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usaphp

You comparing Stalin to Hitler? Are people mad these days?

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12745229 and marked it off-topic.

Well, both are dictators responsible for the death of millions of people for political and ethnic reasons.

They are perfectly comparable.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/03/10/hitler-vs-stalin-... http://historyofrussia.org/stalin-killed-how-many-people/

> Well, both are dictators responsible for the death of millions of people for political and ethnic reasons.

I guess that's Hitler, Stalin and Churchill[1] then.

1. The Bengal famine claimed between 1.5-4m lives

Why would it be mad? Because Hitler singled out an ethnic group for extermination in addition to political opponents rather than just killing off political opponents? They both racked up a comparable body-counts of their own people as rulers (well, enough for both to be consider mass-murders, though I understand that Stalin had a high body-count).

Why not? This seems like a fairly common comparison, made by actual historians. Some estimate that Stalins death toll may exceed that of Hitler.

I'd love to hear your reasoning why the comparison is so wildly incorrect that it earns this response.

Would you put George bush in that comparison? Or we already forgot how hundreds of thousand people died during invasion of Iraq for clear political reasons?

You are addressing criticisms of Stalin with a logical fallacy called "whataboutism".

I just hate hypocrites...You did not answer my question either.

We know that you hate the US, that's fine. But that doesn't mean you can't be objective about your own country's history.

Where exactly did I say I hate US? Quite the opposite I love It. I hate politicians who make stupid decisions that ruin people's lives. And nobody talks about those ruined lives anymore because it's not popular. Why can't you be objective about your country history that killed hundred thousands of innocent people in Iraq, Kosovo conflict and those Guantanamo prisons?

Please. George Bush did not run a dictatorship, had very limited power and did not kill his political opponents. There would be much more to say, but I'll leave it at that.

Is your comment designed to make this a USSR/USA thing?

Both were dictators who killed millions. Seems like a reasonable comparison.

Add Sir Winston Churchill to the list. He is personally responsible for death of millions of Bengali people.

We don't count them.

Still, nobody would compare Churchill (or Bush; see above) to Hitler or Stalin. This is because Hitler was not just responsible for the people killed in WWII. Hitler and Stalin also killed people because they wanted to get rid of personal enemies and because they actually wanted to do some form of ethnic cleansing.

Do you have any facts about Stalin doing "ethnic cleansing"? I thought he put people into Gulags no matter what ethnicity they were.

The US _today_ has the highest incarceration rate per 1000 people in the world. It uses slave labor in private prisons _today_. Why are you so keen on digging the Soviet past. Because it is safer to bark on a dead lion?

Well, the US government did ethnic cleansing during the WW2 by putting all Japanese americans to concentration camps. Don't bark onto dead lions. Look what your own government is doing with your own nation today. You have slave labour in private prisons!

They were both dictators that killed millions of their own citizens.

Stalin killed far more people than Hitler, and Mao killed far more people than Stalin. I'm not sure where this instinct to give brutal dictators a pass so long as they were leftists comes from, but it makes no sense.

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