it wasn't because they thought the US was coming to get them, it was because they had territorial ambitions of their own.

The Polish-Soviet War was based on disputed territories (Polish territories gained in WW1 which were formerly Russian before the Great War) and the lack of a border defined by the Treaty of Versailles. The Poles had just as much territorial ambitions, btw (taking Galcia and Volhynia). It seems that neither wanted a major war and it was stumbled into by accident (not unlike our own War of 1812).

A lot of those wars seemed to be a reclamation of the lands the Western countries had taken away from the Soviets after WW1.

And fighting a 3 year Civil War right after your existance will tend to make you upgrade your military.

Finally, if Stalin "never trusted Hitler", then why did Barbarossa come as such a complete and utter shock to Stalin that he was unable to even give orders in the days immediately following the attack?

It was likely the timing of it. Didn't expect him to betray the Soviets until Britain was out of the picture. All reports say Stalin didn't trust Hitler to keep his word... but Stalin thought he had more time.

What I am talking about is the difference between murder, and a combination of murder and negligent homicide. Either way, though, when looking at two political systems, both of which caused tens of millions of deaths through their DIRECT and AVOIDABLE actions, such nuance is, to me, irrelevent.

Because your moral center is deficient, IMO. To not care about intent is, frankly, simply monsterous and opens the door to an ends justify the means analysis. Millions dying because you have dumbass economic policies, while horrible, is a far sight better than putting them into ovens.

[Meticulous Man]

Personally I voted for RIAA, but as to Nazis vs Commies... clearly the Nazis were more "evil" if the word is to mean anything. Despite having failed, Communism was still a fundamentally humanistic project while the Nazis were out to conquer living space for Aryans and kill teh subhumans with the help of modern technology. And Germany wasn't a backwater like Russia was, either. I just think it's really hard to understand WTF might have been going on in the Germans' heads at the time.

And if I'd have to choose between today's hippie commie idealists and neo-Nazis, I'd prefer the Commies any day of the week.

[GePap]

Originally posted by David Floyd
Yes, but concentration camps were distinct from extermination camps. Sure, people died in concentration camps, just like people died in concentration camps started by the British during the Boer War. I'm not justifying either, I'm just pointing out the difference.

You are missing the point. The Nazi state from the start meant to wage a campaign of political annahilation against its' enemies, that when things invariably turned violent, became a campaign of physical annahilation.

First of all, the difference between 12 and 70 years is approximately the same as the size of a pimple on a flea's ass when it comes to measuring history.

But we are not talking about all of history. After all, your pet ideologies have been around hardly any time on a macro-historical level.

Secondly, Nazism was faced with a war that pit itself against the rest of the world. It didn't die out on it's own, and it certainly wouldn't have died out in 1945 if WW2 hadn't happened, or if Germany had won WW2. In fact, it could easily have outlasted communism, in that Germany had the capability to outperform the Soviet Union economically, and absent a wartime economy with vast influxes of free foreign goods for the Soviet Union, industrially.

NAZISM DEMANDED THAT WAR. Nazism wasn't a system that could have survived without conflict, it craved conflict, it demanded conflict. After all, the Nazi state was always the aggressor. They invaded Poland, and the USSR, they declared war on the US without any real reason to. How much do you even know about the ideology? There is no such thing as "peace Nazism." Its an ideology built on a world of warring nations, and that is exactly what it gave the German people.

Haha, that's very possibly the case, but I still think I'd have a better chance in Nazi Germany than the Soviet Union.

Well, given that your basic ideology seems to be selfishness to the core, I guess as long as you are doing fine, what happens to everyone else is irrelevant. At least it should give the rest of us a clear idea of your "moral" compass.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by David Floyd
Erm, you should check out the history of the PRC's occupation of Tibet. I lot of the reasoning was very similar to "White Man's Burden" - the poor backwards Tibetans were unable to govern themselves and needed the Chinese to do it for them.

Tibet was considered by China to be an integral part of China for many hundreds of years. When Mao stood in Tienanmen Square in October 1949 and declared, "China has stood up." he was stating that the dismemberment of China was over and that China would be returning to its former glory, which means restoring its old borders. What the Tibetans wanted or needed wasn't really the issue. That said, the Chinese invasion led to a considerable improvement in the life of the average Tibetan, since they were no longer serfs and slaves. Since, however, spreading the revolution at the point of a gun is not a Leninist principle, Mao ought to have stayed out of Tibet.

First of all, check your stats.

Who are you, Wiglaf?

I'd rather suspect that 30 million individuals DID do time in the gulags, especially given that the gulag population ranged between .5 million and 1.5 million for any given year between 1934 and 1951. True, 30 million may not have died in the gulags, but that isn't what you said.

According to Michael Parenti's book, Blackshirts and Reds, the vast majority of those sent to the Gulag eventually returned home, like Saras' grandfather. The Gulag was simply the Soviet prison, where they sent common criminals, as well as political prisoners. It was hard, it was harsh, and some camps had a near 100% death rate (even among the guards), but that had more to do with the conditions of life in far Siberia, as well as exigencies of the war. Eighty percent of the deaths in the camps occred from 1941 -1945, when all Soviet production was aimed at the war effort. Common thieves and murderers were rather low on the list of folks to get food when soldiers were hurling themselves into the maw of the Nazi war machine.

Moving along, I readily admit that the policies of the communists were responsible for the deaths of millions (The Black Book of Communism, BTW, gives an estimate of 100 million as the number of non-war deaths directly caused by communist policies, far exceeded those caused by the Nazis even if you include wartime deaths in the Nazi total and exclude them from the communist total).

Yes, but that's over seventy years as opposed to just twelve. Furthermore, it is for all Communist countries, not one. If one were to compare all of capitalism for the same period against all of Communism, we come out by far the better.

At the end of the day I'm not going to care if I starved to death in the Ukraine or was gassed in an extermination camp. I'll be just as dead either way, and that's what I'm getting at.

The likelihood of you being starved to death in the Ukraine was much lower than the likelihood of you being sent to a death camp by the Nazis.

Well, Lenin killed his fair share,

Not so much. It was a civil war, and the Whites were killing millions.

Stalin was by far the worst of the bunch. But then again, there was also Mao, Pol Pot, and Kim Song Il/Kim Il Jung.

Mao didn't set out to kill millions. It was a result of him thinking he knew more about agriculture than agricultural scientists precisely when flood and drought were about to strike China.

Pol Pot, while the modern word for insane, hatred and murderousness, had a similar problem. He confiscated all of the rice in order to prepare for war with Vietnam and then a drought hit, and millions starved. The vast majority of people that were executed by Pol Pot were actually fellow Communists. In fact, as far as deliberate execution goes, the single category that was most likely to get a person killed was to be a member of the ruling party, whether you were in the USSR, the PRC, or Democratic Kampuchea. Also keep in mind that it was Communists who threw out Pol Pot.

Hold on, though. Imperialism didn't exactly take productive, advanced countries and turn them into ****holes.

That's what they did to India and China.

Imperialism, by and large, took ****holes, and in those ****holes built railroads, factories, roads, hospitals, and various other infrastructure, some of which is still in use today.

****hole by whose standards? And you're wrong. Everwhere the imperialists invaded ended up poorer, more wretched, and the death rates skyrocketed. The Belgian Congo was the poster child for this, but the original inhabitants of the Americas are nearly extinct.

Except for the minor fact that before the Nazis ever invaded, the Soviets used their military machine to invade Poland in the 1920s,

Actually, Poland attacked the Russia in 1919. The Soviets defeated the invasion and invaded in 1920, and because of Stalin, lost the war and ended up having to surrender a huge section of territory and peoples. Poland then attacked Lithuania. Poland also conquered and annexed independent Galicia. They were on a tear. So when the Soviets attacked in 1939, they were simply stripping Poland of all the territory they had conquered from their neighbors in 1919-20.

When the Soviets were gearing up for war, it wasn't because they thought the US was coming to get them, it was because they had territorial ambitions of their own.

No, it was because they were expecting to go to war with Germany.

Finally, if Stalin "never trusted Hitler", then why did Barbarossa come as such a complete and utter shock to Stalin that he was unable to even give orders in the days immediately following the attack?

Because Stalin thought he was going to be the one to betray the other.

Yes, but concentration camps were distinct from extermination camps. Sure, people died in concentration camps, just like people died in concentration camps started by the British during the Boer War. I'm not justifying either, I'm just pointing out the difference.

Not so much. While the Final Solution may not have started until 1941, the camps were already places people went to die.

First of all, the difference between 12 and 70 years is approximately the same as the size of a pimple on a flea's ass when it comes to measuring history.

Not when it comes to modern history.

Haha, that's very possibly the case, but I still think I'd have a better chance in Nazi Germany than the Soviet Union.

Maybe, maybe not. That's still a sucky basis on which to decide which you hate more.

[rmsharpe]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara Since, however, spreading the revolution at the point of a gun is not a Leninist principle, Mao ought to have stayed out of Tibet.

I guess Lenin wasn't a Leninist then, since he had no problem using his guns...

[chequita guevara]

The revolution already happened by that point. The purpose of the Cheka was to shoot those helping the White armies. Do you think that both sides of the U.S. civil war allowed people to try and sabotage their war effort. Hell, in the South, simply opposing the war was enough to get you hanged in some cases.

Furthermore, Russia is obviously part of Russia, and so you can't be spreading the revolution if you are fighting inside your own country. Or is logic a little too difficult for you?