The HORRIFIC Torture Of The Women Of The Battle Of Berlin

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I don't believe in terms like "necessary evil" or "lesser of two evils". Especially when we live in a modern world where intellectuals are claiming that good and evil don't even exist.

So if good and evil don't actually exist, what does that make Stalin and Hitler's brutal war crimes? Or America's own racist history?

You have to understand that WWII was a race against time to nuetralise the Nazis. Not just the POWs but intelligence shared at the Yalta conference in Feb 1945 mean't there was an urgent need to stop the Nazis from murdering the remaining civilian populations of Jews, gypsies and slavs held in concentration camps (the allies had advanced knowledge from reconnaissance spy planes).

The Nazis knew the war was over yet spent the last 6 months accelerating the murders in the death camps including conducting death marches to a) escape from the allies/Soviets to save their own backsides and b) keep killing civilians.
That level of dedication to killing is quite horrific. While some here are pretending faux outrage against the Soviet soldiers the reality is that every Russian knew what the German population was conducting against their own people, they learned it the hard way during operation Barbarossa and the battle of Stalingrad. The anger was not (as Magz claims) fake. They were legitimately angry and retaliatory at what was done to their own families and homeland.

I don't condone violence against civilians. But if people can reconcile that US servicemen with PTSD who saw their friends get cut down by the Viet Cong can spray agent organge onto hundreds of thousands of Laotian and Vietnamese civilians or wipe out entire villages then it's not really such a hard stretch to imagine what Soviet soldiers felt.

And Magz, even if Stalin drew on some central Asian Soviet populations you can't project whether they cared or not about what they thought of Germans murdering their comrades and fellow Soviets.

Interesting question. My own feeling is that what we call "good" and "evil" are completely in the eye of the beholder, and I take the use of those words to be metaphors for things we love and things we hate. The danger of seeing good and evil as absolute and real is that people may run away with the idea that their personal feelings are the last word on the matter - then they're failing to own their part in it. But my view can easily get misunderstood when the matter is one in which there's a very strong consensus, when practically everybody hates a thing such as genocide. If I then wade in and say "you're wrong, genocide isn't inherently evil," then people may think I'm siding with mass murder. So these days I usually just take a statement such as "Hitler was evil" as a metaphor, and either agree or say nothing.

So, I'm OK with terms such as "a necessary evil" and "the lesser of two evils," and although I don't think good and evil actually exist, that doesn't mean I can't have strong feelings about Stalin and Hitler's brutal war crimes or America's own racist history, and it doesn't reduce the energy I might put into fighting against the things I hate. The individual decides what they love and what they hate, and helps or hinders it accordingly, depending on how effective they are.


What was necessary about the harm he did? I have a theory, but I was just wondering if your reasoning was the same.

I might be in the minority on this but I feel that if there is truly such a thing as "evil" in this world it exists only in the hearts of humans. I don't believe any living creature on earth matches humans in terms of cruelty, selfishness, and willing ignorance. We've all abused our power of invention to do much more harm than good to the world by inventing things like plastic and atomic weapons.

Sometimes i think the world would be a much happier place if people would quit pretending like they aren't hypocrites. But then again I myself understand that it's easier sometimes to just pretend to conform so I don't have to deal with the wrath of judgemental types.

Their own regime killed many, many more "comrades and fellow Soviets"...
A grain of true might be something Timothy Snyder claims: that Hitler's and Stalin's cruel regimes fueled and enabled each other.

And I imagine they fueled every other brutal dictatorship to this day.

No that's not true. I don't know about Stalin, but Hitler's inspiration came from elsewhere
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018 ... ced-hitler

You really believe it had just one source, in addition a pretty distant one?

Then you're ignoring all the processes that took place in Europe before, during and after WWI.

The soviets lost the most men by number in world war two, but also killed the most people. Soviet Russia in particular has been historically cruel and authoritarian, in a similar way to the Nazis and how they acted in their heyday. The difference being that the Nazis faded into obscurity after world war two, whilst communist extremists still had an empire up until the 1990's and the end of the cold war - and are still a big presence on the world stage today.

A lot of people play down the dangerous behaviour of communist extremists and the actions of the state behind them nowadays. The woke of Twitter don't help, with their revisionist ideas of history.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees that. I find the uprise in young people wanting to destroy the system and replace it was Communism almost as deeply disturbing as the many people trying to create a dictatorship influenced out of Trumpism.

These kids (feels weird labeling them as this since most are around my age or younger) clearly don't get why communism has failed in so many countries. In theory it only works when everyone in a society INCLUDING those in power agrees to not be selfish.

I just don't see that ever happening with Americans. We value individualism too highly and I think trying to mix that with an ideaology like communism is a recipe for disaster.

So basically I feel like we are screwed either way. Half the country wants to be communist, the other half wants to be fascist. Look at how well that turned out for the Germans during and after World War 2.

Like German elections in the 1930s.
I know, that's not uplifting.

Well, I'm from the UK, but I consider myself to be a democratic-socialist, in the same vein of semi socialist countries like Germany.

The UK has very high wealth inequality (not as bad as the U.S, mind you).

But yes, people just seem to hop onto stupid things like the MAGA train (almost fascism) and the communist train (communism is also terrible in its true form).

Exactly! Even my mom who is normally skeptical of political stuff agreed that something is very off about American politics. Many of us are just afraid.

Stalin's treatment of civilians was based purely on his maintaining control. It was pure authoritarianism
Hitler and the Nazis were driven by racism (pure and simple).

Nazism learned everything about eugenics and race control from the USA before Hitler.

Absolutely true. While the Nazis had done horrible atrocities during the war, the common people did not. What we are seeing today in Ukraine is very much a replay of what Stalin's troops had committed.

Nobody wants to see this in 2022 but drawing lines from Putin to Stalin is a non-sequitur