1: People will fixate on the morality of the two systems as a math problem, i.e., which system killed more people? According to the people doing most of these counts -- largely anticommunist orgs -- the communists killed more people numerically, and because the context of any of that is irrelevant, they must be worse.
This is why I'm a fan of unfavorably comparing the number of kills by WW2 hero Audie Murphy with the Golden State Killer as a response to highlight that death tolls are one of the dumbest ways to evaluate morality.
2: People for whatever reason have this notion that the fascists were better for their countries economically than the communists, even though it was the communists who produced far greater developments.
3: People associate fascists more with killing and brutalizing "others" or "undesireables" that they aren't (or at least don't consider themselves) a part of, whereas communists are associated with the choices they make mostly affecting "their own people" (if that isn't a basically trigger phrase for you, congrats, you haven't wasted as much time as me talking at libs).
4: There has been an embarrassingly successful move to re-paint the Soviets and various historical socialist countries as backwards and technologically inept, and to portray the fascists as techromancer masterminds. Think of all the weird media plots were there is some dumbass secret Nazi super-tech as a plot device. Meanwhile the Soviets were the first people into fucking space, and people still sometimes act like they were morons hot-gluing sheet metal together because they didn't have crapitalist modes of production.
5: Some people have this idea that the Nazis only lost because the whole world aligned against them (uh... except for the rest of the axis, ignore them), but people think failure is built into communism (the "communism doesn't work" stuff).
1: People will fixate on the morality of the two systems as a math problem, i.e., which system killed more people? According to the people doing most of these counts – largely anticommunist orgs – the communists killed more people numerically, and because the context of any of that is irrelevant, they must be worse.
This is why I’m a fan of unfavorably comparing the number of kills by WW2 hero Audie Murphy with the Golden State Killer as a response to highlight that death tolls are one of the dumbest ways to evaluate morality.
"There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."
I'll add that it's common for these people to only count the Jewish victims of the holocaust who died specifically in the various death-camps, and leave out everybody else that the Nazis killed (most notably all the soldiers and civilians of the countries they invaded). So, they'll often arrive at only a ~6 million figure for the Nazis.
In addition to the genocide at home, the Nazi army basically had shoot-to-kill orders for all Eastern Europeans - but those deaths get lumped into general Soviet deaths, which is part of the reason why their number is so much higher than everyone else's.
“There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
It makes me so sad that exposure to The West Wing in college taught me this quote
In what context??? Isn't like 90% of that show characters spewing facts and statistics at each other as rhetorical flourish? I tried watching it a few years ago and I couldn't make it past the second episode.
lol it's the title of episode 21 of season 1I'm sorry
edit: this isn't the clip where bartlet says it, but I refuse to watch any more westwing to find the clip, which I think was near the end of the episode.
2: People for whatever reason have this notion that the fascists were better for their countries economically than the communists, even though it was the communists who produced far greater developments.
It's wild how effective we let fascist Propaganda be. 9/10 WWII docs will just straight up show images of their tanks and rallies and so on without ever once commenting on how it was all just flash - Hitler's economic policy was borrowing a shitload of money, hiding his military spending with Disney Bucks, and then declaring war before the payments came do. Under Mussolini trains literally ran worse than they did before but everyone associates him with the "at least the trains ran on time" truism. We're slightly more honest when talking about the Japanese economy of the period, but only because understanding that the American embargo on oil was a deciding factor to their attacking Pearl Harbor is part of the narrative.
I welcome the Reichskanzlers attempt at Reprivatizierung, but I call on him to go further. :SDP_keirstarmer:
see the nazis only killed jews and the commies just killed everyone invading them in self defense (re:the entire world). clearly the commies are the bad ones here cause they killed people from every country on the planet. they just love killin
They're propagandized to view proletariat control of the means of production in a communist society as being step 1 to genocide. The slight of hand is that they basically made all deaths under communism the results of morally evil indefensible decisions and deaths under capitalism "just the way shit is sometimes man. Progress has a cost ya know".
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Authoritarianism is bad
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Nazism was Authoritarian
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Communism was Authoritarian
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Nazism and Communism are the same and are bad
Regarding the rehabilitation of nazism:
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Revisionist nazi history also extols its industrial and bureaucratic efficiencies willfully disregarding the corruption and ineptitude of it's leadership and most importantly, its purpose and the end result
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There's also the "they were fighting for something" ("at least it's an ethos") and "they were forced into it" lines of reasoning which is just apologia for atrocities and genocidal project
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Propaganda-soaked westerners also think of communism as decidedly not part of The West (ie. not white) and therefore not good
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Anti-communism as a project precedes Nazism by decades
Just some thoughts from my experience
All built on the most horrific slave labor regime imaginable.
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People generally act like Nazi's were super productive and good at things (even if they did bad things) while the USSR was bad at doing things.
This is a very interesting point. Gulag/purge/famine jokes are completely acceptable in everyday conversation. Not even with just anti communists but any average person. Meanwhile Holocaust jokes (rightly) are not acceptable at all
Because they don’t think they’re fash, it’s just the cage they were born in so they can’t see it
I don't mean to generalize, but working from some American fascists that I read/look at on social media. The thought process seems to be:
- Nazis are bad (but because of the Holocaust and nothing else they did or believed), maybe invading France was bad since they are a White Western nation, but it is the realities of war, so not that bad.
- The difference between Fascists and Communists is only that Communists go further and get greater blind fervor of their followers because they incorrectly claim the moral high ground (something Fascists don't do, they will just outrightly say "we want to kill Jews because we are irredeemably evil") claiming things like "there is no such thing as racism against Whites" (as Communists supposedly does racism and genocide against Whites), or SJWs claiming they are lifting up minorities as they do cancelling and cultural revolution or "Kulaks had it coming"
- Therefore, "we" are the good guys and any similarities of us to the 1930's fascists is fine as long as we don't exactly recreate the Holocaust.
Not knowing history, not knowing theory, having nothing but a life of propagandized ideas as the foundation of how you see and interact with the world around you.
