Hogs saying that, or saying "communism is worse because it killed more people" are spewing fascist talking points designed to normalize fascism in comparison to the "genocidal death count of communism"
Hogs saying that, or saying "communism is worse because it killed more people" are spewing fascist talking points designed to normalize fascism in comparison to the "genocidal death count of communism"
Yes though I've yet to find a way to explain this that takes less than an hour
Lately I’ve been using the continuing battle over the legacy of the Civil War in the USA as an example to try and explain the continuing ideological battle over the legacy of the Second World War. Libs are quick to agree that there are aggressive distortions of history around the Civil War. Takes about an hour and a half. Sigh.
Ha, I hear that. Glad you're fighting the good fight, though!
Specifically for the "more deaths always means more evil" type of thinking, compare WW2 hero Audie Murphy's kill count with that of the Zodiac killer or the Golden State killer -- it is higher than both combined.
Therefore, by this reasoning, we must conclude that the war hero who fought off and killed literal hundreds of Nazis who were invading Europe to do genocide, is actually worse than serial killers who targeted and gruesomely killed young couples, which is obviously ludicrous and helps intuitively illustrate the issue with this reasoning. If they try to whinge and babble about special exceptions "because war" or whatever, they're granting the point that context is important and that morality is not just a math problem.
That's true, though I also dispute the anticommunist calculations themselves that claim larger numbers.
Capitalist propagandists counted (with embellishment, exaggeration, and sometimes complete horseshit) deaths in socialist countries. They did not and do not count the comparable deaths in capitalist ones, where they see the constant premature deaths as an inevitable fact of life, or of poverty with no clear cause.
The great lib Amartya Sen once did a comparison of India and China, primarily their excess death rates, which averaged an over 4 million difference every year against India, cumulatively around 100 million deaths over the decades described.
Who is aware of those deaths and thinks of them as a black eye on capitalism? Why are they not mentioned virtually every time India or capitalism in it are discussed? They have been actively ignored, much as Sen was, so that they can drift back into the background. Capitalism doesn't just kill more people than claimed by any bullshit exaggerative book about socialist countries, it insidiously masks them as a natural and inevitable status quo so thoroughly that even the socialists forget to point to them!
Also, your note of Nazi reminded me of another fun fact: the anticommunist kill count lists often get so desperate that they include the deaths of invading Wehrmacht soldiers and people killed by SARS-CoV-2.
Mostly from Hunger and Public Action: Studies in Development Economics:
Thank you!