Flippant Anarchism. A lighter take on social criticism with the aim of agitation.
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And he isn’t mainstream taboo in the rest of the world because he only killed Europeans. What’s your point? People cosplay as Nazi for shits and giggles in places where the Nazi had no impact at all. But go cosplay as emperor Hirohito in China while waving the Japanese Naval flag and see how well you’d be treated. While nobody outside of the Asian pacific would give a damn or even know who he is.
I just walk around with a unit 731 patch when I'm in the Asian pacific...
I’m not sure why people are struggling with this one. The reason Hitler is at the top of the evil ruler foodchain is because of his ideology and specific intent.
He wasn’t some common racist who thought his own race was superior and others were inferior. He specifically believed that Jews (as well as Roma people, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities and mental illnesses) were vermin. Worse than insects. He openly made it his goal the complete annihilation of all these peoples who he hated with all the virulent, vitriolic, frothing-at-the-mouth passion he could possibly muster. He engineered the industrial killing of over 11 million people.
There is no other person more deserving of the label “enemy of humanity” than Hitler. There is absolutely nothing for which any decent person can relate to him, never mind understand him.
I can understand that he was fucking nuts.
You forgot "Slavs" who he saw as slightly better than vermin iirc.
The saddest part is what Hitler thought/did was commonplace throughout human history. People have been genociding and exterminating people they deem lesser since the beginning.
He's only seen as this abhorrent in modern times.
Horray, we are the point of "actually, a lot of people were as bad as Hitler".
No, you dickwads. The man murdered 11 million people in 12 years outside of combat action, most of them within the last 5 years of his terror. Thats not counting any of the victims of the war itself: You know, 900.00 People starving in Leningrad alone and so forth. Thats why he is vilified.
Dont know why this reflex to downplay his atrocities is always there.
Oh and i have plenty of hate for the other fucks on that list. And Stalin. And Mao. And Pol Pot. And Idi Amin. And Netanyahu. And Kissinger. Because some people actually managed to dislike genocide as a concept and not just when it hits the people who look like them.
Churchill caused the deaths of 6 million Indians at a conservative estimate
Leopold killed 20 million in the Congo. That's pretty equivalent numbers
That doesn't work for the narrative, so those deaths don't count.
Who here is downplaying any atrocities?
Anyone who implies that all these people with astronomically lower body counts than Hitler are just as bad as him, like OOP.
Leopold was responsible for 1.5 to 13 million deaths. And a slave trade that effected many many more lives than that.
White people hardly mention Leopold at all.
The actual reason is the industrial killing. Only the nazis searched for the cheapest and most efficient way to kill as many people as possible
I kinda feel like the rationing of bullets and redemption exclusively for severed human hands in would count as trying to find greatest efficiency.
In reference to King Leopold's reign in the Congo. It was.... Unbelievably brutal and quite modern in their pursuit of "efficiency".
I think physically the most efficient would just be to basically strangle people to death. It's really not physically that demanding to strangle someone to death.
However, it is extremely demanding mentally. Which is why the "most efficient" is usually the "most detached" one.
It should be a tip to these people that they disgust themselves while doing what they claim to think is right. But it fucking isn't. And I don't know why.
I think you’re right. It also wouldn’t be unfair to say that, if you’re in a european/western world country that is likely going to be mostly white and also happens to have taken a big part in WW2, that of course it will be a big part of your history. For the US, it’s our history in Europe, but we don’t seem to claim or learn much about European history elsewhere, like Leopold or Churchill’s Bengal Famine.
I think many people are familiar with at least a few mass killers. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, maybe the Red Terror, Christopher Columbus, you could even count Khan as one of the biggest, but we might view that as a bloody past and the result of Khan’s conquest of other peoples rather than a internal conflict killing millions of a specific group. Columbus’ mass murder was partly out of ignorance when the European diseases spread in the New World, but Europeans didn’t have too much of a problem with killing natives otherwise.
Hitler, OTOH, as you said, turned mass murder into a pointless, cold, indiscriminate killing machine in a way that no other ruler did. People were warehoused until fed to the machine. The Soviets/Russians and Pol Pot (influenced heavily by Stalin) are a pretty close second, they rounded up people and shipped them off to gulags or prisons and worked them to death if they weren’t just outright killed.
Nah Leopold and Churchill both did it too
In the case of Churchill, it is more agriculture killing.
Leopold was rightfully viewed as a monster by his racist contemporaries. I don't think anybody sane is lionizing that guy.
Edit: They do and did lionize Henry Morton Stanley who helped set up Leopold's death machine. And his contemporaries made him persona non grata over it as well, even though history somewhat gave him a pass and made movies about him.
I'll probably (and rightly) get downvoted for asking this but was Churchill's crime. Does it have to do with how he treated Ireland?
He caused massive famines across India just to fill coffers of the British empire. 6 million people at a conservative estimate
Destroyed Bengal and Bangladesh
Ask most Indians- Churchill and mother Theresa are two of the most hated people in our history
Instituted policies that led to mass famine / genocide in South Asia.
I mean, I disagree with Hitler's views too, but his views aren't really what makes us hate him universally, it was his actions.
Churchill fought with the Spanish trying to crush the independence movement in Cuba in the 1895 Cuban War of Independence.
He wanted to fight against the Pashtun Mohmand tribe in north-west India, but was assigned a position as a journalist rather than a combat position.
He also fought for the British army against the Boer republics in the Second Boer War.
It's not like this guy was just idly opining about race and imperialism, he was enthusiastically engaging in the violent wars as a soldier to further those imperialist conquests. I'm sure as a politician he played an important role in preserving those power dynamics as well (alas I'm no expert on Churchill and I'm only reading about him because of this post).
That said, the original post was only pointing out that Churchill would be taboo if his racism and imperialism victimized Europeans, and I would agree that this is more likely to make him taboo. We see this kind of logic with how the conflicts in Syria are treated differently than the conflicts in Ukraine. I think people are willing to overlook imperialism and racist violence when it doesn't impact white people.
That is absolutely true. It's also amazing how many people are even unaware of their horrific crimes.
So many white people are thinking this is somehow praising Hitler for stating "Murdering millions is bad when it happens to anyone or is done by anyone, we don't see it talked about because it wasn't to Europeans."
Fuckin' bizarre. Murder is bad. When European powers did it to Africa, no one remembers who did it because everyone did it. We know Hitler because he used the same imperialist justification on Europeans. "I will improve your lives and civilize you the German way."
If Hitler did it to Africa, no one would have complained or had a leg to stand on without being hypocritical. Italy, France, England, Portugal, Denmark, all did the same heinous acts to who was justified towards.
Good time to remind everyone that the Nazis were inspired by Jim Crow laws and the poor treatment of African Americans that was prevalent for the time, especially in the southern US.
And that the British were one of the first to run national concentration camps https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War_concentration_camps
I guess Mao and Pol Pot aren't mainstream?
In my experience (American) people might know the name Pol Pot but not know anything about him. And I feel like my experience is skewed because I had a high school teacher who was a refugee who fled the Khmer Rouge.
Most just know such Cold War figures as 'enemy' but not really much in regards to how or why.
Comparatively the linking of Hitler and the Nazis to the Holocaust is unparalleled in political discourse.
Lest I go down a reading rabbit hole I don't have time for today, what's the TLDR on churchills evils? my history education was lackluster
During WW2, the Bengal region of India was suffering from a poor harvest. Despite having reserves, the British did not release those thinking they may be needed for the war (they were not).
The British also did not acknowledge any famine and provided no relief.
The resulting famine killed somewhere between 800k to 3.8m (according to Wikipedia).
The difference being that one was an act of cruel apathy, their lives were valued less than the war effort (one could even argue that the British hoped to ultimately save lives), while the other actively reveled in and advanced the industrialised mass murder of entire peoples.
Please, do not compare these two. One is cruel and wrong, the other is unfathomable evil.
Edit: King Leopold is for some reason still respected in some places I am told, which is disgusting. But I repeat, one was done to make a profit (at the cost of inconceivable suffering) while the other wasn't even done for profit - suffering WAS the goal.
The difference being that one was an act of cruel apathy, their lives were valued less than the war effort (one could even argue that the British hoped to ultimately save lives), while the other actively reveled in and advanced the industrialised mass murder of entire peoples.
I think this is letting Churchill off a bit too easily.
At the time, India was under British rule. Both the British government, and the Crown knew what was going on in Bengal, and chose inaction. Churchill himself openly held anti-Indian sentiment calling them "a beastly people with a beastly religion" and that any sort of relief sent would accomplish little to nothing as as Indians are "breeding like rabbits."
This man actively chose to let people under his rule starve.
It's also worth pointing out that India was a significant presence during WWII, "By the end of the war, it had become the largest volunteer army in history, rising to over 2.5 million men in August 1945", and a significant contributor to the state of things is how hard the British colonial rule pressed the local industries for the sake of the war. The military sucked up a lot of produce leaving scraps for the domestic market, which was significantly upcharged so only the rich classes could afford anything.
In the system that the British Government used to procure goods through the Government of India, industries were left in private ownership rather than facing outright requisitioning of their productive capacity. Firms were required to sell goods to the military on credit and at fixed, low prices. However, firms were left free to charge any price they desired in their domestic market for whatever they had left over.
Further, the British government censored media, forbidding them from reporting on the famine. Things didn't really take a turn until The Statesman published photos of the famine, which made it around the world and the British government stood there with egg on their face.
Churchill on the other hand, ate well.
Churchills attitude and comments about it suggests otherwise. He was hailed as an evil cruel racist, not in retrospect, but during the war. Churchill wasn’t well liked, as people think he was during his time. The people that think Churchill was one of Britain best PMs have only a basic understanding of British history. Churchill was immediately voted out as soon as elections resumed. When he got back in a PM his party had less votes than the opposition.
Churchill was nevertheless a PoS. For example he was also responsible for the Greek civil war post-ww2
You're absolutely right. I was trying to be concise and in turn made it sound pretty accusatory.
There has been a number of investigations by both the British and Indian governments since the famine. The general consensus is that it was caused by bad management and unresolved socio-economic issues over any purposeful acts of cruelty.
I personally don't think Churchill actively encouraged the famine in India, but he was an ardent supporter of maintaining the empire by any means necessary.
Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong have all committed atrocities far worse. And I do agree that Leopold belongs on that list too.
You could make that same argument for stalin and the holodomor which is often used as the main proof of his evilness. Same with mao, most of the deaths attributed to them are from failed policies that caused mass famines. Do you think Churchill is on the same level as them? Because most of the west views the first two as mass murdering tyrants and Churchill as a hero.
You could say there worse because they ran oppressive authoritarian states, but the British empire was just as authoritarian to anyone who wasn't white.
hitler did to europe what europe had done to the rest of the world for centuries
Hitler did to Europe's poor and downtrodden what Europe's rich and priveleged had done for centuries.
No, because the Nazis are the biggest losers in History.
Their claim that their people and army were superior, while not even being able to win a single war made them so.