He never shot anyone while working as a courier in the Great War? It’s not impossible, I’ve just never heard that before.
Oh right, Hitler fought in world war one. That had escaped me. Then he probably shot people personally, but he might not have. Also during the failed putsch he participated in some fighting. But Stalin was a badass resistance fighter in his early life. The point though is that evil dictators usually don’t do the dirty work once they are in power. We consider them evil because of their influence. Since it’s about thir infuence, it’s odd that we count certain causes of death but not others.
Oh right, Hitler fought in world war one. That had escaped me.
That’s funny, because WW1 is pretty much the reason Hitler was Hitler.
Guess he did a thorough job, hey?
That is the oldest trick in the book. Kill everyone that disagrees with you and poll the remainder. Like Iraq/Aghanistan.
Also available at EPJ. At about 22 minutes in, he talks about how many Stalin bumped off, quoting chapter and verse of books and official soviet archives.
And the winner is… 60 million plus.
But don’t worry, Stalin lovers, Mao Tse Tung beat him with 70 million.
This is not counting those who died of starvation. Add another 20 to 40 million for that, he says.
Omelettes. Eggs. Polylogism.
What I just can’t comprehend is why people are so obsessed with trying to minimize the number of deaths at the hands of tyrants. What does it matter if it was 60 million, 40 million, 20 million or “merely” 200,000??? Even the Stalin apologist concedes an entire major city murdered… how the hell does it matter??? If it’s a supposed skepticism of politically exaggerated death numbers, fine, but go in and actually look at the data and provide reasoned critiques for the numbers… but don’t play word games like “yeah, but Stallin didn’t personally shoot 60 million people” as if that doesn’t go without saying. It doesn’t matter whether government ordered death is administered individually (as in direct execution) or collectively (as in a seige or artificial famine)… it’s still the direct result of the criminal actions of an individual leader and his henchmen. The only tempering that should be applied to death-by-government statistics is that of moderating our surprise… it should come as no surprise that governments are so deadly or criminal. It’s only if you first accept the fairy-tale peddled by the Establishment that governments are run by magical elves sprinkled in pixie dust who are only interested in saving babies, feeding the homeless and defending the helpless that it can come as a surprise that governments are invariably run by sociopathic murders and maintain power over a pile of dead bodies that staggers the imagination.
Clayton -
What about Holodomor? Do you include that?
By this token you are only saying this because you must love Hitler.
“By this token you are only saying this because you must love Hitler.”
Non sequitur. He isn’t saying that people minimise the number because they love Stalin, he is only saying that those who love Stalin would want Stalin to look good, which is less and less possible the higher the murder toll is. With Mao’s death toll being higher, they can at least say ‘Mao was worse’ (though they may be Mao-lovers also). True Stalin lovers probably wouldn’t care, since the 60 million were just bourgeois supernumeraries standing in the way of the Socialist Utopia and therefore deserved to be liquidated.
No, he is saying people who disagree are Stalin lovers.
According to Rummel the US killed less people than the Yugoslav Partisans. How very gutsy.