I think you brush over the conquests of the USSR (you write: "What Stalin mostly didn’t do was conquer and expand the USSR’s territory."). Sure, compared to the already vast territory of the USSR, pre-WWII, that might be somewhat true but it certainly does not feel like that to Estonians, Latvians or Lithuanians whose independent countries were swallowed by Stalin or to Poland which saw its border move quite a bit westwards.
It took 46 years for the Baltics to regain their freedom but the eastern parts of Poland, pre-WWII, seem forever lost.
The USSR lost nearly 5 million troops during the first year of Barbarossa. Which was also pretty much all Stalin's doing. He'd already purged pretty much his entire senior (general) staff during his purges; meaning there were no officers with the capability of commanding any unit over brigade size. He insisted on positioning most of the Red Army and Air Force close to the border--within striking distance of the Germans.
And even after the panzers were encircling huge pockets of his troops, he committed reinforcements into fresh pockets of encirclement and death, practically to the gates of Moscow.
The ~30 million Soviet civilians who perished during the next three years were those trapped behind German lines. Lines that his own ineptitude and paranoia directly created.
Also Finland, and Bessarabia. He absolutely was expanding and attempting to expand prior to getting double crossed by his boy Adolf. And after the war he turned the entirety of eastern Europe into puppet regimes. What are you talking about Noah?
The Soviets also had a significant percentage of the Ingush and Chechen population deported to central Asia with inadequate food and shelter. Predictably,this resulted in a high death rate. Stalin was almost certainly aware and approved of it. Both ethnic groups were small so the number of deaths wasn't that large compared to the total Soviet population.
But even those was almost all former territories from the Russian Empire, that could be argued that were "stolen" under duress in the Brest-Litovsk treaty (exceptions - Konigsberg, Bukuvina, Ruthenia/Zakarpatia)
2 things about the Rwanda genocide & the Congo wars:
1) Yes the Hutu Power had a hateful ethnic ideology, but that kind of understates it. What made the Rwanda genocide so awful besides ethnic hatred was the Hutu sense of historical grievance which the Hutu felt was justified. Hutu ideology was based on "you oppressed us, so now it's own turn".
Before colonialism, Hutu were historically serfs to Tutsi aristocrats. In fact, Hutu-Tutsi were more historically caste systems more than races. The Germans, and later Belgians more-or-less racialized the caste system. Though Razib Khan, the geneticist had done some research showing that there is some genetic variation from Hutu and Tutsi. But basically, if you had more cows you were a Tutsi, Rich people were cattle herders and if you didn't how cows, you were a farmer, or a Hutu. The Hutu were serfs of Tutsi. In pre-colonial Rwanda, there was Uburetwa, a system of bonded labor, tied Hutu farmers to Tutsi patrons through the ubuhake patron-client relationship.
When the Hutu created their ideology under the Parahutu party, they would mention how they were serfs/servants under Tutsi for centuries. Basically, using historical grievance to justify being an asshole. Literally before independence, the Hutu kicked out 100K Tutsi into neighboring Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, and Congo and refused to take them back.
It also didn't help that after independence, Burundi was a Tutsi Monarchy while Rwanda was a Hutu Republic, and they used to trade places ethnically cleansing the other group, and they would use the other country as a scapegoat to say "see this is why you can't have THEM RULE!"
2) While the Hutu government did cause the Rwanda genocide. The 2nd Congo War had a pull and push factor. The Hutu killers fled to East Congo and attacked Rwanda from there. So, Kagame and Museveni of Uganda invaded East Congo to stop their attacks, which kickstarted the Congo Wars.
We need to step back. What happened first was during the genocide, France had a UN mandate for peacekeeping and they made the blue zone in southwest Rwanda. Hutu refugees and genocidaires left the zone and entered East Congo because they thought they were going to be killed by Kagame. In East Congo there was then refugee camps were Hutu lived and the Hutu genocidaires attacked Rwanda from East Congo.
Kagame told the West "bro I am going to enter Congo unless you help me", the West didn't do anything. So Kagame and Museveni of Uganda (who had his own issues with the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in East Congo) worked with a Congolese warlord and smuggler named Laurent Kabila to overthrow Mobutu and then Kabila would be Kagame and Museveni's Lackey to remove the Hutu murderers and ADF. They removed Mobutu and killed some genocidaires, but 250K congolese in the east died. That was the first Congo War.
The 2nd Congo war was when Kabila betrayed Kagame and Museveni, allowed the Hutu to kill Congolese Tutsi (called Banyamulenge), and didn't help Kagame remove the remaining Hutu genocidaires. As a result, Kagame took matters into his own hands causing the cluster fuck of the 2nd congo war causing 5M deaths (most deaths were actually disease and famine).
I'm struggling to see any examples in this link that are comparable.
For example, i see the Ottoman turks as an example, but they slaughtered the Armenians. The Armenians did not historically make Turks bonded servants. Turks just thought Armenians were a threat and would act as a 5th column for Russians, so they killed them.
Also, it mentions the holocaust. Again the jews never put Germans in servitude. It also uses Pol Pot who killed the urban dwellers and minorities as the Khmer Rouge saw them as a threat that needed to be dealth with.
This article is more about genocidaires rationalizing why they should kill their enemy to destroy a preemptive threat. That's not the same of what i was talking about, which is where a formerly subjugated group uses historical subjugation as an excuse to murder the currently oppressed people (who were the historical subjugators).
"But basically, if you had more cows you were a Tutsi, Rich people were cattle herders and if you didn't how cows, you were a farmer, or a Hutu."
I think this is largely a myth (but probably an useful myth, if you could convice tutis and hutu to believe that), and tutsis are really a distinct people (probably nilotic) who conquered the hutus some centuries ago (even if after they adopted the bantu language of the hutus, like other conqueror peoples in history, like the Germanic-speaking Visigoths in Iberian Peninsula, who adopted some kind of Romance language)
Not a myth at all. Read any scholarly book on Rwandan history and you'll learn about it. I have many Rwandan friends (and dated one for a few years) and this is just basic, removed from propaganda history.
Quite literally, when a Hutu received a cow in pre-colonial times, it was called "kwihutura" - “to shed Hutu status” in their language kinyarwanda. When a Tutsi lost cows due to cattle disease or poor care, it was called "guhutura" - “To fall into Hutu status”). It's literally in the language. Precolonial rwanda was a semi-feudal cow economy.
As said before I do think there is some genetic differences (as I said Razib Khan has done some research on it, plus they just look different...), at the end of the day it was caste system. Hutu were literally serfs of the Tutsi Aristocracy, and precolonial Rwanda (and burundi, and the Ankole in sourhwest uganda, and frankly a lot of precolonial east africa) were cow economies where wealth was measured in cows.
The weird thing with studying the Nazis is: You already know they were bad, you try to prepare yourself for the worst and then you study the details and you get floored by the realization that it actually was way, way worse and that - no - you are not prepared at all. And then all this happens again. And again.
For all you innocents, who only know about the mere 5,95 million killed in the "holocaust": If you want to have a really bad day, then research Oskar Dirlewanger and Christian Wirth.
Great list. America has a history of working with commies to defeat fascists as you stated. But we also have a history of working with fascists/far rightists to defeat commies.
For example, America helped the right wing monarchists to fight the commies in Greece. Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomingtang had some fascist leanings (his paramilitary blue shirts was modeled after the Italian blackshirts and german brownshirts) and we tried to help him against the CPC. We helped Suharto liquidate nearly 1M leftists. We helped Syngman Rhee's far right South Korean military government against the Kim family in the Korean Civil war. Greece & Portugal were both in NATO to contain the soviets while they had their far right governments. Salazar was a founding member, and greece was still in nato when the miliaey junta was in power.
Why isn’t Elon musk on the 21st century list of monsters. His DOGE dismantling of USAID has caused an estimated 700,000 preventable deaths. The Lancet estimates 14 people will die of preventable deaths, via the dismantling of USAID, by the end of 2030. And Musk saw this as an opportunity to joke: “Could have gone to parties this weekend. Instead tossed USAID into the wood chipper.”
It’s unconscionable to sanewash, overlook, omit this administrative genocide.
I don’t like this argument about USAID and think it’s counterproductive. I won’t quibble about the numbers. I think the message and moral logic around the issue are bad and may ultimately be harmful. By holding Elon up as one of the century’s great monsters for his role in destroying the agency I feel people are saying that ending a good and beneficial activity is morally equivalent to deliberately beginning a bad and destructive activity. My worry is that if it’s monstrous to stop doing good then there is some disincentive to start doing good in the first place.
This most definitely walks off with the championship trophy for most convoluted logic. The preventable deaths of 14 million people, twice the number that died in the Nazi Death camp system, millions will be children five years of age and under isn’t counterproductive? Elon Musk is a very sick
man who thinks empathy is a weakness. Equating morality with logic? Having spent time working in a Third World country or a Covid-19 POD in the midst of a pandemic clears up any confusion about incentives or disincentives. If causing the preventable deaths of 14 million people doesn’t make one a monster, I shudder to think what does.
Only insanity can sanewash what Musk and his DOGE operatives have done. For the record, these were crimes because DOGE didn’t have the proper security clearances to access these databases. Recommended reading: “Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of show the Trump Administration Shredded USAID,” by Nicholas Enrich. Musk and Marco Rubio have repeatedly lied about the fatal consequences of the dismantling of USAID. Rubio lied to a House Subcommittee. Musk continues to lad out on X at Bruce Springsteen, Nicolas Kristof, et alia. When confronted with the fatality facts, Musk responds with childish and profane insults.
So, Elon Musk is worse than Hitler? And not only is he worse than Hitler, but he is vastly more efficient as he managed to produce more evil in less than one year than hitler did in 12 years in power. And he manages to do it as basically a part time henchman while continuing to spend some time on his regular job? Alright, you might have convinced me.
"By the early 2000s, hipsters in my dorm were already hanging ironic Chairman Mao posters in their rooms"
They weren't ironic. And almost every socialist in the west were actual fans of Mao (and Lenin, and Stalin and Pot and...) when he was doing his thing. This is why I say we should stop treating socialists as people who just want "good" (they don't, their ideology is based on evil envy), they're as monstrous as the nazis, every single one. Socialists shouldn't be welcome in civil society.
"They weren't ironic. And almost every socialist in the west were actual fans of Mao "
Nops - at the time was a clear distinction between Maoist groups and the other left-wing groups, and Maoists were a smal minority in all Wester countries (and, ironically, sometimes were allied with the right-wing against other left-wing factions, with a tendency to see the pro-Soviet Communists - "revisionists", "social-fascists" - has the main enemy)
1) Mao: The Untold Story, by Jung Chang and Holliday is not "the authoritative biography of Mao." It is, ironically, a Maoist style hit piece against Mao. Mao was a bad person. Mao did see the Chinese people as means for his own elevation. All of this is true. The problem with Mao the Untold Story is that, like a Maoist struggle session, it takes the conclusion: Mao was a horrible monster, and then fits every piece of his biography into that frame.
During the Cultural Revolution, cadres would take some random person, tell them they were a "capitalist roader" and then force them to recount their life story and point out how every part of it shows their political deviance.
Reading Mao the Untold Story gives the same feeling.
2) I love how you unironically write "Removed” here means “killed”, since the Nazis intended to take all of the land."
And yet can't understand why many people see the Israeli Right's plan to settle and take all of the West Bank and Gaza as .... genocidal. As you say, "wanting to take all the land" means death or removal for the locals.
"And yet can't understand why many people see the Israeli Right's plan to settle and take all of the West Bank and Gaza as .... genocidal." <-- It would be! But that plan has not been executed yet.
Also, FWIW, the Hamas plan -- which most Palestinians themselves seem to support -- is to do exactly the same thing to the Israelis that the Israeli Right wants to do to the Palestinians.
So, faced with an intractable conflict between two groups of people who want to expel and (probably) genocide each other, I think our best bet is to limit our involvement in the conflict.
There are 529,000 people in settlements in the West Bank. It seems like it is a genocide "in process," by some percentage.
Do we argue that the Holocaust and the German General Plan Ost wasn't genocidal until they got X percentage into Poland and killed Y thousands of people?
At what threshold of land theft and expulsion does the existing settler project go from "unexecuted to executed?"
Americans under the age of 30 have never lived in a world where a settler in the West Bank couldn't shoot a Palestinian in full view of Israeli troops and get away with it.
Hamas are bad people who want to do bad things. That doesn't change the Israeli right's and the Israeli government's culpability anymore than the existence of the Holodomor excused Operation Barbarossa.
If it was just settlers, it wouldn't be genocide. It would be a zoning issue. It is the "settlement" + "expulsion/land theft" + "avowed intent to take all of the West Bank" that tips it over the line.
No, this is nonsense. A settler murdering a Palestinian and getting away with it is evidence of murder and impunity, not “some percentage of genocide.” Illegal settlements, expulsions and abuses do not magically add up into genocide. Genocide requires an intention to destroy a people, not merely the existence of serious crimes against them.
And comparing this to Generalplan Ost is obscene. Germany explicitly intended to murder, starve and deport tens of millions so Germans could replace them. Israel is not carrying out a half-finished Holocaust in the West Bank. If your argument repeatedly needs Jews to become Nazis before it feels morally powerful enough, people are going to notice the Jew hate underneath it. You aren't a serious person.
Does Israel's occupation of West Bank and Gaza and continual expansion of settlements count as a plan? To me it seems like they're in the process of executing their plan, albeit slowly.
Are you serious? With between 6 and 9 million Palestinian refugees? With essentially the entire territory of the state of Israel taken from Palestinians? The West Bank and Gaza are just the final steps of an already executed plan of genocide. We are seeing a resurrection of the glory days of the genocides in the Old Testament.
"With between 6 and 9 million Palestinian refugees?" You mean the grandkids of grandkids of refugees who inherit refugee status (different from literally any other group on earth, even though there are similar conflicts, the other ones just don't happen to involve jews vs muslims). You're delusional.
" You mean the grandkids of grandkids of refugees who inherit refugee status (different from literally any other group on earth"
All refugees inherit the status - Iran and Pakistan are also full of "Afghan refugees" whose grandparents fled Afghanistan after Soviet invasion; the same for Karen refugees from Burma in Thailand, etc. Afaik, the hereditability of the status of refugee is more narrow for Palestinians: I think that, while the ACNUR recognize the children of a refugee father or a refugee mother as refugees, the UNRWA only recognize the children a refugee father.
I wonder from what that "urban myth" (that only the Palestinian refugees pass the status to their children) even came to life
No. You found examples of refugees having children while the same displacement remains unresolved, then quietly changed that into “all refugees inherit status.” Genius.
If an Afghan refugee is resettled in Sweden, becomes a Swedish citizen and has grandchildren here, those grandchildren are obviously not Afghan refugees. That single example destroys your absolute claim.
UNHCR’s general system is not hereditary refugee status. Its own handbook says family unity is not part of the Convention’s refugee definition. Derivative status normally covers spouses and minor dependent children, and is not called for when the person has another nationality and enjoys that country’s protection. The Convention also says refugee status ceases when someone acquires a new nationality and enjoys its protection.
The Afghan and Karen examples concern children born into ongoing, unresolved displacement. It does not make UNRWA’s system normal (where you inherit refugee-status EVEN IF YOU HAVE PROTECTION IN ANOTHER COUNTRY, IDIOT).
UNRWA maintains a separate, generation-unlimited registration category for male-line descendants of the original 1948 population. UNRWA itself admits that this registration does not confer refugee status under the Refugee Convention. It establishes eligibility for UNRWA services. It also keeps Palestinians with full citizenship elsewhere in its refugee count, including most registered Palestinians in Jordan.
Your mother-versus-father point isolates one narrow difference while ignoring the much larger one. UNHCR’s derivative protection during continuing displacement is not identical to UNRWA registration passed down indefinitely by ancestry.
So no, the distinction is not an “urban myth.” The myth is your claim that every refugee’s descendants automatically inherit refugee status in the same manner.
According to Google AI search for "how many Palestinians are in refugee camps":
About 1.5 million registered Palestinian refugees live in 58 official refugee camps. This is roughly one-third of the total registered refugee population, which is supported by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
West Bank and Gaza are relatively small territories - probably the Israeli Right don't have any problem in killing all Palestinians there, but their plan is easily done in a 1948-redux, simply expelling Palestinians to other countries (mutatis mutandis, the same for the "from the water to the water, Palestine will be Arab" crowd)
I think you're a little too kind to Stalin. He definitely tried to conquer. He conquered the Baltic states, parts of Romania and other parts of Eastern Europe. He did not annex the Warsaw Pact nations but they were tributary states.
While Mr. Smith’s evaluation seems valid enough, I am reminded of some of the lyrics of Buffy St Marie’s Universal Soldier.
“Without him how would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau. Without him Caesar would have stood alone”
Without the support of millions of their supporters none of these ‘monsters’ would have amounted to a hill of beans.
The real tragedy of the human condition is how often hundreds upon thousands upon millions of ordinary people have been willing to follow such leaders no matter how awful the consequences, not only for their supposed ‘enemies’ but for themselves as well.
The English poet John Dunne had it right. “Therefore do not send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”
Interesting -- I never learned about the Nazi's Hunger Plan as a long term plan for starving to death eastern Europe, although I knew that millions of Russians and Ukrainians died during WW2 from deliberate starvation in Nazi occupied areas. However, Wikipedia has a good article on the subject.
Phillip K Dick must have read about it, since in The Man in the High Castle, he describes what is effectively the Hunger Plan's results, and extrapolates it to using nuclear weapons in Africa, and a future war for territory against Japan.
You most obviously omitted, for reasons I do not understand, the killing of perhaps 5% or more of the population of Gaza, often through indiscriminate aerial bombing with 2,000 pound bombs supplied by the US, the deliberate prevention of the supply by the US and international forces of food and water to the Gazan civilian population, the forced resettlement of perhaps 90% of the population, and the destruction of over 70% of the housing and infrastructure in the territory. Why is this not mentioned in your list of 21st Century issues?
It is definitely not at the same magnitude as other examples are. Hamas (and Gazans that overwhelmingly support it) attacked first with a brutal slaughter. They also want Israel to stop existing.
With regard to Putin, don’t forget the Chechnya wars and the as many as 200,000 civilians killed there. His internal suppression has been brutal.
Also, don’t forget his tendency to assassinate anyone whom he thinks might work against him, whether in Russia or abroad. There’s a reason that former Russians I know joke darkly about the dangers of having a balcony on your apartment.
Interesting that Japan is overlooked, though you make a compelling case for them to be ranked 2nd. I guess it’s because we Americans focus more on events in Europe.
It's true that Americans focus on events in Europe, but probably because Americans have been largely a European population. In America, war has become entertainment. Think of the endless replays of Normandy and Pearl Harbor
. It would be different if the European wars and the Asian wars had been fought on American soil.
Have to add Enver Hoxha for honorable mention. He only doesn't make the list because Albania is a small country. Hoxha did make Christopher Hitchens' list of dictators to write about in his book on dictators. My wife's family was disposessed, banished, tortured and killed at various stages. Horrible. Not completely "psychotic" like the Khmer Rouge, however. A good use of the word here by Noah.
I was watching a lecture series on the peoples of the steppe last month. And the professor said something pretty funny/strange; on the one hand, Genghis Khan killed tens of millions of people and pulverized many ancient cities into dust, but on the other hand new trade links between Europe and Asia were established.
I think you brush over the conquests of the USSR (you write: "What Stalin mostly didn’t do was conquer and expand the USSR’s territory."). Sure, compared to the already vast territory of the USSR, pre-WWII, that might be somewhat true but it certainly does not feel like that to Estonians, Latvians or Lithuanians whose independent countries were swallowed by Stalin or to Poland which saw its border move quite a bit westwards.
It took 46 years for the Baltics to regain their freedom but the eastern parts of Poland, pre-WWII, seem forever lost.
The USSR lost nearly 5 million troops during the first year of Barbarossa. Which was also pretty much all Stalin's doing. He'd already purged pretty much his entire senior (general) staff during his purges; meaning there were no officers with the capability of commanding any unit over brigade size. He insisted on positioning most of the Red Army and Air Force close to the border--within striking distance of the Germans.
And even after the panzers were encircling huge pockets of his troops, he committed reinforcements into fresh pockets of encirclement and death, practically to the gates of Moscow.
The ~30 million Soviet civilians who perished during the next three years were those trapped behind German lines. Lines that his own ineptitude and paranoia directly created.
Also Finland, and Bessarabia. He absolutely was expanding and attempting to expand prior to getting double crossed by his boy Adolf. And after the war he turned the entirety of eastern Europe into puppet regimes. What are you talking about Noah?
The Soviets also had a significant percentage of the Ingush and Chechen population deported to central Asia with inadequate food and shelter. Predictably,this resulted in a high death rate. Stalin was almost certainly aware and approved of it. Both ethnic groups were small so the number of deaths wasn't that large compared to the total Soviet population.
But even those was almost all former territories from the Russian Empire, that could be argued that were "stolen" under duress in the Brest-Litovsk treaty (exceptions - Konigsberg, Bukuvina, Ruthenia/Zakarpatia)
2 things about the Rwanda genocide & the Congo wars:
1) Yes the Hutu Power had a hateful ethnic ideology, but that kind of understates it. What made the Rwanda genocide so awful besides ethnic hatred was the Hutu sense of historical grievance which the Hutu felt was justified. Hutu ideology was based on "you oppressed us, so now it's own turn".
Before colonialism, Hutu were historically serfs to Tutsi aristocrats. In fact, Hutu-Tutsi were more historically caste systems more than races. The Germans, and later Belgians more-or-less racialized the caste system. Though Razib Khan, the geneticist had done some research showing that there is some genetic variation from Hutu and Tutsi. But basically, if you had more cows you were a Tutsi, Rich people were cattle herders and if you didn't how cows, you were a farmer, or a Hutu. The Hutu were serfs of Tutsi. In pre-colonial Rwanda, there was Uburetwa, a system of bonded labor, tied Hutu farmers to Tutsi patrons through the ubuhake patron-client relationship.
When the Hutu created their ideology under the Parahutu party, they would mention how they were serfs/servants under Tutsi for centuries. Basically, using historical grievance to justify being an asshole. Literally before independence, the Hutu kicked out 100K Tutsi into neighboring Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, and Congo and refused to take them back.
It also didn't help that after independence, Burundi was a Tutsi Monarchy while Rwanda was a Hutu Republic, and they used to trade places ethnically cleansing the other group, and they would use the other country as a scapegoat to say "see this is why you can't have THEM RULE!"
2) While the Hutu government did cause the Rwanda genocide. The 2nd Congo War had a pull and push factor. The Hutu killers fled to East Congo and attacked Rwanda from there. So, Kagame and Museveni of Uganda invaded East Congo to stop their attacks, which kickstarted the Congo Wars.
We need to step back. What happened first was during the genocide, France had a UN mandate for peacekeeping and they made the blue zone in southwest Rwanda. Hutu refugees and genocidaires left the zone and entered East Congo because they thought they were going to be killed by Kagame. In East Congo there was then refugee camps were Hutu lived and the Hutu genocidaires attacked Rwanda from East Congo.
Kagame told the West "bro I am going to enter Congo unless you help me", the West didn't do anything. So Kagame and Museveni of Uganda (who had his own issues with the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in East Congo) worked with a Congolese warlord and smuggler named Laurent Kabila to overthrow Mobutu and then Kabila would be Kagame and Museveni's Lackey to remove the Hutu murderers and ADF. They removed Mobutu and killed some genocidaires, but 250K congolese in the east died. That was the first Congo War.
The 2nd Congo war was when Kabila betrayed Kagame and Museveni, allowed the Hutu to kill Congolese Tutsi (called Banyamulenge), and didn't help Kagame remove the remaining Hutu genocidaires. As a result, Kagame took matters into his own hands causing the cluster fuck of the 2nd congo war causing 5M deaths (most deaths were actually disease and famine).
You can learn more in depth about Rwanda here:
pre-colonial & colonial: https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/the-economic-and-geopolitical-history-4cf
1960s to Rwandan Civil War: https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/the-economic-and-geopolitical-history-fce
Rwanda Genocide & 1st Congo War: https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/the-economic-and-geopolitical-history-989
2nd Congo war to Present: https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/the-economic-and-geopolitical-history-174
>What made the Rwanda genocide so awful besides ethnic hatred was the Hutu sense of historical grievance which the Hutu felt was justified.
But that is not particularly unique to the Rwandan Genocide. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09546553.2012.700611
I'm struggling to see any examples in this link that are comparable.
For example, i see the Ottoman turks as an example, but they slaughtered the Armenians. The Armenians did not historically make Turks bonded servants. Turks just thought Armenians were a threat and would act as a 5th column for Russians, so they killed them.
Also, it mentions the holocaust. Again the jews never put Germans in servitude. It also uses Pol Pot who killed the urban dwellers and minorities as the Khmer Rouge saw them as a threat that needed to be dealth with.
This article is more about genocidaires rationalizing why they should kill their enemy to destroy a preemptive threat. That's not the same of what i was talking about, which is where a formerly subjugated group uses historical subjugation as an excuse to murder the currently oppressed people (who were the historical subjugators).
"But basically, if you had more cows you were a Tutsi, Rich people were cattle herders and if you didn't how cows, you were a farmer, or a Hutu."
I think this is largely a myth (but probably an useful myth, if you could convice tutis and hutu to believe that), and tutsis are really a distinct people (probably nilotic) who conquered the hutus some centuries ago (even if after they adopted the bantu language of the hutus, like other conqueror peoples in history, like the Germanic-speaking Visigoths in Iberian Peninsula, who adopted some kind of Romance language)
Not a myth at all. Read any scholarly book on Rwandan history and you'll learn about it. I have many Rwandan friends (and dated one for a few years) and this is just basic, removed from propaganda history.
Quite literally, when a Hutu received a cow in pre-colonial times, it was called "kwihutura" - “to shed Hutu status” in their language kinyarwanda. When a Tutsi lost cows due to cattle disease or poor care, it was called "guhutura" - “To fall into Hutu status”). It's literally in the language. Precolonial rwanda was a semi-feudal cow economy.
As said before I do think there is some genetic differences (as I said Razib Khan has done some research on it, plus they just look different...), at the end of the day it was caste system. Hutu were literally serfs of the Tutsi Aristocracy, and precolonial Rwanda (and burundi, and the Ankole in sourhwest uganda, and frankly a lot of precolonial east africa) were cow economies where wealth was measured in cows.
I would recommend this book
https://www.amazon.com/History-Rwanda-Monarchy-Post-genocidal-Routledge-ebook/dp/B0C3Y6GYWT/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Or this:
https://a.co/d/0gRyL2Zz
If you'd like to learn more.
The weird thing with studying the Nazis is: You already know they were bad, you try to prepare yourself for the worst and then you study the details and you get floored by the realization that it actually was way, way worse and that - no - you are not prepared at all. And then all this happens again. And again.
For all you innocents, who only know about the mere 5,95 million killed in the "holocaust": If you want to have a really bad day, then research Oskar Dirlewanger and Christian Wirth.
Great list. America has a history of working with commies to defeat fascists as you stated. But we also have a history of working with fascists/far rightists to defeat commies.
For example, America helped the right wing monarchists to fight the commies in Greece. Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomingtang had some fascist leanings (his paramilitary blue shirts was modeled after the Italian blackshirts and german brownshirts) and we tried to help him against the CPC. We helped Suharto liquidate nearly 1M leftists. We helped Syngman Rhee's far right South Korean military government against the Kim family in the Korean Civil war. Greece & Portugal were both in NATO to contain the soviets while they had their far right governments. Salazar was a founding member, and greece was still in nato when the miliaey junta was in power.
Why isn’t Elon musk on the 21st century list of monsters. His DOGE dismantling of USAID has caused an estimated 700,000 preventable deaths. The Lancet estimates 14 people will die of preventable deaths, via the dismantling of USAID, by the end of 2030. And Musk saw this as an opportunity to joke: “Could have gone to parties this weekend. Instead tossed USAID into the wood chipper.”
It’s unconscionable to sanewash, overlook, omit this administrative genocide.
Unbelievable.
I don’t like this argument about USAID and think it’s counterproductive. I won’t quibble about the numbers. I think the message and moral logic around the issue are bad and may ultimately be harmful. By holding Elon up as one of the century’s great monsters for his role in destroying the agency I feel people are saying that ending a good and beneficial activity is morally equivalent to deliberately beginning a bad and destructive activity. My worry is that if it’s monstrous to stop doing good then there is some disincentive to start doing good in the first place.
This most definitely walks off with the championship trophy for most convoluted logic. The preventable deaths of 14 million people, twice the number that died in the Nazi Death camp system, millions will be children five years of age and under isn’t counterproductive? Elon Musk is a very sick
man who thinks empathy is a weakness. Equating morality with logic? Having spent time working in a Third World country or a Covid-19 POD in the midst of a pandemic clears up any confusion about incentives or disincentives. If causing the preventable deaths of 14 million people doesn’t make one a monster, I shudder to think what does.
Only insanity can sanewash what Musk and his DOGE operatives have done. For the record, these were crimes because DOGE didn’t have the proper security clearances to access these databases. Recommended reading: “Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of show the Trump Administration Shredded USAID,” by Nicholas Enrich. Musk and Marco Rubio have repeatedly lied about the fatal consequences of the dismantling of USAID. Rubio lied to a House Subcommittee. Musk continues to lad out on X at Bruce Springsteen, Nicolas Kristof, et alia. When confronted with the fatality facts, Musk responds with childish and profane insults.
So, Elon Musk is worse than Hitler? And not only is he worse than Hitler, but he is vastly more efficient as he managed to produce more evil in less than one year than hitler did in 12 years in power. And he manages to do it as basically a part time henchman while continuing to spend some time on his regular job? Alright, you might have convinced me.
This also was my thought reading this article. Elon's legacy will include crimes against humanity as well as Tesla.
Was that supposed to be 14 million as opposed to 14?
"By the early 2000s, hipsters in my dorm were already hanging ironic Chairman Mao posters in their rooms"
They weren't ironic. And almost every socialist in the west were actual fans of Mao (and Lenin, and Stalin and Pot and...) when he was doing his thing. This is why I say we should stop treating socialists as people who just want "good" (they don't, their ideology is based on evil envy), they're as monstrous as the nazis, every single one. Socialists shouldn't be welcome in civil society.
I know they're ironic because my friend who hung the posters was complaining to me the other day about how younger people didn't get the irony.
And he isn't a socialist or a "social democrat" today?
"They weren't ironic. And almost every socialist in the west were actual fans of Mao "
Nops - at the time was a clear distinction between Maoist groups and the other left-wing groups, and Maoists were a smal minority in all Wester countries (and, ironically, sometimes were allied with the right-wing against other left-wing factions, with a tendency to see the pro-Soviet Communists - "revisionists", "social-fascists" - has the main enemy)
2 things:
1) Mao: The Untold Story, by Jung Chang and Holliday is not "the authoritative biography of Mao." It is, ironically, a Maoist style hit piece against Mao. Mao was a bad person. Mao did see the Chinese people as means for his own elevation. All of this is true. The problem with Mao the Untold Story is that, like a Maoist struggle session, it takes the conclusion: Mao was a horrible monster, and then fits every piece of his biography into that frame.
During the Cultural Revolution, cadres would take some random person, tell them they were a "capitalist roader" and then force them to recount their life story and point out how every part of it shows their political deviance.
Reading Mao the Untold Story gives the same feeling.
2) I love how you unironically write "Removed” here means “killed”, since the Nazis intended to take all of the land."
And yet can't understand why many people see the Israeli Right's plan to settle and take all of the West Bank and Gaza as .... genocidal. As you say, "wanting to take all the land" means death or removal for the locals.
"And yet can't understand why many people see the Israeli Right's plan to settle and take all of the West Bank and Gaza as .... genocidal." <-- It would be! But that plan has not been executed yet.
Also, FWIW, the Hamas plan -- which most Palestinians themselves seem to support -- is to do exactly the same thing to the Israelis that the Israeli Right wants to do to the Palestinians.
So, faced with an intractable conflict between two groups of people who want to expel and (probably) genocide each other, I think our best bet is to limit our involvement in the conflict.
" the Hamas plan -- which most Palestinians themselves seem to support "
They seem?
According to opinion polls.
"Has not been executed yet."
There are 529,000 people in settlements in the West Bank. It seems like it is a genocide "in process," by some percentage.
Do we argue that the Holocaust and the German General Plan Ost wasn't genocidal until they got X percentage into Poland and killed Y thousands of people?
At what threshold of land theft and expulsion does the existing settler project go from "unexecuted to executed?"
Americans under the age of 30 have never lived in a world where a settler in the West Bank couldn't shoot a Palestinian in full view of Israeli troops and get away with it.
Hamas are bad people who want to do bad things. That doesn't change the Israeli right's and the Israeli government's culpability anymore than the existence of the Holodomor excused Operation Barbarossa.
The presence of the settlers is not, itself, an act of genocide. We cheapen the word when we misuse it. Not all bad things are "genocide".
If it was just settlers, it wouldn't be genocide. It would be a zoning issue. It is the "settlement" + "expulsion/land theft" + "avowed intent to take all of the West Bank" that tips it over the line.
No, this is nonsense. A settler murdering a Palestinian and getting away with it is evidence of murder and impunity, not “some percentage of genocide.” Illegal settlements, expulsions and abuses do not magically add up into genocide. Genocide requires an intention to destroy a people, not merely the existence of serious crimes against them.
And comparing this to Generalplan Ost is obscene. Germany explicitly intended to murder, starve and deport tens of millions so Germans could replace them. Israel is not carrying out a half-finished Holocaust in the West Bank. If your argument repeatedly needs Jews to become Nazis before it feels morally powerful enough, people are going to notice the Jew hate underneath it. You aren't a serious person.
Does Israel's occupation of West Bank and Gaza and continual expansion of settlements count as a plan? To me it seems like they're in the process of executing their plan, albeit slowly.
Are you serious? With between 6 and 9 million Palestinian refugees? With essentially the entire territory of the state of Israel taken from Palestinians? The West Bank and Gaza are just the final steps of an already executed plan of genocide. We are seeing a resurrection of the glory days of the genocides in the Old Testament.
"With between 6 and 9 million Palestinian refugees?" You mean the grandkids of grandkids of refugees who inherit refugee status (different from literally any other group on earth, even though there are similar conflicts, the other ones just don't happen to involve jews vs muslims). You're delusional.
" You mean the grandkids of grandkids of refugees who inherit refugee status (different from literally any other group on earth"
All refugees inherit the status - Iran and Pakistan are also full of "Afghan refugees" whose grandparents fled Afghanistan after Soviet invasion; the same for Karen refugees from Burma in Thailand, etc. Afaik, the hereditability of the status of refugee is more narrow for Palestinians: I think that, while the ACNUR recognize the children of a refugee father or a refugee mother as refugees, the UNRWA only recognize the children a refugee father.
I wonder from what that "urban myth" (that only the Palestinian refugees pass the status to their children) even came to life
No. You found examples of refugees having children while the same displacement remains unresolved, then quietly changed that into “all refugees inherit status.” Genius.
If an Afghan refugee is resettled in Sweden, becomes a Swedish citizen and has grandchildren here, those grandchildren are obviously not Afghan refugees. That single example destroys your absolute claim.
UNHCR’s general system is not hereditary refugee status. Its own handbook says family unity is not part of the Convention’s refugee definition. Derivative status normally covers spouses and minor dependent children, and is not called for when the person has another nationality and enjoys that country’s protection. The Convention also says refugee status ceases when someone acquires a new nationality and enjoys its protection.
The Afghan and Karen examples concern children born into ongoing, unresolved displacement. It does not make UNRWA’s system normal (where you inherit refugee-status EVEN IF YOU HAVE PROTECTION IN ANOTHER COUNTRY, IDIOT).
UNRWA maintains a separate, generation-unlimited registration category for male-line descendants of the original 1948 population. UNRWA itself admits that this registration does not confer refugee status under the Refugee Convention. It establishes eligibility for UNRWA services. It also keeps Palestinians with full citizenship elsewhere in its refugee count, including most registered Palestinians in Jordan.
Your mother-versus-father point isolates one narrow difference while ignoring the much larger one. UNHCR’s derivative protection during continuing displacement is not identical to UNRWA registration passed down indefinitely by ancestry.
So no, the distinction is not an “urban myth.” The myth is your claim that every refugee’s descendants automatically inherit refugee status in the same manner.
And of course you're a socialist from Portimão. We know what you people did with jews, it apparently didn't leave your genes.
According to Google AI search for "how many Palestinians are in refugee camps":
About 1.5 million registered Palestinian refugees live in 58 official refugee camps. This is roughly one-third of the total registered refugee population, which is supported by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
You are obviously the one with his eyes shut.
You're obviously a nazi socialist and you aren't a serious person. I don't know why people pretend people like you want good.
You obviously are a ranting idiot who hasn't got two brain cells to rub together. Otherwise you wouldn't have to resort to ad-hominem so quickly.
West Bank and Gaza are relatively small territories - probably the Israeli Right don't have any problem in killing all Palestinians there, but their plan is easily done in a 1948-redux, simply expelling Palestinians to other countries (mutatis mutandis, the same for the "from the water to the water, Palestine will be Arab" crowd)
I think you're a little too kind to Stalin. He definitely tried to conquer. He conquered the Baltic states, parts of Romania and other parts of Eastern Europe. He did not annex the Warsaw Pact nations but they were tributary states.
While Mr. Smith’s evaluation seems valid enough, I am reminded of some of the lyrics of Buffy St Marie’s Universal Soldier.
“Without him how would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau. Without him Caesar would have stood alone”
Without the support of millions of their supporters none of these ‘monsters’ would have amounted to a hill of beans.
The real tragedy of the human condition is how often hundreds upon thousands upon millions of ordinary people have been willing to follow such leaders no matter how awful the consequences, not only for their supposed ‘enemies’ but for themselves as well.
The English poet John Dunne had it right. “Therefore do not send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”
Interesting -- I never learned about the Nazi's Hunger Plan as a long term plan for starving to death eastern Europe, although I knew that millions of Russians and Ukrainians died during WW2 from deliberate starvation in Nazi occupied areas. However, Wikipedia has a good article on the subject.
Phillip K Dick must have read about it, since in The Man in the High Castle, he describes what is effectively the Hunger Plan's results, and extrapolates it to using nuclear weapons in Africa, and a future war for territory against Japan.
You most obviously omitted, for reasons I do not understand, the killing of perhaps 5% or more of the population of Gaza, often through indiscriminate aerial bombing with 2,000 pound bombs supplied by the US, the deliberate prevention of the supply by the US and international forces of food and water to the Gazan civilian population, the forced resettlement of perhaps 90% of the population, and the destruction of over 70% of the housing and infrastructure in the territory. Why is this not mentioned in your list of 21st Century issues?
It is definitely not at the same magnitude as other examples are. Hamas (and Gazans that overwhelmingly support it) attacked first with a brutal slaughter. They also want Israel to stop existing.
With regard to Putin, don’t forget the Chechnya wars and the as many as 200,000 civilians killed there. His internal suppression has been brutal.
Also, don’t forget his tendency to assassinate anyone whom he thinks might work against him, whether in Russia or abroad. There’s a reason that former Russians I know joke darkly about the dangers of having a balcony on your apartment.
Interesting that Japan is overlooked, though you make a compelling case for them to be ranked 2nd. I guess it’s because we Americans focus more on events in Europe.
It's true that Americans focus on events in Europe, but probably because Americans have been largely a European population. In America, war has become entertainment. Think of the endless replays of Normandy and Pearl Harbor
. It would be different if the European wars and the Asian wars had been fought on American soil.
Stalin was talking with Eden, Churchill's lieutenant, who was in the Soviet Union, for talks:
Stalin: The problem with Hitler, he doesn't know when to stop.
Anthony Eden, thinking about someone with that much power: Does anyone?
Stalin: I do.
Have to add Enver Hoxha for honorable mention. He only doesn't make the list because Albania is a small country. Hoxha did make Christopher Hitchens' list of dictators to write about in his book on dictators. My wife's family was disposessed, banished, tortured and killed at various stages. Horrible. Not completely "psychotic" like the Khmer Rouge, however. A good use of the word here by Noah.
I was watching a lecture series on the peoples of the steppe last month. And the professor said something pretty funny/strange; on the one hand, Genghis Khan killed tens of millions of people and pulverized many ancient cities into dust, but on the other hand new trade links between Europe and Asia were established.
Great Courses?
yup