Will Hitler be seen in a more positive way in the far future?

[Lord Baal]

Trust me, no-one cares about genocide or whatever word you want to use to describe mass scale killings. Rationalization of it in your line of argument above is a waste of time. Guys are great or bad depending on how they serve the social order. JC and Augustus were great because they served as the basis of legitimacy of future emperors. The stuff you are talking about is incidental, being incorporated into narratives about such figures later to sustain such greatness. Truman and Stalin aren't baddies not because they didn't order mass killings of civilians, they did, but few really cared and such baddieness would serve social order poorly (though in Stalin's case, Stalin the baddie does exist to some extent to discourage communism, as a warning of the dangers of Moscow rule, and so on), . Few cared about Hitler's killings at the time either, we only care now because he has become a demonic figure whose baddiness serves our social order (see above).

Plenty of people, including fellow Germans, deplored Hitler's killings at the time they occurred. Being part of the existing social order can get you a lot of leeway, but it can't hide excuse the most heinous of crimes. It can help cover them up, but not disguise them. Unless we end up in one hell of a dystopia, that's the way things will stay.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Of course. It's like people who opposed gassing Iranians in the 1980s (or similar US activities), there weren't many of them (few knew, fewer cared) and those there were were treated as deviants. Except of course you maybe had a bigger chance of being slung in a camp yourself if you opposed very publicly in early 1940s Germany.

 

[Lord Baal]

Of course. It's like people who opposed gassing Iranians in the 1980s (or similar US activities), there weren't many of them (few knew, fewer cared) and those there were were treated as deviants. Except of course you maybe had a bigger chance of being slung in a camp yourself if you opposed very publicly in early 1940s Germany.

Which still didn't stop dissent.

 

[Louis XXIV]

One thing to keep in mind is that Julius Caesar (who I don't think did things remotely comparable to what Hitler did) was admired in his time. Genghis Khan was feared in his time, but that's about it. With Nazi Germany, we had the Nuremberg trials to make clear how terrible their actions were. That historical record will hopefully survive in the future, which will always make Hitler seem worse. Plus, Hitler's military successes were very ephemeral. He's not Genghis Khan in that regard. He should be seen as closer to someone like Epaminondas.

Even with Napoleon (who is comparable in the war-making side of things, but not in the genocide side of things), Europe seemed glad to have him over with rather than to undermine his legacy (the closest they got was to make nationalism the bad guy, but, since nationalism was associated with liberalism and democracy at the time, it actually made it easier to associate Napoleon with those traits). Certainly, he died admired by far more than those who admired Hitler. It's easier to have a popular evaluation of a person if there are contemporary sources that rate him highly. It's much harder to contradict almost all the sources to reach your conclusion.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Imagine we were dependent for our information about Hitler on Mein Kampf and a few short histories / biographies written by a few higher ranking Nazi bureaucrats after his death.

That's what we rely on for JC and AC, basically.

The principles of eugenics and the basics of the methods used in the early Holocaust were part of mainstream thinking in Europe and America at the time. Had the European war not unfolded the way it did, the Holocaust would likely have been praised as worthwhile measure to get rid of a source of political and genetic weakness. Perhaps more advanced scientists of today would now regard that the underlying notions as misguided, they would probably agree with the aims and put it down to misunderstandings/culture of the Nazi time.

Indeed, even the Holocaust at its height was not particularly unusual in history. In terms of percentage of people who became victims, it is smaller than a medium-sized medieval pogrom or your average early modern village witch purge. Cleaning a society of deviants in times of stress is actually pretty normal human behaviour, as horrible as we might see it.

At any rate let me reiterate I think it is a mistake to think Hitler is a baddie because of the deaths his regime are responsible for. No-one cares about that sort of thing in general, and the victims are usually helpless, voiceless and, more often than not, dead. The only reason people here think that is what happens is because the nominal reason for demonizing Hitler is his genocide ... in fact I argue above that it is actually because he is an important demonic figure that sustains the ideology of the modern Western political-economic system.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

I think what is special about Hitler (besides all the stuff he is responsible for and everything) is that he is not even considered as a human being. He is not just seen as a terrible human being, but as some kind of fairy tale evil monster if there has ever been one. That is at least the vibe I get and I recently read an article on a new Hitler biography where the author argued something a long those lines. In the article the author would for instance stress how Hitler was not just a lunatic who screamed out his lungs in his evil madness at speeches but that Hitler would start out his speeches in a smooth and rather normal way to then steadily increase the pace and volume, not just for dramatic purposes but to get a feeling for how far he could go with his respective audience. But all the speech video clips one likely knows are part of those rage-style-passages at the end of his speeches.
Or the author would talk about how gentle Hitler could be, how he was known as a pleasant conversation maker and a good listener.
He decried that other historians were to eager to shrug him off as a madman - instead of daring to view him less in convenient stereo-types.

Going by that, yes I believe Hitler will be seen in a more positive light in the future. Just that "more positive" will still be a far far shot from actually positive.

 

[Pangur Bán]

If you were from a century or so ago, had the mindset of that era, and you heard about the evil of Hitler and so on, you could only think he was possessed by some sort of demon. In fact, here's proof:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...in-possessed-Devil-says-Vatican-exorcist.html
Modern educated people still understand the world through similar demonology, even if they have cartoonised literal embodyments of such; i.e. believing 'Hitler was evil' is just a 21st century way of saying Hitler was possessed by a demon.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

That was put well.

 

[Traitorfish]

Well, being of Sephardic Jewish descent myself, I think Jews can best be labeled a macro-ethnicity, an ethnicity of ethnicities. If you want, you can view Jews as one ethnicity, but you can also separate the diverse Jewish groups.

The closest counterpart would IMO be the Scandinavian countries, where you could see Swedish, Norwegians et. al as one ethnicity of Scandinavians, but can also be viewed apart.

That's possible, although I'm suspicious of any so neat a way of tying it up. The problem with Jewishness is that until quite recently, the ethnic self-identification of Jews as Jews was a basically local rather than global phenomenon, it was just expressed in global terms. When a Dane defines himself as a "Dane", he does so mindfully of his undeniable cultural and linguistic proximity to the Swede, and one way of addressing that is to produce as you say a shared "macro-ethnic" identity, which allows for a reconciliation between a sense of opposition and a sense of community. But when, e.g. an Ashkenazi Jew defined himself as a "Jew", he didn't really need to pay much attention to distant Jewish communities, but was rather concerned with his gentile neighbours. The Dane-Swede relationship is more closely mirrored between a Yiddish-speaking Jew and a German-speaking Prussian than between an Ashkenazi Jew and a Mithrahi Jew, and the expression of this relationship in terms of a world-spanning nation seems to be an awkward carry-over from Jewish religious belief.

Indeed, Jews if anything seem to have had the opposite problem to the Scandinavian, of reconciling their nominal brotherhood with the real cultural and linguistic diversity. For example, English Spheardi Jews had an extremely mixed attitude towards the Ashkenazim who came to the country in the 19th century, because they could never quite reconcile a shared sense of Jewishess with the reality that outside of religious practice they had no more in common with these strange, Yiddish-speaking newcomers than any other bourgeois Englishmen.

It's worth noting, I think, that many of the Jewish nationalists in Central and Eastern Europe before WW2 were not concerned with the fate of world Jewry, but specifically with that of the Ashkenazim, who they saw not as the wandering sons of Israel but as a people at least broadly indigenous to the region, and their agitation was directed primarily towards self-government for Ashkenazi communities within the multi-ethnic context of the region, rather than a "Jewish homeland". To them, the global Jewry discussed by the Zionists was a nonsense, and a dangerous one at that.

Now, none of that is to say that we can't regard Jews as a "macro-ethnic" group, or that they can't so regard themselves. Clearly they do, and given that in another thread I recently argued that "ethnic American" is a perfectly plausible concept, I can't really disagree. But I think it's worth drawing out these points to understand the complexities of Jewish, and the consequent difficulty of realising a shared "Jewish nationhood" in Israel.

Why has no one mentioned the Israelites yet?

Too long ago to be the "Nation of Israel"?

Presumably for the same reason that no serious person brings up Arminius when discussing German national identity.

I wouldn't call Stalin, Churchill or Truman genocidaires. Criminally complicit in killing, for sure.

Well, in Stalin and Churchill's case, ethnic cleansing was adopted as state policy, so...

 

[Dachs]

Presumably for the same reason that no serious person brings up Arminius when discussing German national identity.

 

[Traitorfish]

There were probably better examples, yes.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Well, in Stalin and Churchill's case, ethnic cleansing was adopted as state policy, so...

They're ethnic cleansers, yes, genocidaires, no. Stalinist deportations, for instance, while certainly brutal, do not qualify as "genocide" in my book.

 

[Traitorfish]

Many of these deportations were implemented alongside policies of Russification intended to eliminate the groups in question as distinct ethnic groups, at the very least at the level of local communities. Stalinist policy towards the Cossacks and, post-1941, towards Soviet Germans seemed to intend nothing less than their dissolution as peoples.

 

[Lone Wolf]

I wouldn't classify even this as genocide, to be honest.

 

[Pangur Bán]

If you spend your time lawyering a particular word, you'll get very little insight into the past. There is no definition of the word up in the cosmos that you can work out through analysis. Move goals posts a little to the right, a little to the left, one dictator may commit genocide, another just mass murder; what difference does it make for the purposes of history? Genocide = mass murder keeps it simple and stops delusions arising from selective goal-post shifting.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Well the difference all depends on what one is trying to use the term genocide for, isn't? A differentiation of genocide and mass-murder can be useful if the former is about mass-murders centering around ethnic conflicts and later about basically all other mass murders. At least to me it appears useful. As ethnically loaded mass murders happen in a very specific context quit different from say murdering a general political opposition or for the hell of it.
On the other hand, if it is only a genocide if one intends to truly eradicate an ethnicity (as I have seen it argued), it becomes a term so specific and naturally contentious that it is probably more burdensome than useful.

 

[Lone Wolf]

There is no definition of the word up in the cosmos that you can work out through analysis.

Well, duh. There are more and less helpful definitions, though, defining a genocide as "mass murder" seems to be the opposite of helpful - an analysis-stopping cliche, if anything, that prevents you from finding out what was really going on. It's like calling the British Empire "a fascist state".

 

[Traitorfish]

If you spend your time lawyering a particular word, you'll get very little insight into the past. There is no definition of the word up in the cosmos that you can work out through analysis. Move goals posts a little to the right, a little to the left, one dictator may commit genocide, another just mass murder; what difference does it make for the purposes of history? Genocide = mass murder keeps it simple and stops delusions arising from selective goal-post shifting.

Genocide doesn't mean "mass-murder", though. It's possible to commit genocide without killing anybody, such as e.g. Nazi policy towards the Sorbs, Masures and Kashubs, who were classified as "Slavic-speaking Germans" and accordingly pegged for forcible assimilation into the Volksdeutsche. This constituted genocide in the literal sense of "the destruction of a people", but didn't necessarily mean kiling anyway.

(Of course, Nazis being Nazis, they ended up killing tens of thousands of them anyway. Not nice people.)

The claim that Stalin committed genocide is thus not just that he killed large numbers, or even that he did so on ethnically-selective grounds, but that he pursued policies with the intention of dissolving certain peoples as peoples.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Genocide always implied murder to me. Anyway, if we analytically differentiate various methods of getting rid of ethnicities regardless, I don't see how it's that big of a deal.

 

[Pangur Bán]

If you insist on such semantic regulation, you end up privileging subjective identity politics over facts (and indeed only certain forms of identity politics). Truman burned hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians intentionally because, in part, they were Japanese ... not an author of genocide. Stalin's attempts at economic reform ended up starving hundreds of thousands of peasants ... some of whom happened to be 'Ukrainian'' ... genocide. Total nonsensical self-serving lawyering in my mind.

Regulated meaning in international treaties is the product of political processes, so the strong obtain the ability to manipulate it at the expense of the weak, to exempt themselves from its effects while subjecting their enemies. To me that is slavish internalization of passing power-driven 'norms', not the basis for serious insight.