Evil

Folks on the right sometimes tar lefties like me as Stalin apologists. I have no idea where this comes from. For the record, in my book, Stalin was evil, okay? Big league evil.

I tend to think that there was a certain artistic genius to Nazi evil that makes it worse than Stalin's reign in an important way. But I won't argue with folks who call Stalin worse than Hitler, since Stalin killed more people, which is an imprortant metric that transcends questions of style. On the other hand, I'm not letting Pol Pot off the hook; the Khmer Rouge may have killed piddling numbers of people by Hitler and Stalin standards, but there are ways in which they make even the Nazis look like the Boy Scouts of America.

If you are going to go by the numbers, though, I learned recently that Mao is the champion of twentieth century evil. So Uncle Joe has at least that much going for him.

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Capturing a longer rant which I fell into elsewhere on social media, where smeone said the Soviets killed ~200 million people while the Nazis only killed six million:

I must object to the tally provided here as demonstration that communism is categorically more evil than fascism. The Nazis did not kill six million people. The Nazis genocided six million Jews, mostly in murder factories. In the same murder factory system they also killed five million other people: Roma, communists and other political dissidents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses (!), et cetera.

They also started the bloodiest war in human history. They killed 20 or 30 million people in the Soviet Union. They also killed about 1.5 million people or so on the Western front, but on the big tally that is practically a rounding error.

And they wanted to kill more. Why, in a murder factory, do you run a kitchen that serves enough food to keep the inmates just barely above starvation? Because it was the cheapest way to manage the problem of disposing of the bodies. They were killing as fast as they could run the ovens and dump the ash.

And they were just getting started in Russia. The plan was to conquer the entire Soviet Union and murder or enslave EVERYONE (another 150 million people or so).

So the low number of 30 million dead did not reflect that the Nazis were not evil enough. They were JUST GETTING STARTED, but they were fuckups who bit off more than they could chew and got invaded for their trouble after only having about a decade to soak the earth with blood.

I’m not saying the Soviets were not evil, but it took them seventy years to gulag and starve all those people. Pikers, in comparison. Heck, after Stalin kicked the bucket it was barely like they were even making a real effort.

If you really want to get communism at the top of the Big List of Evil, you have to talk about Mao. But even Mao had an unfair advantage in racking up the numbers: he had decades to run a country of half a billion people, half of whom were half-starving to start with.

(And again, if you ask me, pound-for-pound you have to give the Maximum Evil prize to the Khmer Rouge; compared to them, the Nazis look like the Girl Scouts.)