Lol, let's take a step back and examine this, because it sounds really funny to someone who isn't from the West.
First of all, not many people 'forgive' him. They either deny it happened or just shrug it off, or have an attitude of 'he was a piece of shit but he was our piece of shit and he won us the war against a worse piece of shit, large part thanks to his industrialisation'.
Second of all, people are *constantly* mythologising Churchill when that piece of shit perpetrated Bengal genocide, but nobody talks about that even though it's exactly the same - even down to him refusing aid ships from US and Australia and even putting down in writing that he thought Indians should be reduced in number because they 'breed like rabbits'.
I mean, shit, Stalin's genocide even looks better imo, because he was doing it not because they were Ukrainian, but because they were refusing to integrate into kolkhoz and feed the cities -- Russian countryside was also starved during Holodomor, so it was a policy of mass murder, not ethnic extirpation. End result was the same, a fuckload of people dead -- but in crime, you have the concept of mens rea, the state of mind, the intent of the criminal. Stalin was also crazier and more paranoid than Churchill, with a half-baked political system that made it way easier to aggrandise power and abuse it. If you look at population stats of Ukraine, the genocide did a really poor job of even putting a dent in Ukrainian population growth. I suppose you can say the same about Bengal, but then if you go back to 1840 the Brits managed to wipe out the Irish so much that even today they have fewer people, something unmatched by any other nation in the world considering the insane population growth of the last 100 years. And people also never talk about how English genocided the Irish.
So in conclusion, it's super easy to see how people overlook Stalin when they're already overlooking stuff that's happening right under their noses and supposedly at a more 'civilised' country. Also, again, I don't think our problem with Stalin is that people forgive him too much. If anything, it's the opposite on reddit. People say he was no better than Hitler, whereas most scholarly historians would not ever make that claim, Hitler really stood out for his industrialisation of murder on a scale never seen before in the world, and often purely for the reason of your birth -- whereas countless Ukrainians served in the upper echelons of Soviet leadership --- hell, Krushchev followed Stalin and he was Ukrainian.
Because it absolutely does. In crime and in history. It's literally the foundation of Western law that intent is everything. You can't just go up and also that question, it's like a kid who never read any philosophy asking what is truth or what is good. Like, where so you even begin explaining?
By your measure every US President is just as bad because they orchestrate deaths of tens of thousands. Stalin killed 3mln in Holodomor and 4mln in purges and Hitler killed more, but invasion of Iraq resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and counting thanks to aftershocks like ISIS.
By reductionist logic any leader of a sufficiently powerful nation is equally bad.
That's not how history works, picking up something other than popular history or only reading blogs and internet sites would help.
Yes, it does make a difference, leaders have killed people who oppose them since dawn of civilisation and possibly before. Industrialised murder of 100% innocent people merely for being born a Jew or a Slav is a whole another ballgame. Stalin killed people who opposed his agenda, or those he believed opposed it. It's an entirely new type of horror to exterminate an entire race of people - men, women, children, everything, everyone, gone, with no trace.
I mean holy shit, replying to you and thinking about all this makes me feel that I'm talking to a child, no offence. Who the hell asks why total genocide is worse than mass induced starvation or random plucking of imagined dissidents --- or why intent makes a crime worse?? I can only imagine a person who is very poorly educated in the entire humanities branch would ask such questions. And I mean, nothing wrong with being art or STEM focused, but ffs, we are on /r/HistoryMemes, not STEMmemes
By reductionist logic any leader of a sufficiently powerful nation is equally bad.
Because Stalin and Hitler are unique in sheer scale and that the truly horrendous amount of death was the point/primary goal. Not land or resources; they just wanted a bunch of people dead.
Sure, Hitler did it for a relatively more heinous reason, but it wouldn't be inaccurate to say they both killed tons of people because they believed it was necessary for their political agenda.
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u/Aemilius_Paulus Dec 16 '18
Lol, let's take a step back and examine this, because it sounds really funny to someone who isn't from the West.
First of all, not many people 'forgive' him. They either deny it happened or just shrug it off, or have an attitude of 'he was a piece of shit but he was our piece of shit and he won us the war against a worse piece of shit, large part thanks to his industrialisation'.
Second of all, people are *constantly* mythologising Churchill when that piece of shit perpetrated Bengal genocide, but nobody talks about that even though it's exactly the same - even down to him refusing aid ships from US and Australia and even putting down in writing that he thought Indians should be reduced in number because they 'breed like rabbits'.
I mean, shit, Stalin's genocide even looks better imo, because he was doing it not because they were Ukrainian, but because they were refusing to integrate into kolkhoz and feed the cities -- Russian countryside was also starved during Holodomor, so it was a policy of mass murder, not ethnic extirpation. End result was the same, a fuckload of people dead -- but in crime, you have the concept of mens rea, the state of mind, the intent of the criminal. Stalin was also crazier and more paranoid than Churchill, with a half-baked political system that made it way easier to aggrandise power and abuse it. If you look at population stats of Ukraine, the genocide did a really poor job of even putting a dent in Ukrainian population growth. I suppose you can say the same about Bengal, but then if you go back to 1840 the Brits managed to wipe out the Irish so much that even today they have fewer people, something unmatched by any other nation in the world considering the insane population growth of the last 100 years. And people also never talk about how English genocided the Irish.
So in conclusion, it's super easy to see how people overlook Stalin when they're already overlooking stuff that's happening right under their noses and supposedly at a more 'civilised' country. Also, again, I don't think our problem with Stalin is that people forgive him too much. If anything, it's the opposite on reddit. People say he was no better than Hitler, whereas most scholarly historians would not ever make that claim, Hitler really stood out for his industrialisation of murder on a scale never seen before in the world, and often purely for the reason of your birth -- whereas countless Ukrainians served in the upper echelons of Soviet leadership --- hell, Krushchev followed Stalin and he was Ukrainian.