Originally posted by Cheung
[email protected] 06, 2007 06:42 am
I know the conventional answers are "considerably more than Hitler", but I've never asked a Stalin defender (I prefer not to use the term "Stalinist" when addressing his defenders due to its perjorative connotation. I don't think you're fond of the term anyways.).
Numbers, sources, and a refutation of the conventional numbers (if one is available) would all be nice.
Thank you
How many people did Churchill kill? More than Hitler? I would say no. Does this make me a "Churchill defender"?
Stalin's dictatorship was clearly criminal, and even autophagic. However, there was a critical difference between it and Hitler's regime: the latter was directly intent on depopulating Eastern Europe from its aboriginal population, in order to make place for German political and demographic expansion.
So, when the Wehrmacht attacked the Red Army in June, 1941, it was followed, from day one, by a parallel military structure - the SS - whose purpose was to eliminate each and every Jew and Gipsy in the occupied area, as well as any other inhabitants who could not be used as a slave labourer in the German war effort.
This was never true of Stalin's dictatorship, at any moment of it's history. It never attempted to exterminate Poles, Ucrainians, Kazakhs, or Germans, to expand its own economical domination.
This does not mean that many people didn't die because of the dictatorship's absurd mistakes in economic management, or due to its paranoid fear of even more absurd conspiracies. But the qualitative difference is still there, for anyone to see.
Of course, then there are Nazi sympathisers in the Ukraine, or Latvia, or Lithuania, whose political agenda is to put an equal sign between Stalin crimes and Hitler's, because they are accomplicits of the latter. But we should not accept the false dichotomy between being Stalinists and downplaying Nazi German's atrocities in Eastern Europe.
Luís Henrique