> They were the lucky ones, of course. The consensus estimate is that 70 million human beings have died so far during the CCP's reign of terror, mostly from starvation. My wife spent much of her youth hungry. She and her friends used to pull the stingers out of honeybees to get a bit of sweetness in their lives. The things little girls do, huh?
I dated a Chinese girl for 3 and 1/2 years whose father was sent to a labor camp for a lot of her childhood.
I really don't understand how the Communists don't have the same reputation and stigma of the Nazis. They killed over twice as many people, most of them civilians, and did it for twice as long. They ran their countries into the ground in pretty much all meaningful measures, destroying civilizations well known for science, commerce, and innovation. They accomplished almost nothing of value, in any of the areas mankind finds valuable. And they're treated with a mild disdain, but nothing like the Third Reich, where they probably deserve even worse treatment.
If anyone doesn't know who Deng Xiaoping is, it's worth reading a little bit about him. He was probably one of the most important and good politicians of the last 100 years. He helped lead China out of the Communist mess they were in, declaring, "It doesn't matter what color the cat is as long as it catches the mouse." Was imprisoned for a while due to his views before taking over and putting China back on the path to being a global power with healthy, happy citizens.
But as a casual historian, I'm still baffled why the Communists don't have the same or worse of a rep than the Nazis - input from knowledgeable people is welcome.
The courts of public opinion, history or even the actual international courts are poor ones. The Nazis are unique in the treatment they got. Many of the judgements do not contain the consistency to be called justice.
The Nazis lost to deeply injured enemies, Europe, the Soviet Union & the US. They were clearly proven to be malicious. That is they were evil in theory, intention, strategy, tactic, rhetoric, practice and in practical outcome. Communists tended to have at least some of these which were palatable. This leaves the possibility that they have good intentions, got waylaid, failed, etc.
Nazis brought terrible suffering and disgrace to their own people and were recognised by Germans in this way. But this is extremely unusual and it is a consequence of regime change. Look at Turkey and the Armenian genocide. Modern Turks do not believe in it and it was almost 100 years ago. You can't be friendly with Turkey and bring it up.
Communism has not really fallen in the same way Nazism and Fascism fell. Even Russia is still really a descendant of the Soviet Union.
The places that do consider communists similarly to fascists are those places that felt colonised by them.
2. The Nazis were across-the-board evil, whereas the Communists at least pretended to have some decent intentions.
3. The big one which makes sense - the governments and descendants of the fascist areas owned up to what they did and denounced it. Most places don't.
4. Finally, no real theatrics or drama at the end. Communism just slowly eroded and died, there were no cities sacked or surrenders signed.
Good points: #3 was the biggest one I hadn't considered enough.
That said, I've traveled around the world some, have friends who had parents in the Communist Party, and have an older acquaintance whose family were Polish resistance fighters to the Nazis later turned black marketers/Polish underground.
Pretty much everyone with exposure to Communism thinks it was a pretty awful thing, on pretty much all levels.
Berlin's got to be the most obvious example: You can walk through old, pre-WWII Berlin neighborhoods (beautiful), Allied post-WWII Berlin neighborhoods (pretty nice), and Soviet post-WWII neighborhoods (very ugly, foreboding, and dreadful aside from what the citizens have made of it recently). It's a pretty incredible contrast.
But the way you outlined it makes sense - great points, and thanks for shedding some light.
Although this is HN and we should not discuss politics, just a few points.
Firstly, the Nazis may have been bad – but the treatment of post-WW1 Germany was bad and a causing factor of WW2.
The Treaty of Versailles ensured in effect that there will be another war in Europe. I think that Germany was uniquely the only country in the 20th century to receive such a hard “punishment” (both economically and culturally) when they lost the First World War.
Not just history. Actual international courts are extremely inconsistent. They are basically a way of judging losers with a little bit more legitimacy then just hanging the enemy king.
War crime charges as they are legally defined could probably be proved about any leader of a country at war, nt just Omar Al Bashir or Saddam Hussein. Almost certainly George Bush (and many other recent world leaders) would at least meet the criteria for trial.
If a domestic criminal justice system functioned like the international one, it would be deemed as non-existent. We just do not have an international system, but we pretend we do.
It's not that black and white. It was Deng's regime that crushed the Tiananmen Square protesters. There were other nominal heads-of-state at that time, but Deng had de facto power.
His reputation is generally favourable today because of the economic wonders he orchestrated in the 90s.
Depending on how you define a good politician, Zhao Ziyang, the party general secretary in 1989, was sympathetic towards the pro-democracy movement. But overall he didn't change as many lives as Deng did. He lost power after Tiananmen Square protests.
One liberal political who was pro-democracy at that time yet still remained in power is Wen Jiabao, the current Premier (second in power maybe). He is probably the most popular politician in power today. If there is going to be top-down democratisation, it would probably start around him. He is in a lineage of politicians who rose to power through meritocracy rather than loyalty, succeeding Zhu Rongji.
If you ask most Americans who invaded Poland in 1939, most will simply say "Germany" or "the Nazis". Few will mention the "Soviet Union" or "the Communists". Even fewer will say "the National Socialist German Workers Party". That's part of the Gramscian Damage.
University humanities and social science departments are relentlessly conformist, though they certainly don't see themselves that way. Since they largely control the inflow of ideas into the culture, they can choke off whatever they want. So, the CCP largely gets a pass.
I'm still baffled why the Communists don't have the same or worse of a rep than the Nazis
The simple answer is that many "intellectuals" in the West find the notion of "to each according to his need, from each according to his ability" very appealing. They "need" to do lots of unproductive (and unrewarded in the West) things such as sit around talking about abstract philosophy, and those poor suckers with "ability" will support them for free.
Never mind that the one of the first things real Communists do when they take over is send all the intellectuals for re-eductation...
I like that you're quoting one of Ayn Rand's "Communist" talking points rather than talking about Communism proper.
Let's get something straight. There is no Communist-central plan. Russia and China each approached Communism differently. If somebody else were to try Communism, they'd have a completely different approach to it. As it is, the only Communist regimes we talk about are the ones installed by violence, and as a result we get this idea that you can't have Communism without violently murdering people. The smaller communes that manage to last decades without violence, they're the ones we ignore when readying our anti-Red talking points.
You're showing a fair spot of anti-intellectualism when you bash abstract philosophy. Who do you think invented capitalism? I'll give you a major hint: He was an abstract philosopher. Adam Smith was just like Karl Marx, only we like him more. Every major idea we've seen in the world stems to some degree from abstract philosophy, as you call it. It's not particularly abstract, mind you, because it has concrete effects on the world. We're not talking Nietzsche, here.
Now, let me explain why the Holocaust is really so touted, and why Mao isn't mentioned as much. Partly it's because Germany is a European nation, and the world is still very Euro-centric. In bigger part, however, it's because the Nazis did a pretty good job at its attempt to exterminate the Jewish religion, which, though small, is a pretty major force in the world. People still think Judaism is one of the three major religions in the world, because they like ignoring Hinduism. Jewish people are usually well-educated, hard-working, and ambitious, which is why there's still a disproportionate amount of them in executive positions at companies, in top-notch colleges, and in the literary world. (If we go by the utterly lame judge that is IQ, the average IQ of a Jewish person in the United States is higher than of any other arbitrary demographic, including asian.)
There were 18 million Jews when Hitler took power. When his regime was ended, one in three of those Jews were dead. Remember Nazis also killed 5 million Protestants, but nobody cares about that, because there are so many Protestants. Hitler showed a lot of Jewish people the mortality of their faith. In a time when Jews were still hated in most parts of the world—and they were certainly still hated in the 40s—they were dealt an enormous blow.
So a lot of well-educated and influential people all took up the cause. We've got literary masterpieces regarding the Holocaust. I can't think of any that have to do with other genocides; if they exist, I haven't heard of them. There's Eli Wiesel's Night, there's the diary of Anne Frank. Authors wrote a slew of kid's books about the subject, so that a lot of us grow up with the Holocaust ingrained in us. Number the Stars; the Devil's Arithmetic. Those are the books used to teach 10-year-olds about morality. It's all Holocaust-based, because many of the best kid's book writers are Jewish. (Even the ones that don't make being Jewish a big part of their writing. My favorite Child's Lit author is Daniel Handler alias Lemony Snicket, one of whose adult books is about the Golem in the Jewish religion.)
Finally, we have the fact that World War II is perhaps the best and easiest story ever told. We've got a brilliant military leader and outright psychopath whose childhood is tragic and fascinating, whose seconds-in-command were all rich characters, and whose uniforms were all made by Hugo Boss, still a big name in the fashion industry. There's the famous swastika. Then there are Hitler's allies: Mussolini, who's almost comically corrupt and bad, and Hirohito, the faceless emperor of a nation that was batshit insane when it started fighting and that tortured American soldiers in unspeakable ways. On the other side you have the heroic crippled FDR, and the brilliant procrastinator Churchill, and you've got the morally uneasy compromise with Stalin. It's a made-to-go movie, which is why so many movies are made about it. Whereas World War I was hell, World War II had a very clear villain. And how do we know he's a clear villain? Because he's cooking Jewish people in ovens.
So World War II is an easy story, and it all revolves around the Holocaust as proof of our moral superiority. Therefore, the Holocaust gets celebrity attention, which complements nicely all the talented Jewish people who remember the Holocaust because their parents died in it.
(I'm saying all this as a kind-of Jew who grew up listening to a different Holocaust survivor each year. Apologies if that colors this narrative.)
No, I think the difference between nazi and coumminst terror is not just historical perception. There is a very clear difference between political terror and racism. You can choose to be a communist or not. You can choose to be politically active or not. You cannot choose whether you are jewish or not.
The communists killed political opponents and they killed many more people by plain incompetence. They did not set up an industrial operation to deliberately murder people _regardless_ of what they did.
It's not just a numbers game either. If it were, the inventor of the automobile would have to be considered one of the greatest villains in the history of mankind. So we do make a difference based on the motivation for killing people. Here's my hierachy of evil, which explains why I agree with those who find communism less horrible than the nazi holocaust:
Killing people for what they are
Killing people for what they do
Killing people by accident or incompetence
Letting people die unnecessarily
The nazis did all four. The communists just the latter three. Capitalism specialises in the the last item. And yes there are exceptions that blur the lines (like Stalinist ethnic cleansing), but they are just that, exceptions.
Good points, but: There are many genocides that target based on race or religion. So I was trying to explain why the Holocaust and not a similar genocide targeting, say, racial groups.
Yes there are many. But I'm not aware of one that was as elaborate, ideologically and logistically, as what the nazis did. In my opinion they fully deserve their place at the top of the evil list.
I dated a Chinese girl for 3 and 1/2 years whose father was sent to a labor camp for a lot of her childhood.
I really don't understand how the Communists don't have the same reputation and stigma of the Nazis. They killed over twice as many people, most of them civilians, and did it for twice as long. They ran their countries into the ground in pretty much all meaningful measures, destroying civilizations well known for science, commerce, and innovation. They accomplished almost nothing of value, in any of the areas mankind finds valuable. And they're treated with a mild disdain, but nothing like the Third Reich, where they probably deserve even worse treatment.
If anyone doesn't know who Deng Xiaoping is, it's worth reading a little bit about him. He was probably one of the most important and good politicians of the last 100 years. He helped lead China out of the Communist mess they were in, declaring, "It doesn't matter what color the cat is as long as it catches the mouse." Was imprisoned for a while due to his views before taking over and putting China back on the path to being a global power with healthy, happy citizens.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping
But as a casual historian, I'm still baffled why the Communists don't have the same or worse of a rep than the Nazis - input from knowledgeable people is welcome.