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Comment by nudpiedo | Hacker News Reader

One should not infinitely demonize one side and picture the other as innocent/fighter of freedom when there was such a prolonged conflict and both sides committed selective mass murders against civilians (you can however argue that a side was even more evil than the other, but that's not the topic of today).

When a side is superior to the other the conflict is solved in a few weeks/months at most. The national side didn't do the war alone, and the war almost stagnated during long periods of time because at times there was no easy conclusion on the horizon and no side wanted to give up.

Everything else is propaganda and ideology I believe, prove me wrong otherwise.

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In a turbulent time in the politics of country X, an important part of the army of that country rebels against the elected government, wins a terrible civil war, and proceed to establish a 40 years catholic-fascist dictatorship.

I tried to take away all the propaganda and ideology.

Everyone can judge now by itself if what happened in country X was evil.

You just omitted everything, for example that the republic had 8 different Coup d'etat and that it often needed to use the army to repress their own civilians, restrict rights in many regions and became ungovernable during most of its time. Neither the Republic was a free democratically elected nor the dictatorship was fascist during its whole time in the power. And still the fascist dictatorship was still terrible with no doubt, but missing the key facts misses the point of history which should be to honor the truth to avoid repeating those mistakes again.

You are still judging it in the frame of the modern world. Do not romanticize the past by judging only parts of the story projecting modern ideas on them.

Saludos Roberto.

No, you're right.

One of the big issues in historical discussions, especially if you get out of scholarly material is that a lot of people do tend to have overly simplified views of conflicts and if they've got a side they are biased towards, the other side is demonized, as you have said.

In any conflict, especially war, the door is opened for vendettas and sociopathy and basically evil (chaos is a ladder). The Nationalists had Hitler and Mussolini as backers, the Republicans had Stalin. Of course, both sides (yes, both sides) had good people that were stuck in the middle of it for whatever reason.

Hemingway's account in the middle of For Whom the Bell Tolls where the rebels go into the town and murder priests and other supporters of the conservatives really struck me. Hemingway actually fought with the left and was sympathetic to them, but even he was aware of atrocities that were being committed by his own side.

The demonization of the other side and the inability to call out our own side when they're doing wrong really just weakens one's own cause. It's kind of sad that we as humans still haven't figured that out, but I guess it's something about how we are and it's a tragedy cause on that other side is just another person.

I think it's part of human nature to form groups and keep ideologies and believes in spite of knowing that's not rational. Still I think speaking to single individuals could lead that to better conclusions than just anonymous discussions on the internet or speeches for the masses.

Somehow I lost faith in education of the masses since in the last 20 years I've seen how the biggest part of population got access to a higher volume of information but with higher biases than ever before and more and more sources being deeply biased by an activist or political agenda. That's probably also part of the democratization of the internet, bringing our old habits into this new reign now open to everyone.

One should also not pretend that, because both sides did bad things, that automatically makes them morally equivalent.

Bad things happen in war. German troops committed war crimes in World War II; so did American troops. That doesn't mean they committed the same number of war crimes, or crimes on the same scale, or that the American cause was therefore morally equivalent to the German. Volume matters. Scale matters. Intent matters.

Your logic leads inexorably to false balance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance), where anyone who isn't perfectly pure is therefore completely impure and therefore all sides are always the same. That's not how the world works. Even the best-hearted people make mistakes and do bad things. Saying one crime is morally the same as many crimes, or one small crime is morally the same as one gigantic one, or one accidental crime is morally the same as one committed on purpose, only serves to give the worst among us a free pass.

> prove me wrong otherwise.

Spare us the Ben Shapiro posturing, please.

I don't believe any of his statements imply moral equivalence. I can believe (using your example of WW2) that on the whole, Imperial Japan was a more evil system (rape of Nanking? unprovoked attacks?) but still see Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the murder of Japanese prisoners of war as evil acts of their own. That's not the kind of slippery slope you are describing, it's just how history works

I really think bringing in the rhetorical attacks and the references to Shapiro and modern politics (nobody wass taking about that guy) is disingenuous and takes the discussion out of the historical and into today's politics, which isn't useful and distracting.

I never said there was a balance, just that none of the sides deserve any praise or romanization when the other to gets the sole attribution of any evil acts. Both sides performed mass murders of civilians. Stop praising people who did that just because an even more depictable side won that conflict.

> Spare us the Ben Shapiro posturing, please.

Maybe that's your issue, you are projecting your frustrations on me and answer things I never said.

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