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Post by Adam in Stroud on Jul 29, 2019 20:34:20 GMT
I don't know as much about almost any of the cases under discussion as most of the posters above, but I find Devil Wincarnate and Forfarshire Conservative's analysis of the 3rd Reich persuasive. (On purely military aspects, K-H Frieser's Blitzkrieg Legend argues that the war was unwinnable due to lack of strategic resources and British control of the seas, and that the defeat of France merely delayed the inevitable.) It's interesting to note that even if one puts aside the moral aspects, Hitler's regime still come out as essentially disastrous. On Mao: I wonder if one can really be sure how many deaths were due to economic negligence or recklessness, and how many were deliberate. Whole classes such as landlords were deliberately attacked, as were ethnic minorities who dared to not consider themselves Chinese (e.g Tibetans,) as were KMT supporters who didn't get out to Taiwan, and there were numerous casualties of the Cultural Revolution quite deliberately murdered. |
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Sibboleth
Labour
'Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood.'
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Post by Sibboleth on Jul 29, 2019 22:07:22 GMT
Hitler would not have lived to see the final realisation of the Nazi project. It was so monstrously inefficient, and economically illiterate, that the economy would have eventually collapsed. Effectively, it would have ended up as East Germany nearly did. The whole thing was kept afloat entirely via literal fraud. |
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Post by Devil Wincarnate on Jul 29, 2019 22:16:23 GMT
Hitler would not have lived to see the final realisation of the Nazi project. It was so monstrously inefficient, and economically illiterate, that the economy would have eventually collapsed. Effectively, it would have ended up as East Germany nearly did. The whole thing was kept afloat entirely via literal fraud. A prime example. Hitler did not take his salary, and this was trumpeted in the usual way, and was returned to the treasury. Meanwhile, he charged the postal service ten times as much in royalties to use his head on stamps, kept off the books. |
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Post by finsobruce on Jul 30, 2019 6:25:17 GMT
The whole thing was kept afloat entirely via literal fraud. A prime example. Hitler did not take his salary, and this was trumpeted in the usual way, and was returned to the treasury. Meanwhile, he charged the postal service ten times as much in royalties to use his head on stamps, kept off the books. "Goebbels be a good chap - go down the Post office and buy me some stamps"
"Yes, mein Fuhrer. How many?"
"Oh, about 700,000".
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The Bishop
Labour
Down With Factionalism!
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Post by The Bishop on Jul 30, 2019 10:34:17 GMT
On Mao: I wonder if one can really be sure how many deaths were due to economic negligence or recklessness, and how many were deliberate. Whole classes such as landlords were deliberately attacked, as were ethnic minorities who dared to not consider themselves Chinese (e.g Tibetans,) as were KMT supporters who didn't get out to Taiwan, and there were numerous casualties of the Cultural Revolution quite deliberately murdered There has been a Twitter account for a few years now that is chronicling the Cultural Revolution in "real time" 50 years on. Horrifying and hilarious in roughly equal measure. |
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slon
Non-Aligned
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Post by slon on Jul 31, 2019 16:16:59 GMT
It isn't just dictators
Quite sensible, popular and apparently humane decisions are made by people with a full democratic mandate .... and result in the deaths of millions of individuals or even the targeted deaths of whole ethnic groups.
Other respected people were perhaps lucky in some of their plans were never implemented.
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mboy
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Post by mboy on Jul 31, 2019 16:34:30 GMT
Indeed. This issue of intent, and ability of action, was the source of a long argument between Noam Chomsky and Sam Harris. Chomsky maintains that the USA is the greatest terrorist entity in the world, closely followed by Israel, while Harris says that's absurd.
During their argument, Chomsky totalised the number of civilians killed in various actions over the last few decades, and compared them to those from Al Qaeda (this argument was pre ISIS). US killings from sanctions friendly-fire, mistakes, Iraq, etc were higher than Al Qaeda, ergo the USA was a bigger terrorist entity. On the pure basis of the number of lives ended, this appears true. But Harris countered that those US kills were during the course of actions that were designed to prevent greater disasters, and that the US made strenuous efforts to minimise those death; while Al Qaeda kills were purely to eliminate as many innocent people as possible. If the USA had wanted to, it could have carpet-nuked the entire Middle East and killed 200,000,000 people without any serious effort. Conversely, the deaths by Al Qaeda were limited only by their failures and lack of weapons - indeed if Al Qaeda had a nuclear arsenal we know they would have used it instantly on Israel and others to the fullest extent possible. Al Qaeda would have loved to kill 200,000,000 people. This then is the moral difference between the two. Sam Harris was right, and Chomsky was an idiot.
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Post by therealriga on Aug 28, 2019 4:29:16 GMT
I agree with much of this. There is no time at which Hitler could have died and been considered a great man. How about....Hitler is assassinated in October 1938, after Munich but before Kristallnacht. His successor does exactly the same in that alt. timeline. In that scenario, I could definitely imagine some modern historians lauding Hitler's achievements in the economic sphere and blaming world war 2 and the Holocaust on his successor and speculating that if Hitler had lived those wouldn't have happened. |
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Post by Devil Wincarnate on Sept 1, 2019 17:17:51 GMT
In Argentina, you've got a whole scale of dictators to pick from.
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