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Comment by cup | Hacker News Reader

Why are they compared to each other? Completely different people operating completely different systems with completely different goals.

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They were all dictators operating totalitarian regimes with the goal of absolute power. So they wore slightly different symbols on their arms, the difference between them was only a scrap of cloth.

American society seems to see plenty of difference between purposefully inflicting direct harm and harm as a side-effect of policies not specifically intended to inflict it (enough that politicians will invoke the latter as defense even in instances of the former).

Hell, even in solely the former case it makes a large difference depending on the specifics of the intended target of direct purposeful harm.

More generally, intent is a huge factors in evaluating responsibility & level of harm, and to a lower level so is specificity.

American society

Western society in general has plenty who want to try these policies again because they say this time it will be different.

The only difference you care about. Other people see other differences. You need to talk to more Russians and Chinese if you think a one dimensional comparison has merit. The unofficial party line on Mao (as the article says) is 70% right and 30% wrong. That's a more nuanced position than you think.

They were all twentieth century dictators responsible for millions of deaths.

They were all products of their time, at the start of their mass killing careers firmly believing in making the world better through massive and rapid social change (Mao and Stalin believed in progressive change, Hitler was more 'regressive' although it's more complicated than that). They were inspired by Marx (yes, even Hitler) and his followers.

Hitler and Stalin resided in the same town for a while http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21859771

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