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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28510 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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This is all to say, Hitler was not a normal leader, and whatever priors we have about how "normal countries" work don't apply here.

Compared to what? He was on the level of Stalin and at least in the same league as Franco or Mussolini who actually invented blackshirts as a precursor to Hitler's brownshirts, and we do not even go to atrocities committed by Italians in Ethiopia. Even "milder" leaders like Austrofascist leader Engelbert Dollfuss committed political violence in three figure range. We can go on, especially early post-WW1 period was full of atrocities such as during Polish-Soviet War or under Hungarian Soviet Republic and related red and white terror.

I think your sense of "normal" is highly curated by modern sensibilities and information available to you, which is vastly different to what people in Europe lived as "normal" for decade of their lives or more prior to WW2.

I guess my gripe is with the definition of "normal". Let's think of today - I think Putin is a "normal" leader. Not dissimilar to Xi Jinping or range of various leaders in Africa or Middle East etc. Hitler espoused especially virulent version of fascism, but then Germany was also facing unique challenges. If let's say Germany won WW1 and carved out Lotharingia/Burgundy out of France/Benelux as a new puppet state populated by Dutch and German and French and Flemish people, I would not expect rump France to have your cookie-cutter milquetoast leaders just accepting that.

I would not say that let's say kaiser Franz Joseph or tzar Nicholas II or kaiser Wilhelm II or president Raymond Poincaré or prime minister David Lloyd George were "abnormal" leaders for their times and yet they are all co-responsible for WW1, which should put them into 0.01% of abnormal leaders according to your criteria - right?

Also I was assessing Hitler pre-war, of course once you have total World War, then all comparisons are off. In fact related to the topic of Darryl Cooper vs Churchill - and we can throw Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman into the bunch - grounding to dust millions of houses full of civilians during air raids on cities in Germany and Japan, including dropping atomic bombs is up there on the scale of atrocities committed on civilian population by any leader in the history of the world. Vietnam war caused around 2 million civilian deaths in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos - which makes JFK and Johnson and Nixon also pretty high on the abnormal list. What percentile of abnormality are those figures in your eyes?

And I see why you do not want to discuss these things, because exactly as Cooper points out, the WW2 is prime example of hyperreality event, it has high place as a national myth in very many countries, which makes any assessment immediately mired in controversy. The thing is that as the time goes this pressure is lessened - not many people are riled up if one assesses pros and cons of Napolen or Emperor Ferdinand II or if they talk about how Gengis Khan can be praised for bringing hundred years long Pax Mongolica, which enabled Europe to reach to orient with explorers like Marco Polo and spurred them toward modernity in its own way. We already see WW1 in rearview mirror and you can finally have reasonable discussions about the events leading to the war as well as if the treaty o Versailles. It is inevitable that the same will happen with WW2 some time, Cooper is just one of the early birds in this sense.

If Hitler had merely done the Holocaust, he'd be in the top 0.01% of leaders in terms of murdering his own people. That's not normal by any reasonable definition.

It doesn't affect the argument, but this is a common trope which gets my goat, so I am going to stick an oar in. The Holocaust was mostly not Hitler murdering his own people - most of the German and Austrian Jews escaped. The Holocaust was mostly a genocide of Jews in Nazi-occupied territory - with the numbers being dominated by Polish and Ukrainian Jews because Poland and Ukraine had the largest Jewish populations. Hitler was in the top 1% of world leaders in terms of militarily unnecessary massacres of conquered populations but probably not the top 0.01%. (Genghis Khan says "Hi!") Whether you consider "his own people" to be Germans, Austrians, or both, he wasn't even in the top 1% of world leaders in terms of murdering them.

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