Is it fair to compare Britain to Nazi Germany or the USSR?

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Whenever I see lists online or videos of the worlds worst and bloodiest dictators and tyrants like the one I saw last night starting at Pinochet (3,000 deaths) to Mao (78 million deaths). One of the comments was well what about the US and the British empire? I seem to think people always want to include them alongside Hitler and Stalin. I mean yes millions died from slavery and atrocities in the British empire but Britain within itself as a country wasn't really a dictatorship than it was under Cromwell. People were free to vote, protest, go wherever they pleased although women didn't get the vote until the 1910s. King Leopold ran the Congo free state as a dictatorship but not in his home country Belgium.

Yes, it does seem fair. It seems unfair to act like because some particular in-group wasn't terrorized that the rest of the actions committed by a state or regime or civilization are somehow less reflective of how they behaved.

Even with Nazi Germany or the USSR under Stalin you can find an in-group that did relatively okay under their rule, but that doesn't absolve those regimes of their actions. All you're doing is reducing the value of some people's lives compared to other people's lives.

The British and American empires have both been pretty terrible to peoples under their rule and beyond. How are atrocities less atrocious just because the people they're being committed against have a different national identity or look different from the in-group?

Also, on a separate tangent:

The UK didn't have universal suffrage until 1928, so you're really overstating how democratic Britain was. It wasn't until 1918 that all men (over 21) could vote in the UK. That law also allowed some women to vote. The UK had quite limited franchise prior to that; in 1832 the franchise only included 1 in 7 men and that was after a significant expansion. The UK was an oligarchy of land owners for most of it's history.

I think you're also overestimating how strongly the right to protest was (and is) protected in the UK as well. The UK doesn't have a written constitution so there's no legal equivalent to the US 1st Amendment. The UK is a State Party to the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and to the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights, but also doesn't seem to really be doing a good job of protecting those rights, even now.

https://www.rightofassembly.info/country/united-kingdom

So no, people weren't free to vote or to protest through-out the vast majority of the history of the United Kingdom. People will protest whether or not they're allowed to, that's why there's a history of protests in Britain, not because their right to do so was protected. Often protest led to being violently confronted, they protested anyways.

Yes the European empires (including the US colonies) were built on the backs of slavery and mass murder. But the German Nazis learned everything the colonial empires did and took it to another level. So the scale of misery they created in such a short time is unparalleled.

the USSR was a closed society with an iron curtain so their leadership was able to exert full indoctrination and authoritarian control over their population. In terms of authoritarianism that's what separates the USSR and Nazi Germany from the empires that came before them.

Not an accurate to compare Great Britian to Nazi Germany because Great Britain never deliberately tried to kill every member of an ethnic group under their control.

Their is some accuracy in comparing Pol Pot and China during the Cultural Revolution because while they were not trying to kill every member of an ethnic group they did try and kill all political opponents which ended up being millions of people. As far as China now, until we know what fully what is happening to the Uyghurs there is not enough information.

While Stalin and the rest did kill political opponents most were sent to the Gulag not murdered.

The United States is a more accurate comparison than Great Britain
Genocide of Indigenous Peoples - Holocaust Museum Houston

Where the comparison fails is while there was deliberate attempts to kill entire tribes it was done on an ad hoc basis.

The Brits invented the concentration camp.

The Brits engaged in genocide against the Kikuyu people during the Mau Mau Rebellion.

The Brits wilfully caused famines in India. Food exports went up during these famines, indicating the problem wasn't a lack of food, but instead who was allowed access to food.

They did the same in Ireland, Charles Trevelyan bears significant personal responsibility, but so does the empire that assigned him to his position. Ireland produced enough food to feed itself during the potato famine, but the British landlords didn't allow the Irish to eat the fruits of their labour.

The Brits were prominent in the slave trade, which was genocidal in nature.

You correctly identify the actions of American settlers towards indigenous peoples as genocidal, but those behaviours didn't start when the Yanks gained independence. Further, similar actions occurred against indigenous Australians prior to Australia's independence.

I think you're vastly underestimating how genocidal the British Empire was.

https://historycollection.com/10-atroci ... ory-books/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/h ... 21756.html

^^^ to be fair the Brits and Americans inspired the Nazis

the American Jim Crow laws, their eradication of native Americans and American Eugenics were all greatly admired and emulated by the Nazi party in the 1930s.

Absolutely. I was only rebutting the notion that the Americans were worse than the Brits, when really the Brits and their former colonies were all on the same page when it came to atrocities.

As you noted, the Brits invented the concentration camp, in South Africa.

There is a painting by the very famous English painter J M W Turner, of a British slave ship which shows the terrible reality (of the time) of captives being thrown into the sea to drown. It is shocking to see this painting for the first time (as Turner intended it to be), but it is a factual painting. The Brits do have some very murky history. They are not alone in that.

However the comparison of the Brits to Nazi Germany and the USSR seems pointless to me. Someone once said "Comparisons are odious" and I think that applies to this one.

I think it works in someways, like in regards to how violent they were towards out-groups, but it's an imperfect comparison at best.

Let's put it this way, despite my willingness to compare the three, I'd still prefer living in the Anglosphere over living under the NSDAP or Soviets.

It reminds me of right wingers who talk about how great the 1950s were. Of course these same clowns wouldn't actually want to actually live in that world. Or online gamers who talk how great it would be to be a norse viking or some warrior from yore. Of course disease, scurvy, rotten teeth and living with stock animals and rats pooping in your bedroom isn't what they would sign up for. People fantasise about worlds they would probably last 5 minutes in.