I’ve only lived in Germany for a year and a half so if some more experienced Germans could tell me what I’m missing and explain why things aren’t so bad that would be nice, but it seems like this country is shifting in a negative direction politically from this polling data and it scares me.
If AfD ends up being the second biggest party in the Bundestag next federal election I’ll be quite upset but that’s how it goes I guess.
Arguably, it’s the definition of genocide at play here.
To qualify what I am going to say, I have a minor in History, with a particular focus on the 20th century.
There are moments in both the Soviet Union’ and China’s histories that are genocidal, or aren’t always considered genocide but probably should be considered it. Things such as the Holodomor, etc (I’m not going to argue if this is a genocide or not). As you mention, both nations likely killed more people than the Nazis did (although things such as the black book of communism should not be considered a credible source).
The difference is, neither the Soviet Union nor Communist China were founded on a platform of genocide. The Nazis were. The majority of people killed in the Soviet Union and China were not killed through genocide, they were mostly killed through political violence and state mishandling of resources. The intentions were just different; the Nazis cannot be understood without their desire for genocide, the Soviets can.
You could also argue, though, that the genocidalism score should be dependant on the amount of potential victims.
Depending on the estimate, for example the California Genocide had a higher murder ratio.
I don’t think it’s fair to let genocidists “off the hook” just because they ran out of people to murder.
I agree, I’m just not sure what this is responding to. I didn’t intend, and I hope didn’t imply, that this was at play here. The Holodomor isn’t better than the Holocaust simply because one ended with fewer deaths, and I agree with what I think is undergirding your comment, that there’s no real way to “rank” genocides, they’re all bad.
Yeah, that was basically my point.
I’ve had a few discussions that went like “Nazis where the pinnacle of evil due to the holocaust, which was the most evil thing that ever happened, thus nothing else is really evil”.
And while I totally agree that Nazis/holocaust are really evil, there are a lot of other events and groups that are really evil, and I disagree with ranking genocides just by the size of the “genocidable” population.
I did put “letting off the hook” in quotation marks, because I didn’t think you implied that anyone who murders people on a massive scale is ok, just because somebody else was worse. So no worries, you didn’t imply that.
A genocide, by definition, is an event where as many people are murdered as possible. They are usually limited by the size of the victim population and by the resources the murderers have. Not by how evil the murderers are.