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I'm not too sure how constructive this question is. They have different characteristics for sure and this is enough for me, in terms of analysis.
It's very constructive. Soviets and Nazis both committed genocide. But anyone with a shred of morality should have no hesitation, if it's down to the wire and only the two of them to choose from, which one should side with. The Soviets, if that wasn't clear. The Soviets, awful as they were, and even though they were quite literally genocidal - on multiple occasions, on a massive scale - are very much the lesser evil compared to the Nazis. The idea that there is no 'lesser evil' when genocide is involved on both sides as a matter of general principle would necessarily imply that the Soviets and the Nazis are equally evil, which is fundamentally absurd on its face.
It's a hollow argument trotted out to make "LIBERALS BAD FOR FOREIGN POLICY" sound more profound; it's not a sincerely held principle, and the inability to answer that challenge displays that.
Wait untill you hear about what happened to the indigenous Americans.
Or, indigenous Australians.
Or, pretty much everywhere the British "discovered".
What does that have to do with my point?
I entirely misread your argument the first time.
I actually agree with you.
I was initially dismissive because of the old "are X as evil as Nazi's?" As that's usually a disingenuous argument. Selecting the Soviet Union as another "evil" is almost always American anti-communist nonsense too.
I shall go and correct my other comment.
No worries, it happens. I went to Nazis because no one worth taking seriously disputes that Nazis are both genocidal and some of the worst scum of the earth to ever disgrace this planet, so it avoids an argument over whether Side A is REALLY that bad. The number of cretins as vile as the Nazis is very small - and so frees Side B to be a legitimately evil, yet indisputably less evil, contrast.
Depends on your lens. Both were violent authoritarians really into hierarchical power. The Nazis stood by that, owned it (Führerprinzip and everything), while the Soviets coated the whole thing with "worker's rights" paint, keeping the soviets around as mouthpieces of the Nomenklatura. Arguably, owning your shit is better than being shifty about it, so the Nazis were better.
...not to say that Nazis can't be shifty they constantly are now that you get punched in the face for calling yourself one but the 3rd Reich didn't hide its ambitions.
Then you can use even more different lens. Number of victims. How they went about it. Whether you were required to send birthday greetings to the leader when you're in a KZ/Gulag. The list goes on and on and on, if you want to be partisan you could portray things selectively either way, and that's where you throw up your hands and say "They're comparable only in so far as they are both incomparably evil". The Red Khmer killed way fewer people than Nazis or Soviets, yet they're very much in that "comparable because incomparable" category due to the sheer insanity and ultimately randomness of the policy.
...
what
If you're sitting between the Soviets and the Nazis and saying "Well, I can't say which is the lesser evil", you're no one I would sit at a table with.
If you're sitting at a table with the Soviets saying "Well, I can say they're better than the Nazis", you're no one I would sit at a table with.
At some point the evil is so bad that lesser evilism doesn't work, you have to fight on both fronts, sooner or later, anyway. Ask Makhno. Best you can do is play them against each other.
Not to mention that the Soviets and Nazis were fucking allies.
So you wouldn't sit at the table with the Western Allies in WW2?
The right outcome of that war would have been both Germany and the Soviets getting rolled by everyone else for invading Poland. But authoritarians were appeased, and thus we got the Soviet-Western alliance.
So, no, I wouldn't have because the need would never have arisen.
I suppose the lives of the entire Polish nation are a small price to pay for moral purity?
How many more years do you think WW2 would have went on had the Soviet Union collapsed in the absence of American lend-lease, and the UK and US been left to fight the Axis on their own? How many more years of the Holocaust burning 'undesirables' in the furnaces are acceptable to not have to sully your hands by joining with the Reds?
I have no doubt that the US and UK retained the material capacity to win (the will? That's a different question). But there's a multi-front, multi-million soldier deficit to be made up there, and the Nazis aren't going to be idle in their new lebensraum. How many lives are worth playing "Both Sides" games with two legitimately gruesome but-in-no-way-reasonably-comparable authoritarian states?
The Soviets invaded Poland, remember. Maybe you're blanking out on that one, somehow under the impression that the Soviets "freed" Poland from the Nazis or something.
At that point in the war there were no multiple fronts, there was no lend-lease, there were the Nazis and the Soviets getting away with carving up a sovereign country.
So don't fucking "Polish lives" me here. If you care about Polish lives you hate both Nazis and Soviets.
No, I'm under the impression that the Polish nation survived under Soviet oppression; something which would not have happened under Nazi oppression. Do you not know what Generalplan Ost entailed?
I do hate them both. Just not equally. The Nazis are worse, without ambiguity.
With time, they would've killed it, with deportations, settlements, language policy, etc. Poles are more numerous than e.g. Lithuanians but Russia has wanted to Russify the whole area for centuries now. And the Soviets were nothing but the continuation of the genocidal, colonial, Russian empire with a different coat of paint.
They probably would've treated Poland like Ukraine and worse right from the start if the Nazis hadn't tried a very similar thing directly beforehand: Poland had a very active and well-organised resistance, had the Soviets started out with their usual genocidal programme the Polish resistance would've fought right back. So they bid their time, first carefully cultivating an image as liberators.
The Soviets had 50 years, and didn't manage it. The Nazis had five years and managed a fifth of the fucking population.
Pretty sure the Nazis put a higher priority on genocide than the Soviets did. Guess what? That makes them worse. And looking at those numbers, considerably worse.
They did treat Poland like Ukraine.
The Polish Home Army was a nonentity by the end of the war due to the Sovs stabbing them in the back, and the Cursed Soldiers of the next decade achieved little. It wasn't that the Polish people just suddenly 'forgot' about what the Soviets had done to them - it was that the Nazis were unamfuckingbiguously worse.
Did you blank out on the Holodomor or are you denying it?
We're talking about Soviets vs. Nazis here, not "Who did worse, specifically, in Poland".
Neither. The looting of Poland by the Soviets post-WW2, the export of foodstuffs under famine conditions, and the repression of Polish political organs is well-recorded. The death toll just wasn't as high.
Famine in Poland? You're referring to the Warsaw Ghetto famine (that was the Nazis) or the shortages in the early 1980s? The GDR sent a lot of stuff over back then.
...frankly speaking looking through lists famines in Poland are historically about as astonishingly rare as plague outbreaks.
My point still stands, though: The Soviets were absolutely willing to do worse, it just wasn't opportune at the moment. And this isn't about "What either side did in Poland, specifically", but whether there's a point at which evil is so bad that it's pointless to make distinctions. And the Soviets crossed that line.
You can also find people the Nazis treated way better than Poles, Slavic people: The Sorbs (mostly innocently). Or Croats (because Ustaše). That doesn't suddenly make the Nazis less evil.
No, I'm referring to the postwar situation of the 1940s in which thousands of Poles were deliberately starved to death by Soviet authorities.
Yes, that's kind of the point. The Soviets were opportunistic genocidaires. The Nazis sabotaged their own war effort to engage in more genocide. One. Is. Worse.
So the 1946/47 Winter? Germany also hungered back then, it was an extreme cold and draught double-whammy, but by the life of me I can't find anything about Poland, and that's with searching for sources in Polish.
Yes: Being opportunistic is more effective in the long run. Cold-bloodedness doesn't tend to make things better, on the contrary, as it necessitates habit it's harder to overcome.
...and just for the record: If you'd been arguing that the Soviets were worse I'd have challenged you by arguing that the Nazis were worse. That's my very point. They're both worse.
That's not how comparatives work. Two things can't both be 'worse' if they're the only things being discussed.
My very point is that comparisons become impossible at some point. You might be able to say "The Nazis are worse here" or "The Soviets are worse here" but once you try to go "They're better" you look around and see that nope, that's just coincidence, nope, that's still fucking unconscionable, nope, there's no tiny sliver of goodness behind that that would make "better" a word anyone with an ounce of ethics would use without their stomach churning.
Thus, neither are better than the other, and both are worse. Because the shit they did is so far off the scale that comparisons break down. It's like comparing infinities.
It looks like we see things quite differently. For me all Genocides are evil. I believe it is important to study their differences so they do not reoccur in any way, shape or form. Obviously as humans we haven't worked on this properly (for many of reasons) and one more is currently happening to Palestinians. In that sense comparing randomly any two of them as to see which one is worst, it honestly doesn't make sense to me.
It's not about whether a genocide is right or wrong. All genocides are wrong, and should be prevented when possible. The point is that if there are two sides to choose from, realistically speaking, the fact that both engage in genocide does not make them equal. There is generally still a lesser evil, and oftentimes by a large degree.
Again - if it comes down to the wire, between the Nazis and Soviets, is there a lesser evil there?
As I briefly explained above, I don't see a point to this hypothetical question and I was not convinced by your arguments, so I will not engage to answering it.
I very clearly explained the point, and you've very clearly demonstrated an inability to answer the question.
~~It's not constructive, it's what-about-ism and disengenious rhetoric.~~
I entirely misunderstood the parent comment.
"There is no such thing as a lesser evil in a conflict where both sides are genocidal."
"[pretty indisputable example of both sides being genocidal but there very clearly being a lesser evil between the two]"
"Whataboutism!"
???