Were the Nazis the absolute height of historical evil?

[Night_stalker]

It's one thing to kill a million by either neglect or accident, but to do it delibertly is a whole nother ballgame.

[Ghost Rider]

It's one thing to kill a million by either neglect or accident, but to do it delibertly is a whole nother ballgame.

How so? While this is not to say the Nazi's actions are lessened, the British Empire inflicted horrific standards of living and conditions to their colonies. Just because they didn't escort them by train to an area to die, to claim that it's *another ball game* is ignorant on many levels given their responsibilities and sheer neglect both intentional and unintentional to a people they served as the government to.

So care to explain it or is this another one of your +1 posts?

[Sarevok]

Bear in mind the British did a lot of good in modernizing their colonial subjects. Consider modern India for example. The legal system, railways, telephone networks etc all carry great deal of the original mark left by the British founders. During the era the British occupied Indian subcontinent the place was coming apart on its own and had deplorable standards of living. Even without British mismanagement famines would have occurred and people died. Despite their snobbish attitudes the British ultimately did some net good in occupying India by bringing the places into the modern age.

[Spoonist]

The Nazis are "special" because they were a group of a country that was very well educated and informed, part of an advanced industrialized civilization. Usually, the people of this background are pacific.

There were groups of people like the Nazis but they usually came from less advanced societies. The Nazis came from one of the most developed centers of modern western civilization.

Your implications given the context of the OP is just ridiculous. "Western Civilization" can brag of more wars, bloody revolutions, genocide, racist extermination and simple evil application of technology than any other part of the world.
This because the renaissance and the industrial revolution happened here. With the advent of science we could be so much more effecient in our atrocities compared to pre-science cultures.

I'd also say that it is only after the formation of some nation-fraternities like UN and EU that you actually see anything resembling peaceful conduct between these "western civilization" countries. How many years of peace in europe can you actually find and how recent was that?

[Night_stalker]

It's one thing to kill a million by either neglect or accident, but to do it delibertly is a whole nother ballgame.

How so? While this is not to say the Nazi's actions are lessened, the British Empire inflicted horrific standards of living and conditions to their colonies. Just because they didn't escort them by train to an area to die, to claim that it's *another ball game* is ignorant on many levels given their responsibilities and sheer neglect both intentional and unintentional to a people they served as the government to.

So care to explain it or is this another one of your +1 posts?

To kill a million by accident is deplorable, but to delibertly do it for little motive other than for establising a master race is even worse. Call me cold-hearted bur I have a little sympathy for the accidental murdering of a million. Delibertly doing it loses Amy sympathy you might have.

[Big Orange]

People forget the British Empire's brutalization of the Boer settlers and native blacks in South Africa who got in their way. It was deliberate enough that they erected purpose built concetration camps and destroyed enemy habitations. And in the suppression of the Mau Mau in the 1950s, Churchill gave specific orders to widely spread out the executions to hide the scale of the mass killings.

[Shroom Man 777]

I'd like to put the Spaniards in the list, back when they were colonizing imperialists. I mean, think about it, look at what they did to the South American cultures and what they did to their other colonial subjects. They didn't systemically slaughter them all, ala the Nazis, but what they did was still pretty darn bad. They didn't kill the people, but they totally destroyed the ways of life of the South American Indians and also the old Filipinos. Today the majority of those people who were subjugated by the Spaniards speak languages based on Spanish, they don't even speak their native tongues anymore. Their native cultures, beliefs and religions were wiped out and replaced with very Catholic ones. All those people in South America, everything that made them what they were, replaced and converted!

Imagine if what happened to them happened to the Chinese, you'd have a China full of Catholics, who don't even speak Chinese anymore because now everyone speaks Spanish or some derivative of thereof, and whose cultures and religions would be nothing like the original native Chinese, and everyone there would have names like Jesus or Rodriguez or Gomez or Diego or whatever. Also, instead of faces of Confucius or statues of Buddha or dragons, it'd ALL be replaced with pictures or statues of Jesus or Mother Mary or something!

That's terrible. I don't think the subjects of the British Empire, or any other European colonial power, ended up being so completely converted as those poor folks the Spaniards conquered.

[Night_stalker]

True, but their "conversions" were so brutal that they weren't really endorsed by the Church in the slightest bit. Unfortnately, the condemnation came about 15 years too late to do too much good.

[Ghost Rider]

It's one thing to kill a million by either neglect or accident, but to do it delibertly is a whole nother ballgame.

How so? While this is not to say the Nazi's actions are lessened, the British Empire inflicted horrific standards of living and conditions to their colonies. Just because they didn't escort them by train to an area to die, to claim that it's *another ball game* is ignorant on many levels given their responsibilities and sheer neglect both intentional and unintentional to a people they served as the government to.

So care to explain it or is this another one of your +1 posts?

To kill a million by accident is deplorable, but to delibertly do it for little motive other than for establising a master race is even worse. Call me cold-hearted bur I have a little sympathy for the accidental murdering of a million. Delibertly doing it loses Amy sympathy you might have.

Fuck cold hearted, you sick sociopathic bitch, learn at least some minimal history and gain perspective outside your goddamn navel.

So, it's only worse if they do it...deliberately how? Because they have a ridiculous motive, but when the motive is to fucking destroy people because they are getting in the way of your people's living area...oh wait, that's barely a step away from what the Nazis did.

True, but their "conversions" were so brutal that they weren't really endorsed by the Church in the slightest bit. Unfortnately, the condemnation came about 15 years too late to do too much good.

Care to back it up with something beyond your retarded suppositions? Or is this another wild guessing because you have some idealized view of the world and how it works.

[Thanas]

To kill a million by accident is deplorable, but to delibertly do it for little motive other than for establising a master race is even worse. Call me cold-hearted bur I have a little sympathy for the accidental murdering of a million. Delibertly doing it loses Amy sympathy you might have.

I'd say deliberately rising taxes and use military means to collect those taxes despite knowing a huge famine is going on and therefore directly causing millions of deaths is pretty much on the same level as purposely starving your slaves while working them to death. In fact, it is exactly the same. Did you even read the link I provided?

Sadly, I did not find the books online. But here is a link to some blog with commentary, which summarizes many of the source.

So about 24 to 29 million people died of famine in India over a period of 200 years.

Wrong. The time periods are limited to very few famines which the British did nothing to stop and even raised taxes during it.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Bear in mind the British did a lot of good in modernizing their colonial subjects. Consider modern India for example. The legal system, railways, telephone networks etc all carry great deal of the original mark left by the British founders. During the era the British occupied Indian subcontinent the place was coming apart on its own and had deplorable standards of living. Even without British mismanagement famines would have occurred and people died. Despite their snobbish attitudes the British ultimately did some net good in occupying India by bringing the places into the modern age.

They did so by fucking over the locals quite thoroughly, and stoking ethinic unrest. All of which have reverberations till today.

[Bilbo]

This is an impossible to answer question for many reasons. How does one scale human suffering? There are several who could be at the top of the list for a variety of reasons.

Nazis - We all know why, systematic attempt to exterminate Jews, as well as several other groups of people.

Soviets - The Gulags were not pleasure trips, and the number killed during the revolution of during the war against the Green army are nothing to scoff at.

Mongols - The Khan on more than one ocassion decimated hundreds of thousands of innocents because their leader killed or refused to respect one of his emmisaries.

Tamerlane - Quite similar to the Mongols.

Khmer Rouge - The Killing Fields was not just a clever name.

Roman Catholic Church - Centuries of brutality or the sanctioning of brutality by others.

Aztecs and Mayas - Human sacrifice is not nice.

Great Britain - You have to break quite a few eggs to build the greatest omlette in human history.

The list could go on and on. Some could drop off if you put rules in place about goals, thought processes, or scale. If you scale things by percent of the worlds population affected then the Mongols win hands down because when they killed millions there were a whole lot less people around. If you scale it to number affected compared to total number under control then its probably the Khmer Rouge.

[Simon_Jester]

Patrick's point is a big part of why the Nazis seem so horrific to me. Its not so much the acts, but the horrific calculation involved. Everything was calculated and planned and recorded.

I don't know, it just seems like their evil wasn't just malevolence, but something more. Their victims were treated simply as a natural resource to be exploited until it was gone. They weren't even given the consideration that an animal would be. They were just there to be harvested.

This. At the time, even without fully grasping just how far the Nazis were willing to go, Churchill nailed this, describing the results of a hypothetical Nazi victory as:

"...the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science."

Now, this was during an era when the idea of technological progress was seen as a (more or less) absolute good, so he's not talking about the "science is evil!" attitude a later generation might roll out. He's talking about the systematic, calculated ruthlessness the Nazi system was capable of, the ability to take the methods of science and engineering and pervert them to monstrous ends.

It's one thing to kill a million by either neglect or accident, but to do it delibertly is a whole nother ballgame.

How so? While this is not to say the Nazi's actions are lessened, the British Empire inflicted horrific standards of living and conditions to their colonies. Just because they didn't escort them by train to an area to die, to claim that it's *another ball game* is ignorant on many levels given their responsibilities and sheer neglect both intentional and unintentional to a people they served as the government to.

So care to explain it or is this another one of your +1 posts?

To me, the difference is comparable to that between first degree (premeditated) murder and homicidal negligence. When we judge individual murders, we look at intent. Someone who planned out a murder well in advance is likely to get a harsher sentence than someone who committed the murder in a sudden fit of rage. Both will usually get more punishment than someone who "merely" allowed someone to die by ignoring some responsibility of theirs.

The British cause massive famines by just not caring, often in situations where most authority was in the hands of private organizations like the East India Company and not in the hands of the state. Whereas the Germans specifically sat down and had meetings at the highest levels of government which could be summarized as "We really hate Jews. How can we kill them as fast as possible?" We have documentation of this going on, again at the highest levels. The entire system of government was behind the extermination program, and they were fairly successful at mobilizing the resources of their economy to do it.

It's that extra level of malice and premeditation on the part of the central government that's missing in most British atrocities. You didn't see Parliament planning out campaigns of genocide in advance, even if they didn't do anything to stop them after they were underway. Nor did you see mass public rallies in support of "Let's starve Indian people!" or even "We approve of the East India Company, which starves Indian people!" Partly that's because it was a different era, but it also reflects a disconnect between the actions of the men operating in British colonies and the attitudes of the population themselves.

With the Nazis, there's the impression of a seamless connection between the popular will, the government that mobilizes and organizes it, and the specific people committing the atrocities. And a feedback loop designed to perpetuate those atrocities, rather than a government which will occasionally step in (or at least have a few of the more honorable MPs register a protest) to stop or mitigate them.

So when people rate the Nazis as worse than the British, I think it's because of the sheer monolithic brutality of their system. Also because they had plans for worse than what they actually did, worse even than what the British did in India, in the (impossible) event that they somehow overcame their enemies and took over in Russia. The British operated more or less unopposed, and we know that whatever evil they did was fairly close to the upper bound of what they were capable of. The Nazis could have been even worse than they actually were.

And yes, these are relatively small differences. But I think they help explain why there's a split in the perception of British and Nazi atrocities. Though that's on top of the obvious and much less charitable "it happened to brown people" aspect of British atrocities...

That's terrible. I don't think the subjects of the British Empire, or any other European colonial power, ended up being so completely converted as those poor folks the Spaniards conquered.

On average, no. Although the North American natives didn't fare much better than their southern counterparts, even though they were colonized by British people (who later broke away, yes, but were still in some sense part of the "Anglosphere.") And the people of India suffered a very heavy overlay of British culture, especially considering that they were only ruled from Britain for roughly 150 years. Much of the modern social structure of India cannot be understood as an outgrowth of older Indian culture without knowing about the British Raj.

[Thanas]

I think the difference is also one of public rememberance. It doesn't matter to many people today if the British colonial empire is responsible for more deaths and more destruction of whole civilizations than the Nazis, because most western people have never lived in a world where the victims were still alive and people remember a time when africa or asia did not use the boundaries we use today.

[Samuel]

Actually, they (the Nazis) originally envisioned sending the Jews to Madagascar. Later they planned to use the Jews as construction slave workers for infrastructure projects in the conquered Soviet Union. However, after the failure of Barbarossa, they changed their plan again and decided to simply kill them all.

Madagascar was a third world tropical country. The sort where alot of people would die of disease. Slave labor generally means working to death. Of course, they started up the death squads to follow in the wake of Barbarossa- the Nazis were nothing if not filled with contradictory organizational goals.

Aztecs and Mayas - Human sacrifice is not nice.

So did the celts and alot of ancient cultures. They were vile, but I would consider them absolute evil.

Soviets - The Gulags were not pleasure trips, and the number killed during the revolution of during the war against the Green army are nothing to scoff at.

Civil wars aren't generally counted for evilness because atrocities are typical for alot of them (US civil war was dirty as well, we just don't hear as much about it). The worst they did was the Ukranian famine and the purges- most of the deaths in the gulags came from the war years when the Germans held the Soviet breadbasket.

Bear in mind the British did a lot of good in modernizing their colonial subjects. Consider modern India for example. The legal system, railways, telephone networks etc all carry great deal of the original mark left by the British founders. During the era the British occupied Indian subcontinent the place was coming apart on its own and had deplorable standards of living. Even without British mismanagement famines would have occurred and people died. Despite their snobbish attitudes the British ultimately did some net good in occupying India by bringing the places into the modern age.

They did so by fucking over the locals quite thoroughly, and stoking ethinic unrest. All of which have reverberations till today.

It is worth noting that at the time they conquered India it was falling apart from previosly being under the control of the Mughals. It is quite possible one of the native states could have united the subcontinet again- several of them were adopting Western technology and tactics.

[Iosef Cross]

I'd like to put the Spaniards in the list, back when they were colonizing imperialists. I mean, think about it, look at what they did to the South American cultures and what they did to their other colonial subjects. They didn't systemically slaughter them all, ala the Nazis, but what they did was still pretty darn bad. They didn't kill the people, but they totally destroyed the ways of life of the South American Indians and also the old Filipinos. Today the majority of those people who were subjugated by the Spaniards speak languages based on Spanish, they don't even speak their native tongues anymore. Their native cultures, beliefs and religions were wiped out and replaced with very Catholic ones. All those people in South America, everything that made them what they were, replaced and converted!

Well, cultural destruction and creation (i.e. cultural change) is part of the process of globalization.

I don't have any problems with it all at if it isn't forced on the population.

Imagine if what happened to them happened to the Chinese, you'd have a China full of Catholics, who don't even speak Chinese anymore because now everyone speaks Spanish or some derivative of thereof, and whose cultures and religions would be nothing like the original native Chinese, and everyone there would have names like Jesus or Rodriguez or Gomez or Diego or whatever. Also, instead of faces of Confucius or statues of Buddha or dragons, it'd ALL be replaced with pictures or statues of Jesus or Mother Mary or something!

Most (or at least a very large proportion) of the population of Latin America is descended from Europeans. Even in Mexico there are about 30% of their gene poll of European descent. Imagine if 30% of China's gene poll was of European descent...

In Argentina, 80% of the gene poll is European, probably a larger proportion than in the US. In Brazil about 55% of the gene poll is European. See: "The genetic average admixture of the Argentine population, contains 79.9 % of European contribution, 15.8% Amerindian and 4.3% African."

In Argentina, 60% of the population is of Italian descent second wikipedia's page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Argentina.] In Brazil, ~20% of the population is of Italian descent.

That's terrible. I don't think the subjects of the British Empire, or any other European colonial power, ended up being so completely converted as those poor folks the Spaniards conquered.

Yes, the US for example, has only 1% of their population speaking English.

[Iosef Cross]

Actually, they (the Nazis) originally envisioned sending the Jews to Madagascar. Later they planned to use the Jews as construction slave workers for infrastructure projects in the conquered Soviet Union. However, after the failure of Barbarossa, they changed their plan again and decided to simply kill them all.

Madagascar was a third world tropical country. The sort where alot of people would die of disease. Slave labor generally means working to death. Of course, they started up the death squads to follow in the wake of Barbarossa- the Nazis were nothing if not filled with contradictory organizational goals.

Their idea was to cleanse Europe of the Jews. You can do this by moving them or killing them. They planned to do some of both initially. But later they resorted to simply killing them, since they weren't going to win the war (at least, not soon). They officially started the holocaust in January 1942, when their bid to conquer and defeat the USSR in a single climatic offensive had clearly failed.

Of course, they didn't care if the Jews they sent to Madagascar would die or not.

Soviets - The Gulags were not pleasure trips, and the number killed during the revolution of during the war against the Green army are nothing to scoff at.

Civil wars aren't generally counted for evilness because atrocities are typical for alot of them (US civil war was dirty as well, we just don't hear as much about it). The worst they did was the Ukranian famine and the purges- most of the deaths in the gulags came from the war years when the Germans held the Soviet breadbasket.

It is estimated that between 20 to 50 million people died under Stalin's rule:
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Stalin

[stormthebeaches]

Wrong. The time periods are limited to very few famines which the British did nothing to stop and even raised taxes during it.

That's what I meant. A series of famines over a period of 150 years (not 200, that was my mistake) which resulted in 24 to 29 million deaths. The blog states that the first famine occurred in 1772 and the last famine was in 1927 so I'm drawing my conclusions from that.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, cultural destruction and creation (i.e. cultural change) is part of the process of globalization.

I don't have any problems with it all at if it isn't forced on the population.

Which in this case... it was. Seriously, how did you miss that? Did you just automatically see "destroyed the ways of life" and decide to puff about how cultural destruction and creation is a natural process?

In Argentina, 60% of the population is of Italian descent second wikipedia's page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Argentina.] In Brazil, ~20% of the population is of Italian descent.

You do realize that... well, you probably don't. Anyway, "of Italian descent" does not mean "descended entirely from Italians." It means "had Italian ancestors." Since it's quite possible for one Italian person to move to Brazil and have a dozen great-grandchildren all of whom are 1/8 Italian, that doesn't prove a damn thing about the original population.

Moreover, does the genetics really matter? How does killing off most of the local population and replacing it with your own descendants make it better that you also erased the local culture to the point where historians can no longer even tell how it worked?

[stormthebeaches]

It is estimated that between 20 to 50 million people died under Stalin's rule:
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Stalin

50 million? That can't be right, the USSR only had a population of about 160 million. Last time I checked the Stalin death toll is placed at 20 million. 50 million is just absurd.

[Shroom Man 777]

I'd like to put the Spaniards in the list, back when they were colonizing imperialists. I mean, think about it, look at what they did to the South American cultures and what they did to their other colonial subjects. They didn't systemically slaughter them all, ala the Nazis, but what they did was still pretty darn bad. They didn't kill the people, but they totally destroyed the ways of life of the South American Indians and also the old Filipinos. Today the majority of those people who were subjugated by the Spaniards speak languages based on Spanish, they don't even speak their native tongues anymore. Their native cultures, beliefs and religions were wiped out and replaced with very Catholic ones. All those people in South America, everything that made them what they were, replaced and converted!

Well, cultural destruction and creation (i.e. cultural change) is part of the process of globalization.

I don't have any problems with it all at if it isn't forced on the population.

The Spaniards did force it on the population.

Yes, the US for example, has only 1% of their population speaking English.

Foreigners invading a land and destroying entire native peoples' heritage and replacing it entirely with foreign culture and language =/= Foreigners invading a land and so many foreign-language-speaking foreigners immigrating to it that the native peoples are marginalized into a minority but get to keep some vestiges of their heritage that isn't entirely destroyed and/or replaced with foreign culture and language

[Sarevok]

Bear in mind the British did a lot of good in modernizing their colonial subjects. Consider modern India for example. The legal system, railways, telephone networks etc all carry great deal of the original mark left by the British founders. During the era the British occupied Indian subcontinent the place was coming apart on its own and had deplorable standards of living. Even without British mismanagement famines would have occurred and people died. Despite their snobbish attitudes the British ultimately did some net good in occupying India by bringing the places into the modern age.

They did so by fucking over the locals quite thoroughly, and stoking ethinic unrest. All of which have reverberations till today.

Honestly I cant imagine if Africa or Indian sub continent would have been better off today if the British had not interfered. Africa was pretty much as backward as you can get. India was miserable. The Mughal empire was almost gone, science and technology non existant, education close to zero, human rights a non existant concept. If the British had not occupied India someone else would have. Because India had nothing left to offer resistance. In an age when Europeans were developing the steam engine, iron warships and telegraphy India was stuck with oxen pulled carts. I cant imagine India doing what Japan did by modernizing on its own. The Mughal dynasty and various other states in India had plenty of warning since 17th century the Europeans were coming and they are getting stronger and stronger foothold. As for Africa can you imagine Africans of the time suddenly jump starting development of modern civilization ?

The British Empire did many evil things but overall I would hardly consider them the pinnacle of given the era it existed in. By our standards almost all pre 20th century great nations were guilty of some crime against humanity or another. But given the context of the time it existed it in the British were not so bad and at least ended up doing some net goof for all the suffering they caused.

[Night_stalker]

Yeah, that is the only redeeming factor about their overseas interfering. They helped give many countries moderized infrastructures. Pity that they're now shitholes in Africa, but at least for a time they were safe.

[Stark]

Honestly I cant imagine if Africa or Indian sub continent would have been better off today if the British had not interfered. Africa was pretty much as backward as you can get. India was miserable. The Mughal empire was almost gone, science and technology non existant, education close to zero, human rights a non existant concept. If the British had not occupied India someone else would have. Because India had nothing left to offer resistance. In an age when Europeans were developing the steam engine, iron warships and telegraphy India was stuck with oxen pulled carts. I cant imagine India doing what Japan did by modernizing on its own. The Mughal dynasty and various other states in India had plenty of warning since 17th century the Europeans were coming and they are getting stronger and stronger foothold. As for Africa can you imagine Africans of the time suddenly jump starting development of modern civilization ?

The British Empire did many evil things but overall I would hardly consider them the pinnacle of given the era it existed in. By our standards almost all pre 20th century great nations were guilty of some crime against humanity or another. But given the context of the time it existed it in the British were not so bad and at least ended up doing some net goof for all the suffering they caused.

If most of the 'bad' was done early (say, 18th century) and the 'good' was done later, (19th century, early 20th century), how can you link these two things? The Empire could have been less negligent and greedy early on (well, maybe not economically) and STILL provide all the dubious benefits they provided later (which were often powered by guilt anyway).

[CaptHawkeye]

The scientific experimentation on chinese prisoners of war by the Japanese doesn't match the scale of the nazi holocaust, but I'm simply unable to fathom anything more sickeningly atrocious.

I've seen that video before. I think the most fascinating thing about Unit 731 was how easily its personnel could detach themselves from simple empathy. It could be said that Unit 731's greatest scientific achievement was establishing just how openly deranged some people can be, and how they can even get away with it.