While We Wait: Writer's Block & Other Lame Excuses

[Crezth]

True on that; the Soviets didn't really have a taste for genocide from what I have heard.

Now I didn't say that, but by and far the Nazis engaged in genocide of what is, to me, far darker and fouler in nature than the mass-killings of the Soviets, which were not racially-motivated and did not obliterate an entire culture from Central Europe permanently.

 

[Tycho]

Now I didn't say that, but by and far the Nazis engaged in genocide of what is, to me, far darker and fouler in nature than the mass-killings of the Soviets, which were not racially-motivated and did not obliterate an entire culture from Central Europe permanently.

True, but due to my own incompetence, I thought that you were implying that the Soviets were not interested in annihilating an entire group of people. My apologies for getting confused on that and misconscrewing your original statement.

 

[Thlayli]

Now I didn't say that, but by and far the Nazis engaged in genocide of what is, to me, far darker and fouler in nature than the mass-killings of the Soviets, which were not racially-motivated and did not obliterate an entire culture from Central Europe permanently.

Yo, go check and see how many Poles there are in the Ukraine sometime. Not many? Well gosh, where did they all go?

Somehow I feel most guilty for that last one. I can easily understand the appeal of all the worst aspects of the Soviet Union from the inside, but the people who supported us from the outside just seem disgusting. (No offense towards Terrance, though - I mainly mean certain interwar and Cold War-era Western left-wingers.)

Interestingly this attitude towards our foreign fans was apparently not that hard to encounter back in Soviet days, either.

A very even-handed viewpoint. Please respond to my N3S diplomacy.

 

[Kraznaya]

EDIT: eff, i had this picture originally, but the link was broken. now it has this ugly edit line

 

[das]

Yo, go check and see how many Poles there are in the Ukraine sometime. Not many? Well gosh, where did they all go?

Well, some of them went to Poland. Just like Germans from certain western parts of modern Poland went to Germany. I seem to recall there are people in Poland who don't feel particularly mad at Stalin precisely because of that last bit; it was very much of a favourable tradeoff for the nation, if not for the individuals involved. Of course that isn't a very politic line to take these days.

 

[Thlayli]

While that might be true, Crezth's attempts to establish a moral hierarchy of Nazis being somehow "worse" than Soviets are dubious.

The Soviets certainly targeted ethnic minorities for liquidation, and the Nazis often persecuted and murdered individuals of no particular racial affiliation, unless homosexuals and Catholics are races now. (cue snarky derails) People considering the Nazis to be 'worse' or the Soviets to be 'worse' are often arguing off of which state hedged further from their personal political philosophies, rather than an objective comparison of their human rights violations.

Both states operated on policies of mass terror and killed millions. It'd be equally rational to call the German soldiers "heroes" for fighting against Communist oppression.

 

[Tycho]

I think that people take the moral high ground with the Soviets versus the Nazi's because the Soviets fought on the side of the Allies during WWII. Had it been the other way around, it would have been quite different I think.

 

[SKILORD]

If it had been the other way around we would all be staunchly pro soviet (and speaking russian) and none of us would forget the native american genocide.

 

[North King]

I think the lesson here is that trying to establish hierarchies of evil is kind of silly. The Nazis did awful things, the Soviets did awful things, the Americans did awful things. Let's remember that, move on with our lives, and prevent awful things.

 

[nutranurse]

Hey guys, I'm back. It's been one hell of a few weeks; began with me scrambling to finish my senior thesis (did and passed with flying colors) and ended with me flying to a different country for a pair of funerals. But I'm back! Both in the country and on the forums. By sunday(ish) I'll be in full NESing swing. I apologize to my players/moderators for the sudden absence.

 

[Tycho]

Hey guys, I'm back. It's been one hell of a few weeks; began with me scrambling to finish my senior thesis (did and passed with flying colors) and ended with me flying to a different country for a pair of funerals. But I'm back! Both in the country and on the forums. By sunday(ish) I'll be in full NESing swing. I apologize to my players/moderators for the sudden absence.

Welcome back nutranurse .

 

[Crezth]

While that might be true, Crezth's attempts to establish a moral hierarchy of Nazis being somehow "worse" than Soviets are dubious.

Well, I don't really care to go into a lot of detail, but I will establish as a baseline that it is in fact a question that I have pondered for years and still don't have a satisfactory treatment of. My reasoning is mostly of an emotional sort and establishes as its moral basis a very general sense of intent and effect. Finally, I have maintained that the Nazis were worse despite myriad political views held by me across myriad years, so it isn't merely a means to color the Soviets as good to make my personal politics seem friendlier. So I'd appreciate it if you didn't reduce my fairly complicated opinion to "knee jerk hatred of the right wing/Soviet apologism" when it's really just "hatred of Nazis and the Holocaust so profound as to nullify in effect the magnitude of all other crimes by comparison." I admit that this is really an emotional tack - I have no pretensions about being objective - but thats what it is.

I don't see their crimes as comparable via a moral calculus a la "well according to my spreadsheet the nazis have 435 evil points and the soviets have 510." I think that the white hot anger with which the Nazis exercised their evil upon the world and the pure hate with which they nearly destroyed an entire race of people for no other reason than that they were there is more dangerous to the principles of humanity and civilization and all we hold dear about each other and life than the cold and calculated political murders of convenience by the Soviets, a type of thinking so devoid of emotion as to impel nobody to action. But Nazism is an ethos of hateful emotion, one which will never die, and is all the more evil for exactly that reason.

Yeah, I realize this is all very romantic of me. Feel free to rip me apart on #nes.

 

[Thlayli]

If we do a statistical analysis of inhumane deaths caused by Communist regimes versus inhumane deaths caused by fascist regimes, the former comes out on top. Not all of these deaths were personally orchestrated by the Soviets, but all would have been impossible without Soviet support. For that reason, I view Lenin and his heirs as a greater evil than Hitler and his fellow fascists. The evil that is intelligent, and self-perpetuating, and able to survive, is aggregately worse than the stupid evil that is obliterated within a decade of coming to full power.

 

[Angst]

While highly unstable, nazism produced a situation remniscent of horror. The literary genre, even.

The Angel of Death is one of the scariest things I've encountered in paper in popular history, and that he weren't alone in his position...

 

[Terrance888]

Whoa, whoa! This is the difference between a spoken speech and a written one.

I HEAVILY drenched my speech with Sarcasm. The Teacher approved.

 

[Luckymoose]

America is about equal to the Nazis in horror, but the Soviets stand alone.

 

[Terrance888]

No nation's history is free of evil. Who are we to judge others, when in the future they may think the subjugation of the Native Americans the most horrible act of them all (or some reason)?

We may do everything with "a good intent". Then again, try to find a Nazi to admit what he or she did was evil during the height of their success...

EDIT: On the Nazi v.s. Soviet debate, extrapolate the death toll of 70 years of Nazi rule.

 

[ChiefDesigner]

If we do a statistical analysis of inhumane deaths caused by Communist regimes versus inhumane deaths caused by fascist regimes, the former comes out on top.

Considering that the Nazis had twelve years, while the Soviets had seventy, the fact that the Nazis are even competitive here says something, don't you think?

 

[Gem Hound]

America is about equal to the Nazis in horror, but the Soviets stand alone.

I agree with this. It was the Americans that the Germans originally got the death camps idea from. The Americans though threw the plan out the window.

 

[Thlayli]

I agree with this. It was the Americans that the Germans originally got the death camps idea from. The Americans though threw the plan out the window.

lolwut