The Stalin Prism or is Evil Forgotten?
I have been reading the magisterial Modern Times by Paul Johnson. It is striking to me how much death and destruction Stalin wreaked upon his own nation as well as most of Eastern Europe. Manmade famines, purges, show trials, the pact with Hitler that greenlighted the invasion of Poland, etc.
While death tolls are not necessarily the only way to measure evil, Hitler and Stalin's count are roughly equal with it quite possible that Stalin's exceeded Hitler's. Here is a breakdown of the morbid numbers culled from numerous sources.
This raises to me an important question. When one thinks today of "evil", the human embodiement is very rarely if ever thought of as Stalin. Rather it is almost always Hitler.
Stalin's crimes are comparable and yet he is rarely discussed in the same breath with Hitler outside of conversations between historians. I suspect that if you put a picture of Stalin before present day high schoolers, less than 50% would know Stalin, while over 95% would recognize Hitler. I wonder why?
Certainly, the Holocaust plays a key role in this impression. Hitler's crimes are correctly seen as industrialized mass murder on an unimaginable scale. Hitler almost single handedly provided us with the notion we now have of what a genocide is. Yet, how can one ignore the Gulag Archipelego?
It seems to me that some of this has to do with the fact that Hitler's most egregious (though by no means only) crimes were fundamentally race based, while Stalin's were ostensibly class based, though often it seems they were the acts of a paranoiac. Is the answer this simple or there something mroe sinister at work here?
Stalin was a communist. His end goal was supposed to be a utopia, a utopia that very much appealed to intellectuals disdainful of free markets and classical liberalism. Certainly, while no one of serious repute attempts to exhonerate Stalin, he is also not thrown into the bottom of a Dantesque inferno with near the frequency of his German counterpart. Its almost as if he is given somehat of a pass and not bestowed with the appropriate amount of ignominy his historical record seems to cry out for. Is it because Hitler was too "parochial," a defender of only one group while Stalin at least had pretensions of eventual universality?
In a way, I think that is part of the reason. His barbarism was, in the eyes of many who shape public opinion, more tolerable due to its professed intent. In the end, I supose the answer is not all that important, after all, most people would at least say Stalin is a bad guy. But I think it cuts to the core of a very real problem. For all of our political correctness these days and outrage over the seemingly trivial, have we forgotten how to be outraged by the truly demonic and evil in all its multifarious forms, or only certain types?
Let me be clear, none of this is meant to paint Hitler in anything but the darkest light possible, it is merely meant to raise a question whose answer can tell us a lot about the state of our present sense of our morality.
While death tolls are not necessarily the only way to measure evil, Hitler and Stalin's count are roughly equal with it quite possible that Stalin's exceeded Hitler's. Here is a breakdown of the morbid numbers culled from numerous sources.
This raises to me an important question. When one thinks today of "evil", the human embodiement is very rarely if ever thought of as Stalin. Rather it is almost always Hitler.
Stalin's crimes are comparable and yet he is rarely discussed in the same breath with Hitler outside of conversations between historians. I suspect that if you put a picture of Stalin before present day high schoolers, less than 50% would know Stalin, while over 95% would recognize Hitler. I wonder why?
Certainly, the Holocaust plays a key role in this impression. Hitler's crimes are correctly seen as industrialized mass murder on an unimaginable scale. Hitler almost single handedly provided us with the notion we now have of what a genocide is. Yet, how can one ignore the Gulag Archipelego?
It seems to me that some of this has to do with the fact that Hitler's most egregious (though by no means only) crimes were fundamentally race based, while Stalin's were ostensibly class based, though often it seems they were the acts of a paranoiac. Is the answer this simple or there something mroe sinister at work here?
Stalin was a communist. His end goal was supposed to be a utopia, a utopia that very much appealed to intellectuals disdainful of free markets and classical liberalism. Certainly, while no one of serious repute attempts to exhonerate Stalin, he is also not thrown into the bottom of a Dantesque inferno with near the frequency of his German counterpart. Its almost as if he is given somehat of a pass and not bestowed with the appropriate amount of ignominy his historical record seems to cry out for. Is it because Hitler was too "parochial," a defender of only one group while Stalin at least had pretensions of eventual universality?
In a way, I think that is part of the reason. His barbarism was, in the eyes of many who shape public opinion, more tolerable due to its professed intent. In the end, I supose the answer is not all that important, after all, most people would at least say Stalin is a bad guy. But I think it cuts to the core of a very real problem. For all of our political correctness these days and outrage over the seemingly trivial, have we forgotten how to be outraged by the truly demonic and evil in all its multifarious forms, or only certain types?
Let me be clear, none of this is meant to paint Hitler in anything but the darkest light possible, it is merely meant to raise a question whose answer can tell us a lot about the state of our present sense of our morality.
Stalin achieved some positive things as a result (or in spite?) of his brutal rule. He brought literacy and education to the uneducated peasant masses. He brought vastly improved living standards and vastly improved health (mortality rates fell from 30 per 100,000 to around 10, while the life expectancy gap between Russia and America shrank from about 15 years at the time he took power to within 1-2 years by the 1960s). He transformed the backwards agricultural Russian economy into a leading industrial superpower. He defeated the other tyrant who wanted to enslave, deport and exterminate all the Slavs of Eastern Europe (and while some may argue that his purges and incompetence are what convinced Hitler that the invasion was winnable in the first place, that's besides the point, because who knows what the state of the USSR would have been with some other leader). What did Hitler do that compares to any of this? Hitler brought nothing but death, destruction rape and poverty to his own people, much less the rest of Europe.
I don't think anyone will deny that Stalin was a mass murderer and a brutal, heartless leader who valued human life no more than any other animal species on Earth. I'm not trying to paint Stalin in a positive light at all. But his ends certainly justified his means more so than Hitler, and in terms of morality, Stalin made his decisions based on logic, not pseudoscience, emotion and prejudice; Stalin killed people he justifiably felt were a threat to his nation's security (and if you look at how many people still got away with collaborating with the Nazis during WWII, and who may have been responsible for the destruction of the USSR with a softer handed leader, you may come to understand why I say his paranoia was justifiable).
Basically what I'm trying to demonstrate is that while both leaders were "evil" (if you believe in such terms), and while both were responsible for millions of deaths, there is still such a thing as worse even on that scale. I think that's reason you don't often see people putting Stalin in the same group as Hitler.
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Hitler did create the Autobahn not that that does anything to absolve him of his crimes.
Interesting comments, however, to some extent, I think it validates my thesis that people give Stalin some credit for goals, while very clearly this is not the case for Hitler.
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Clearly not, because Hitler didn't actually achieve any positive goals. He left Germany in a much worse state than it ever was in the 20s and early 30s. And despite his temporary successes in pulling Germany out of depression, we can't forget that Germany was already an advanced, industrialized, educated nation to begin with, making even those successes pale in comparison.
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