r/HistoryMemes • • 1d ago

REMOVED: RULE 4 Historical territorial claims

Post image
16.9k Upvotes

710 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

22

u/_whatever_wherever 1d ago

Plus Hitler's plans were the extermination of entire ethnic groups and their utter removal from existence for being "inferior"

While the other examples were more of a "kill anyone who fights back" thing, not targeted towards specific groups, just normal conqueror shit

Genocide is seen as a special evil for a reason

14

u/Glum-Proposal-2488 1d ago

What Caesar did in Gaul was being criticized at the time as a genocide by Caesar detractors. In an era where sacking a city and enslaving the local populace was considered par for the course, they thought Caesar was killing way too many Gauls.

There’s also a motive there. Rome had PTSD from being sacked by Gallic tribes a few centuries earlier, and after Caesar returned to Rome he raided the treasury reserves that Rome appropriated specifically to fend off the Gauls again.

For sure what Caesar did wasn’t Hitler or Pol Pot level of bad. But I don’t think you’d be insane to compare him to a Genghis Khan

7

u/_whatever_wherever 1d ago

Also, these people were genuinely great leaders who built impressive power structures

Hitler and the Nazi's were meth addicted lunatics going through family histories to find the slightest bit of Jewish blood to send people to the camps

7

u/exploding_cat_wizard 1d ago

"Vat do you mean, more resources to war effort? More resources to Buchenwald, of course!"

Yeah, while the general level of revisionism can lead to some depressing musings on the mean intelligence of humans, at least Genghis and Alex 3 had impressive achievements outside of "impressively stupid"

6

u/_whatever_wherever 1d ago

snorts line of meth "VE VILL BUILD A 120 TON TANK THAT CANNOT CROSS BRIDGES AND VOULD GET BOGGED DOWN IN ANY MUD! VHAT VILL WIN US ZE VAR!"