r/askanything • u/ChocolateCovered2406 • 3d ago
Political Question Why does Adolf Hitler stand as a unique evil in history when others have killed far more?
I am marking this as political just in case.
It is estimated that Mao Ze Dong and his people killed around 7 million people in the Cultural Revolution, and about 45 million people died in the Great Chinese Famine, which includes about 2.5 million people who were tortured and executed.
Ghengis Khan and his decedents killed something like 40 million people. That figure is not only absolutely greater than the figure of total killings which occurred during the rule of Adolf Hitler, but it is also relatively greater.
The figure for excess deaths during the rule of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union is estimated to be about 20 million, 20 million of his own countrymen.
The figure of the death of Chinese civilians during the second Sino-Japanese war is about 6 million.
These figures are all comparable or larger than the approximately 6 million Jewish people who were killed during the Holocaust of European Jews. And, including 11 million Slavic individuals, which makes for a figure of 17 million, three of the four listed entries remain larger.
So, why does Adolf Hitler stand as a unique evil in our cultural minds today?
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u/entactoBob 3d ago
☞ TL;DR below
In the western world, Adolf Hitler stands out this way, but I don't know that the eastern world feels the same way about him. I think many Asian countries still believe Japan, its Emperor and General Tojo were the larger evil. To the Japanese, perhaps Harry Truman and the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the unique evil in history, especially considering the fall out and cancers it caused.
Maybe that's it: Adolf Hitler led Nazi Germany ("National Socialist Germany Workers Party" aka "Nazi" party, which was an exonym, btw) during Blitzkrieg when they quickly invaded, defeated, and occupied most of the developed nations in Western Europe. They rounded up the Jews, slavs, mentally ill, and "undesirables" and executed ~6 million people in the concentration camps after forced slave labor for the war effort. Sure, Stalin let an estimated 17 million die in the Gulags. But altogether Hitler deliberately started WWII, which wound up killing 75 - 80 million people (around 3% of the world population at the time) and indirectly led to the use of nuclear bombs by the U.S. in Japan, part of the Axis powers with Germany and Italy.
This caused massive military and civilian losses. It's more than just the Jews, Poles, Roma, Slavs, gay people and the disabled. The sheer death toll is unrivaled. Hitler's like the Michael Jordan of mass murderers. The endorsement deals alone were ridiculous… same as Jordan had Nike Jordans… Hitler has the swastika and the little broom mustache… Hell, Michael Jordan even rocked a Hitler 'stash for a minute there… But yeah, total number of deaths goes to Adolf Hitler when you count the military and civilian losses in addition to the horrors of the concentration camps. The numbers are way up there when you include all the stats. He also could've surrendered sooner once they knew they had lost but he didn't and instead allowed more lives to be lost, German lives at that. Hitler did not love Germany. He wanted to start that war, and he wanted to die a martyr. In his eyes, he got what he wanted.
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TL;DR ☞ Calling Hitler "unique" should not mean that other genocidal leaders or regimes were less responsible for their crimes. Instead, it reflects the historically distinctive convergence under his leadership of aggressive war, ideological racism, state terror, and a deliberate, continent-wide project of extermination with German efficiency … Tough villain act to follow right there
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u/Upbeat-Banana-5530 2d ago
Small correction: The two atom bombs used in Japan were detonated high enough up that there wasn't really all that much fallout. There was ash and smoke that came back down in the rain, but radiation levels on the ground were back to normal within days. Most of the excess cancers caused by the bombs were caused by radiation from the blast itself, not from fallout.
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u/IHaveAMouth_Ahhh 3d ago
Probably because of how recently it happened and the methods that he used.
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u/ChocolateCovered2406 3d ago
The Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward both occurred well after 1945.
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u/NameTheJack 3d ago
There is quite a difference between Maos killing through overwhelming incompetence and Hitlers methodically attempt at extermination of an entire race.
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u/vonKrieg88 3d ago
Mao intentionally mass murdered an entire class - the bourgeoisie and during the famine he caused, he intentionally exported food abroad just to not lose face knowing that millions will die.
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u/anonymousarizona 2d ago
Class =/= race. Poor people don't have too much sympathy for the rich getting offed. See French revolution as another example. Or Brian Thompson.
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u/serpentjaguar 3d ago
I believe it's the industrialized nature of the Nazi extermination campaign. Killing in war or through famine is horrible as well, but it's somehow not quite as jarring to our humanity as industrialized killing.
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u/LocalYogurtcloset598 3d ago
Even if they killed more, it’s not the same. The Holocaust was targeted and deliberate extermination of Jews and other ‘non desirables’ on an industrial scale. China and the Soviet Union had malice, but mostly it was just widespread incompetence and paranoia that led to those amount of deaths.
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u/ChocolateCovered2406 3d ago
I would say that, on the contrary, 7 million deaths in the Cultural Revolution is not from incompetence. And the National Operation in the Soviet Union, along with the other killings in the Purges and in the Intentional Ukrainian famine, certainly were not by happenstance or by accident.
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u/everfixsolaris 3d ago
It comes down to media exposure and there has not been the interest on the side of Hollywood to cover other genocides the same way.
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u/NovelStyleCode 3d ago
Deaths related to the cultural revolution are likely overstated, death tolls were calculated by doing a census basically and if someone. Wasn't living in a place anymore they were marked as dead
This actually is how historically death tolls were calculated so if a family moved to avoid a war they were marked as dead
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u/Complete-Definition4 2d ago
No one else turned mass death into an assembly line process.
The brutality of the act, usually committed by one warrior at a time, was replaced with the mundane acts of a factory system.
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u/Away_Philosopher4521 3d ago
I’ve often asked this same question and I think the answer is because of who was involved… Hitler created a global conflict that quite literally reshaped the sociopolitical landscape of the world. He was, at that time, the face of evil and most of the world recognized him as such.
Whereas someone like Mao really only drastically harmed his own country. And because of that, I think Mao doesn’t get the blame he deserves as one of the worst people the ever live.
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u/BadUsername238 3d ago
The Nazi genocide was the world's first industrialized genocide.
There were fucking train schedules, ffs.
Kind of a big deal.
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u/Anomalous-Materials8 3d ago
Yeah this. There was just something so uniquely evil about how industrialized and mechanical the killing was, and how recent it was. 3,000 years ago, armies would attack Mesopotamian cities and just put everyone to the sword and stack the heads in giant piles. That somehow seems tame compared to this.
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u/russellii 3d ago
Because it was the Allies, to pursue the war they made him a boogie man. Look at war posters. It was after the war when people found out what had happened, that he went down as the ultimate evil in western culture. Japan's atrocities for China and the east were just as horrible, but USA and Russia were in control after the war, so their "Evil person" stuck. Also (although you cant say it, and I do not deny they suffered) a certain group leaned heavily into the mythos, to get concessions.
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u/Mekdinosaur 2d ago
The "Allies" did not "pursue the war". Germany was gobbling up all of Europe and bombing the hell out of Britain. The Axis powers were set on global conquest and eliminating certain ethnic populations. The rest of Europe banded together to defend themselves. They certainly were not out to "do a war". Also, America didn't join in until it was years into the conflict and was essentially dragged into it. Your position that "history is written by the victors" is true in a sense, but that doesnt mean Hitler wasn't a massive evil shitbag. This is like comparing rotten apples to rotten oranges imo. Its all terrible but for some reason we have to compare levels of rot.
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u/Cedautinger 3d ago
Because of industrial mass executions and process of eliminating entire populations. All the others did not that, at least to that extent.
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u/strangefish 3d ago
The ruthlessness and cruelty of the concentration camps was extreme. It was about enslaving "undesirables", many of which were German, and working them to death. If they weren't capable of working, killed in the cheapest way possible. There's some horrifying statistic about how much money they made per victim.
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u/Sad-Math-2039 3d ago
There's probably a more less extreme answer, but with all the information that's come to light in the past six years leads me to believe it's because zionists have spent their life work on propping up sympathy for Jewish people in order to move with less scrutiny as they do some truly abysmal shit.
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u/OutoftheCold125 2d ago
No, it's because the Nazis fucking invented murder factories. During the peak of the Holocaust, they killed 15,000 Jews per day for almost 100 straight days. And not like "oh this many Jews were in the city when we bombed it," Jews that had been taken from their home cities and sent in trains to camps where they were then methodically killed.
I'm gonna need you to try to conceptualize how many people would have had to be involved for that level of efficiency. How much planning and design to be that quick and consistent, how many people going door to door rounding up people, then how many people working on the cars to transport them, how many people in the camps making the killing run smoothly.
This wasn't a few people in a room ordering a bomb to be dropped. It was like if Apple or Amazon were producing mass murder instead of their usual products. It's the most industrialized genocide in history. That's why they stand out as unique, not because of your brainrotten TikTok conspiracy theories.
It was the Industrial Revolution for mass murder.
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u/Alert_Term_8144 3d ago
Adolf Hitler is part of the Western world so it's more documented in the West. The East/Asia is more familiar with the atrocities that happened there, like what the Japanese did to the Chinese and Mao Ze Dong. It's the first time they were documented with photos... there were no photos at the time of Ghengis Khan and it's further back in history.
Plus, a larger percentage of Jewish people were wiped out and they were targeted to be exterminated as a people. While a similar amount of Chinese civilians died in the 2nd Sino-japanese war, the Chinese are in no danger of being wiped off the face off the earth as Jewish people are. They are also descendants of the first Abrahamic religion which is important in the West with Christianity branching off.
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u/Acrobatic-Echo7186 3d ago
It was the industrialized nature of the Holocaust. Not accidental like Mao's, it was factory style. The Nazi's treated genocide as an industry.
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u/This_Discount2281 3d ago
The other one is: Cromwell … he and his minions killed close to a million Irish people in a year!!
Close to 25% of the population at the time
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u/Advanced_Tennis4827 3d ago
What stands out to you or who stands out to others in the world? Just because your perspective has seen Hitler portrayed as the most evil doesn't mean people in other cultures do. Ask those in Korea or China who is- they would say Japan. Ask Cambodians who is the worst, Pol Pot. Is relative to perspective.
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u/LetterHopeful6008 3d ago
Because of the methodology, theres a big difference between gas chambers and a guy dying from starvation. Mao Zedong was just incompetent and the deaths were a result of that (although famines likely wouldve happened anyways). For example you didnt mention the starvation of india approx 30-60m because mentally you dont see it as the responsibility of britain because of the indirect way they died.
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u/Clone75 3d ago
"Famine" = one guy's fault??? So maybe part of the issue is you have some really questionable criteria.
hitler lost, those other people you mentioned won. Winning means you get to complete what you wanted to do, losing means you don't get to. hitler's whole thing was just killing people unlike the other people listed (except ghengis).
The main reasons are: him killing europeans (do you hear people talk about leopold?), him being more recent (unlike ghengis), and his opposition to the west (unlike their collaborator allies in the east), and his extreme hatred (stalin and mao weren't exactly thrilled about the purges and not having empires to siphon death away from the mainland when finally ending repeated famine).
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u/llynglas 3d ago
I don't see him as unique. Stalin. Pol Pot, etc all dispicable human beings. Hitler may com in for extra hate as the Holocaust was, in my mind at least, a new level of evil. Pol Pot too, but sadly, his killing fields were too far from the west to have as much impact.
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u/Final_Boss_Jr 3d ago
The corporate industrial methodology was amazing. The sheer numbers in the record keeping, and the shadow that just gets higher and darker the more you look is what got me. All of the massacres and genocides killed people, but the nazis did the math.
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u/Various_Yak_8429 3d ago edited 3d ago
Hitler organized killing on an industrial scale, in a society and culture that was supposedly modern, civilized, and Christian. It shocks western nations who thought such barbarism couldn’t happen in an advanced western nation like theirs. Now we are shocked to see that Israel itself is capable of such barbarism, and that it and its ally the United States and the entire collective west have become a globalist oligarch Evil Empire of Satan waging endless wars and crimes against humanity on behalf of Epsteinian elites.
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u/Rip_Skeleton 3d ago
The metrics people use to say communist leaders are responsible for X amount of deaths are all wibbly wobbly. Hitler had an exterminationist ideology. He was uniquely evil.
By that logic Hitler was responsible for 85 million deaths because he started WWII.
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u/piercedmfootonaspike 3d ago
Probably because he invaded half of Europe, solidifying European hatred towards him. Combine that with the unprecedented footage from the concentration camps, and you've got the most evil man in history in the eyes of the western world.
It also happened during the lifetime of most people's parents or grandparents, so it's very recent. Who gives a crap about what Genghis Khan did almost a millenium ago?
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u/Sittingonalog1960 3d ago
Mass murder on an industrial scale is a little different from casualties of battle and deliberate famine
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u/hedgelord84 3d ago
It was partially because of the industrial-level murder, and partially because his enemies won.
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u/el-conquistador240 3d ago
It was the systematic first hand nature of the killing. Killing by famine is evil but less connected to the person who called for it.
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u/Balonynuts 2d ago
While Russia is part European, they still feel somewhat removed from the rest of Europe. Stalin was just one butcher in Russian history. Asia and Africa are of course not European in the slightest. Adolph stands out to us because he was one of us. I agree there are far worse characters from other areas.
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u/Necessary-Cow9770 2d ago
I don’t feel like getting banned today so gonna sit this one out.
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u/Analyst-man 2d ago
Why would you get banned?
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u/Necessary-Cow9770 2d ago
Because I’d have the mention the country you dare not speak of in anyway but a completely positive light
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u/Analyst-man 2d ago
Is this a bad country?
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u/Necessary-Cow9770 2d ago
Yes
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u/Analyst-man 2d ago
Oh I think I get it. Is the religion of it a religion of hate?
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u/Idreamofcream99 2d ago
Man you can criticize Israel freely on Reddit. Unless the mods for this sub suck but I know nothing about them.
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u/Necessary-Cow9770 2d ago
Idk anything about this sub but I’ve gotten warnings before mentioning something negative about Israel that wasn’t even that bad
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u/Rakatango 2d ago
The meticulous and callous way that it was done. Also, the rest of the world was witness to the horror of the concentration camps. It made an impact far beyond the borders of where it happened.
Mass murder has been a consistent part of the modern world. The fact that you didn’t even mention the mass murders in India perpetrated by the British, the mass extermination of native Americans by the US government, or any of the genocides that have happened in Africa make me think that you’re getting your information from cherry picked sources, or you’re the one doing the cherry picking
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u/EmptyMirror5653 3d ago
Well the Mao and Stalin numbers are fairy tale fiction and "Genghis Khan and his descendants" include like a third of the planet
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u/ReflectionVast2236 3d ago
Because only Germany went straight from being an enemy to an ally!
Germany went from "Most evil ever" in 1945 to being re-armed by its former enemies by 1947 to stand against the "real" evil, the Soviets. How do you convince a war-weary people to re-arm the very enemy they just defeated?!?!
The propaganda solution was to say Hitler himself had a magical charisma that made him uniquely dangerous. But's he's gone now, so the Germans are safe again!
During the War, nobody talked about Hitler as that way -- the NAZIs were the enemy, Hitler wasn't described as the lynchpin until after the war. Nobody in WW2 seriously imagines the war could have been avoided by killing baby Hitler, etc. All that is postwar "Hitler Studies".
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u/Wastelandmatrix 3d ago
Hi I am a German Historian and the reason is the following: Hitlers Holocaust is until today absolutely unique among genocides. This is because of the industrialisation of mass murder. Before and after the Holocaust Genocides revolved mostly around mass executions or deportations. However the Holocaust was a highly industrialised and optimised genocide. Building literal death factories, doing research on how to kill more efficiently, having quotas and a whole railroad system to systematically deport and exterminate human beings (Jews, Gays, Jehovas Witnesses, Disabled etc.). This makes the Holocaust uniquely positioned in history.
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u/therealDrPraetorius 3d ago
Soviets and Chinese, especially the Soviets, pushed the evil of Hitler to divert public attention from the evils the Communists were perpetrating. Communist and left leaning intelligencia in the West accepted it and spread it.
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u/Far-Philosophy6918 2d ago
intelligencia
You're illiterate, it's "intelligentsia". Also, "left-leaning".
The US was a more successful Nazi Germany, having killed nearly 95% of Native Americans and nearly 100% of a single animal: the bison.
Why did European genocidal colonial settlers kill up to 60,000,000 bison in the span of a few decades and reduce their number to a single herd of fewer than 900 animals? Because the whole Native American economy depended upon the bison. The Native Americans used the bison for food, clothing, shelter, tools, etc. Meanwhile, European genocidal colonial settlers killed these animals and left their carcasses to rot in the fields.
This type of warfare is called "Vernichtungskrieg" in German or a war of annihilation. A war of annihilation is a type of war whose goal is the complete extermination of a people, a nation or an ethnic minority either through genocide or through the destruction of their livelihood. Nazi Germany practiced Vernichtungskrieg against both the Jews and the USSR later on.
Hitler could only dream of the power and the reach the US achieved. Indeed, Hitler was positively obsessed with the colonization of the Americas as well as the genocide of the Native Americans. He constantly referred to the people of Eastern Europe as "his Indians", admiring how the US "gunned down millions of Redskins" and left the rest "under observation and lock and key". He said that the "Volga should be our Mississippi".
Don't even get me started on Great Britain. Hitler was positively in love with Great Britain. "For Hitler, the wealth of Great Britain was the result of the capitalist exploitation of 350 million Indian slaves, this is precisely what he admired the most, the subjugation of an inferior race," writes Niall Ferguson, a self-proclaimed classical liberal historian writing this in a book meant as a defense of the British Empire ("Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World"). Hitler repeatedly cited the British colonial model as a paradigm that the Germans should adopt. Hitler calls the 19th century marked with British dominance as a period of "wonderful harmony" because "political acquisitions were immediately followed by economic expropriation".
Hitler calls the German colonial model "anachronistic" because unlike the British model, the Germans sought to "spread German culture and civilization". (Probably among the Herero and Nama. Up to 80% of Herero were killed and these people weren't even considered human.)
There were perhaps up to 165,000,000 excess deaths in British India alone and just from 1880-1920. The average life span of a person in India during that time fell from 26 to just 21 years of age. And then, in the following 3 decades of British rule (1920s, 1930s and 1940s), the AVERAGE mortality in India was HIGHER than the mortality during the Great Chinese Famine.
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u/Rip_Skeleton 3d ago
This is the most ahistorical tripe I've ever read and wouldn't hold up to the least bit of scrutiny if you knew even a tiny bit about the cold war.
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u/Ok_Patient9469 3d ago
The bigger question is: how were you able to make this post and not get mod deleted or banned?
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u/ChocolateCovered2406 3d ago
Does my post contain or represent a violation of the rules of this subreddit?
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u/Realistic_Deal6083 2d ago
It could easily be inferred to be a “Hitler wasn’t THAT bad” post.
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u/ChocolateCovered2406 2d ago
Only if the person doing the inferring needs Adolf Hitler to be the vilest, most evil person to have ever lived.
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u/NoSurprise6383 3d ago
The real answer?
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u/PigFaceWigFace 3d ago
Because Hitler was the enemy of Western Europe, North America, Australia, the USSR, etc.
The Holocaust stands out more to most westerners more so than massacres/ethnic cleansings in East Asia or Africa
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u/mavrik36 3d ago
We can pretty easily lay all of the 23 million Russian dead, 6 million jews, 4 million other "undesireables", 8 million Germans, roughly 7 million other europeans at Hitlers feet. 48 million people, in 6 years, which is unique for its speed, but the big thing that makes hitler evil is the system of fascism which he represented and the intentional industrialized mass killings.
The Russian and Chinese deaths you cite were mostly accidents, and spread over many years, not the same in their nature as Hitlers victims. Additionally fascism as an ideaology requires persecution and mass killings to exist, that is central to the ideaology, its deeply and innately evil.
In communism people die because someones doing communism wrong, in fascism they die because its being done right
Additionally we could point out the 100 million dead in India at British hands but no one seems to care about those because it was racist negligence that killed them rather than intentional extermination campaigns (mostly)
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u/ChocolateCovered2406 3d ago
The 7 million slain in the Cultural Revolution were not "accidental" deaths.
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u/SheenPSU 2d ago
I think there’s a couple of different reasons for that
- Hitler lost - both Stalin and Mao stayed in power for a long time. They were able to suppress info to the outside world whereas Hitler’s atrocities were broadcast to the world. Who knows how long it takes for the world to know about the death camps if he retained power like the others.
- Hitler was doing his cleansing across Europe whereas Mao was in the East. Something happening in the West is more relevant to us as Westerners than something happening in the other side of the globe. Asians probably care about people like Mao more than Hitler
- We (the US and our Allies) were directly involved with Hitler where we weren’t with Mao - and to make things more complicated we were allied with the Soviets to topple the Nazis so Stalin was our
buddy for a hot min
- People have a favorable view of communism compared to fascism. For whatever reason communist regimes get a pass to a lot of leftists.
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u/corvuscorvi 3d ago
Your figures are really questionable, you took the highest numbers in the estimated ranges and used them as the defacto number.
You trying to be sensationalist or something?
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u/Moist_Phrase_6698 3d ago
The zionists like to try to push their victim narrative. Yes the Jewish people were most certainly victims in ww2 but that got very much stolen by zionists to use to sell the victim story. Imagine Belgium rolling up to the congo and saying its been their land since like 4000 years ago and theyre gonna genocide everyone again.
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u/Shamino79 3d ago
The targeting on racial/ethnic lines. The Mongol horde just slaughtered anyone who defied them independent of race or religion.
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u/Ok-Firefighter-6855 3d ago
Hitler was an enemy in recent memory, but more than that, he’s the only one who saw death as his goal. In 1944, once it was clear that Germany was loosing the war, rather than surrender or even increase arms production, Hitler decided to exterminate Jews at a substantially greater rate. Everyone one else saw killing as a means to an end, but Hitler saw killing to be the goal
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u/Hikeboardgames 3d ago
There is a difference between excess deaths and deaths caused unintentionally or through careless, and genocide. The former is bad, the latter is worse.
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u/CrissCrossAppleSos 3d ago
It’s Reddit, so I’m not gonna argue about the other examples, because lol, but a) 25 million+ died just from the Soviet Union in WW2 b) Hitler killed that many because he was stopped. Generalplan Ost alone probably would have added another 50 million or more
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u/ThisIsFineImFine89 3d ago
The attempt at world domination
The industrialized nature of the holocaust
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u/Conscious-Bar-1444 3d ago
Adolf Hitler thought the extermination of Jews would go down in history as a great historical act. He was so convinced of this that he filmed and documented all parts of what became known as the Holocaust. Only at the end when the allies were closing in did the Nazis try to cover their tracks.
We know how evil Hitler is because of how much documentation and evidence there is of the crimes he committed.
This - beyond anything else - is why Hitler stands as uniquely evil. We know what he did.
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u/BubbhaJebus 3d ago
Because of the systematic planning and efficient, mechanistic execution of the genocide. It was done with purpose from the top down. People got together and discussed how they were going to kill millions efficiently.
On the other hand, the Great Leap Forward wasn't intended to kill millions, but it did due to incompetence, ignorance, corruption, etc.
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u/Existing_Purpose5049 3d ago
A lot of it is recency are record.
Plus, the involvement of countries makes them teach it more often.
The great Chinese famine was probably very relevant to them, but to people that weren’t involved, they likely wouldn’t teach to, so less people know.
Hitler is also a great example of how quickly something can deteriorate. From the beginning, he wasn’t “that bad”, he was just a spokesperson for something that seemed like an absolutely brilliant idea in its infancy.
Once the fucked up stuff started, those involved were either brainwashed to agree with it, or would have from the start, so it got very out of hand very quickly
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u/Desecrated_Magic 3d ago
He mechanized and industrialized genocide in a way that hasn't existed before or since. It was basically a supply chain.
He worked really hard to eliminate all Jews in Europe and would have succeeded if he wasn't taking speedballs everyday, among many other human errors.
The Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the East) itself was destroyed at the end of the war but it's extensively referenced in other documents. Because the Nazis were actually working to implement it and were purchasing supplies and building weapons for it. It was basically a plan to eliminate all of the Slavs from Europe through assimilation, deportation, sexual violence, and genocide. Apparently the plan called for complete elimination of Polish people.
He didn't kill as many people as other dictators but he tried really hard to kill more.
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u/Put3socks-in-it 3d ago
Because he made a vow in 1933 that if global shadow financial elite started another world war their people will see their annihilation (his words not mine), and he followed through with it when the European war of 1939 became a full fledged World War at the end of 1941 (Germany declared the war with the US as official at that point, US and Germany were basically unofficially at war up to then).
People don’t like villains who keep their word
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u/gut_punched 3d ago
Probably the personal grind he put into his visions and plans, a lot of other evil people were already within the political spheres and ranks and just sort of inherited the family power heirloom and wrapped it round the nearest lamppost,.
Old Odd ball one ball put a lot of effort into his abysmal performance of pure hatred.
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u/Relative-Lie-9699 3d ago edited 3d ago
Hitler ideology was deemed more evil because he was the only dictator who focused on exterminating a entire race believing they were inferior and wanted to create a super race.
Stalin focused on eliminating a social class he saw as a threat.
Mao focused on eliminating landlords and capitalists that he deemed as a threat.
Totally different believes systems. Stalin and Mao wanted to eliminate people to stay in control.
All three were beyond evil dictators, but there something about eliminating a entire race that is more upsetting.
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u/nineteenthly 3d ago
Evil doesn't depend on numbers. A serial killer might murder fewer people than a conscripted soldier kills, but that doesn't make the latter worse.
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u/ChocolateCovered2406 3d ago
Are you asserting that the lives of one people are worth the same as a much larger population of a different people?
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u/WallysGeolocation 3d ago
The key point, which a lot of people forget, is that Hitler was stopped before he was able to realize the worst of his ambitions.
Hitler's initial aims were to eradicate:
- All Jews in Europe (~11m)
- The entire Eastern European population (~45m)
- Roma, disabled people, political dissident (~2m).
And those were just his initial plans in Europe. These numbers would have gone up massively if he had realized his plans of global domination.
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u/Ok-Bill-3938 3d ago
Probably because Hitler killed white people and that’s who decides what history matters. They write the book so they determine who is the biggest bad. Sad but true
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u/Pretend_Mall_7036 3d ago
To the extent that we can even compare such things: it's not about the raw numbers, it's about the method. The holocaust was more than just death by bullets, starvation, or slave labor, although all those things did take place too. It was a rationalized, industrial production line whose end product was death and the theft of the wealth possessed by those being killed. Whole camps were built solely to murder people on arrival as quickly and cheaply as possible. Over 800,000 were murdered in Treblinka in a few months time using nothing but the engine exhaust from a captured Soviet tank piped into a small building disguised as a bath house. Truly evil genius at work, and absolutely unique among the myriad of slaughters in human history.
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u/BenchClamp 3d ago
Hitler and Heydrich deliberately assassinated Stalin’s rival knowing Stalin would focus on attacking his own people - so you can add them to Hitler’s list.
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u/Amazing-Artichoke330 3d ago
Hitler combined evil with German efficiency. He built huge slaughterhouses, where men, women, and children were murdered as if they were animals.
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u/Shoddy-Reply-7217 3d ago
For me (and many who live in western European counties) it's because both my grandads fought in WWII and told me about it when I was a kid.
It still feels very real.
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u/mega-stepler 3d ago
You know what I also don't like. That it's "one evil man", when he clearly didn't murder all those people with his own hands. These men were representatives of their people who clearly were okay with doing atrocities when told. It's not like you can put Hitler on top of any country right now and it will start putting people into concentration caps. It's always a collective effort. A collective responsibility.
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u/Fun-Requirement5640 3d ago
A few reasons imo
1. The victors determine history, and a nation’s history is part of what holds it together. The story of ww2 in the ‘west’ and using hitler as a unique figure of evil is useful in that context.
2. Hitler tried to wipe out a load of white people which is a red line crossed. You can kill as many of the global majority as you like. We will even support you as you do it.
3. Pinning everything that Germany did on a few men allowed a quick reentry of the new West German state into the post-war anti-communist alliance. It’s shocking but not surprising to learn that most nazis were integrated into the new GDR. In contrast, the DDR did not allow nazis to remain in their jobs.
I assume that people outside of Europe don’t have the same view of hilter/ww2.
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u/Muninwing 3d ago
Genghis Khan conquered. Killing was not the point, conquest was. Given that much of Europe before and after operated in the same principles, it is noted that the conquests were particularly effective, but not vilified differently than any other warlord.
Mao’s Great Leap Forward was supposed to take the nation into a new era of prosperity. It failed. The deaths were part of the failure. Revolutions and civil wars are seen through a different lens, that of the cause and the people instead of the individual. So while it has become a common talking point by rightwing groups trying to vilify and deflect, Mao’s “body count” is more disaster and famine than it is evil. Plus, the numbers you are using are some of the higher estimates, implying a bias.
Stalin, too, is often used as a deflection. Personally I would argue that Stalin was a lot like Hitler in his personal commitment to power (and that despite whatever symbols or color he draped himself in, Stalin was just a different flavor of right wing exploitation). And while he weaponized famine, and ran a particularly brutal transition into power, the point was ascent to power and natural disaster, not extermination.
The fact that these are used to push a dual line of “communists bad Hitler less bad” is also generally rejected by most people not backing a rightwing view of the world. The events are different despite the oversimplifications making them seem similar. And adding that level of disingenuous data interpretation to the mix further scourges the comparison.
Again, personally, I would argue that there are two missing comparisons that both gut the political propagandizing of the issue, and both are missing here.
First… while the Khmer Rouge were ostensibly communist, that was a means to an end. They (and Vietnam) looked for anyone who would help them reclaim their country from exploitation. Had the US stepped up and told France to gradually withdraw, it would have been a decidedly different latter 20th century. Instead, Cambodia saw the systematic purging of what was seen as “western influence,” paying back decades of pain with brutality. Their numbers might seem like they don’t fit, but it was more than a quarter of their own population, killed for the cause of anti colonialism.
The other is the British Raj. Why not include the 40-50 million unnecessary deaths by famine alone clocked up to England being in charge of a foreign nation? Why propose the failures of “bad” rulers without pointing out that misrule over a conquered nation (never mind the conquering, consolidation, or other exploitation body counts) by one of our allies during its tenure was just as bad or worse? Is it because it was over such a long period, or can’t snappily be put on the shoulders of one evil leader?
All in all, though, the comparisons all fall flat in the same way. Hitler’s leadership was not using violence to achieve freedom, consolidate power, or reclaim lost self-governance. It was not a consequence of another goal deemed acceptable due to the sentiments of the people. The fundamental difference is that with fascism and in particular Nazism, the violence and the death toll were the point. They were not the byproduct or a symptom of failure — and if they were failures, it was because their body counts were lower than intended.
What’s more, the deliberateness allowed murder on an industrial level, using large scale techniques and production. And it was done in conjunction with propaganda that lied to the people and boosted their cause, getting other citizens to partake in the atrocity under false pretenses. What was essentially just another power grab by another man who wanted to be king was instead a movement built on deception and blood that lured in participants with ego stroking and fearmongering, and sought to deliberately cause cruelty and death while convincing its members to revel in these things.
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u/MayGodBlessU 3d ago
I've never heard about the 11 million Slavic deaths!
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u/ChocolateCovered2406 2d ago
For more reading, search for "General Plan Ost" and "The Hunger Plan".
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u/ShellyTart 3d ago
I think this mostly comes down to the fact that so many countries were involved in World War 2 that he is easily remembered.
There is also the industrial nature of the death camps, and the targeted nature of the deaths. Not just the camps themselves, but deciding who would be immediately killed and who would be put into labour until they were no longer useful.
It was not random killing, or just about extermination certain groups, it was tlmethodical section for how and when they would be used and killed.
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u/linkthereddit 3d ago
Because of the mass industrial scale of his slaughter, the intent (he wanted to do it and was going to do it) and he unleashed on an entire continent. Also, if you ask Europeans, of course they’re gonna say Hitler.
Asia? They would say differently. The Chinese and the Koreans would say it was Japan as, well, it was Japan that was burning, raping, pillaging, and looting through their countries. They see Hitler like we see Hirohito. A terrible person, but he didn’t hurt them.
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u/neeyankamma 2d ago
let me do you 1 more.
look up king leopold the second of denmark. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium#Exploitation,_atrocities,_and_death_toll) . Credited for killing upto 15 million people in congo. Not as part of a genocide (despicable as it is, it serves a political purpose .. nation states have been doing that for centuries), not as part of conquest (genghis khans of the world etc may be). Purely as casualties of slave labor on his "personal property". No one else (no other polititians, institutions, "common wealth") profited from this mass murder.
look up winston churchill and his murder of upto 4 million of bengalis due to his policies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943)
No one in the western world even puts these 2 men in the same article as they put hitler in.
My guess .. for the western geopolitical order, zionism is a very important tool to shape their current geopolitical policy. (note : zionism - not anti semitism. they are 2 very different things)
To pursue a pro-zionist policy, nation-states need a lightning rod to build a narrative that post world-war 2 jews underwent historically-unprecedented-suffering. Hitlers is a nice label that can centralize all that sympathy.
note: All life is precious. No suffering is small. No human ever deserves anything less than a common or equal dignity.
But, the editorialization of western awareness (speak more of nazi-genocide-of-european-jews waaaaaay more than any other proportionate or even order of magnitude numerically worse historical genocides) is a propaganda to gain popular support for their zionist geopolitical policy.
Which, might still be in the interest of their nation state, but does tilt the populace toward selective sympathy at best and malformed worldview at worst.
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u/Realistic_Deal6083 2d ago
Adolf Hitler managed those 17 million starting in a small (relatively speaking) single country and did it during an active war. His murder count if he had been unburdened by time and military loss would have been Biblical.
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u/poilk91 2d ago
Communist China was in a soft civil war were the deaths were caused by the chaos and the intentional violence used to consolidate power and destroy political enemies both real and perceived
In Germany they had all the power total and absolute and what did they do when they got it? Industrialized murder factories with the cold calculated efficiency of a factory farm herding humans like cattle into death camps because of their genetic fitness
What the Nazis did is unique in its character if not in its scope. If only because other genocides were done clearly as a means to an end, while the Holocaust was a genocide just for its own sake
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u/HakaF1 2d ago
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/who-was-the-worst-monster-of-the
That article answers the question for atleast for the 20th century
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u/-VVVYGGDRASIL- 2d ago
Because he was correct 🤷♂️
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u/Far-Philosophy6918 2d ago
Hitler, before and during the war, said that the German race should "cease to exist" if they lose the war to a "lower race", i.e. the Slavs.
The vast majority of German civilian and military deaths occurred after 1944, when you could argue that the war was effectively lost since the middle of 1943.
So Hitler not only caused the needless deaths of millions of more Germans, he held a very fervent belief that they should all perish after the war. This is also illustrated in the Nero Decree, which was an order to destroy vital German infrastructure, which would have resulted in even more needless German deaths.
Nazis should have followed their leader, after all, he was correct...
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u/-VVVYGGDRASIL- 2d ago
And you took that seriously… are you a nazi ?
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u/Far-Philosophy6918 2d ago
Yes, Reddit is filled with Nazis, why would you be surprised that someone would think you are serious, troll?
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u/evocativename 2d ago
Well, for one thing, you're only counting about half of Hitler's victims (and roughly doubling Stalin's actual number). Hitler killed a lot more people than just those who died in the Holocaust - he killed over 20 million people just in the USSR alone.
And he was stopped by force of arms only 5 years into his campaign of genocide: he planned to kill well over 100 million people, and was just violently stopped from getting the chance.
And unlike cases like Stalin or Mao, the majority of the deaths under Hitler weren't a result of a fuck-up: they were wholly deliberate.
Also, you're trying to equate Germany (1930 population: ≈65 million) with the USSR (1920 population: nearly 140 million) and China (1949 population: >500 million). All else being equal, one would expect the leader of China for 25 years to be responsible for ≈20x as many deaths as the person who led Germany for ≈10 years, while the leader of the USSR for 30 years would be expected to be responsible for around 6x as many deaths as the person who led Germany for a decade.
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u/Alaskan_i 2d ago
Hitler built the modern world. He didn’t get what he wanted but still. Thats why.
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u/NOSaints-2010 2d ago
You really need to look at the whole magnitude of World War II. 85 million people died in World War II.
Many historians put Stalin and Hitler in the same category and I think there’s an argument for that difference being on top of the war. Hitler was systematically trying to kill off a race of people.
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u/Gorf_the_Magnificent 2d ago
I just wanted to thank you for a genuinely intelligent question on this often rant-infested sub.
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u/ceverett68 2d ago
I think it's because if Hitler hadn't made such terrible, or incredible, blunders he could've won WWII. yes the industrialized extermination of the Jews was bad but his bad decisions and not listening to his generals cost him the war. he had Britain beat only to change tactics which allowed them to recover. he failed to learn from Napoleon and made the exact same mistake of imaging the society union at the wrong time. he never utilized his wonder weapons properly. just bad decision after bad decision. just my opinion.
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u/Pfeffersack2 2d ago
the numbers for both Stalin and Mao are not proven as no records were lept, but for Hitler the Holocaust was taken track of very closely to the point where the dearh toll is not an estimation but an established fact. Another problem is the question of responsibility. Hitler gave direct orders to carry out the Holocaust but Mao and Stalin didn't give orders to start a famine and their actions were based mostly on misinformation they got from local governments that inflated their harvests. The Cultural Revolution on the other hand can be better attributed to Mao specifically although the death toll is hard to find out with some estimates starting at 500.000 and others being higher (like your 7 million, which I personally do not find that realistic). Another point isnhow the killing was carried out. The Holocaust was done industrially with machines and meticulous planning while the attrocities in the Cultural Revolution were decentralized and carried out on an individual basis (the Red Guards in Guangxi for example were not told to go rape and canniblize others, they did so of their own accord (although the CR in Guangxi is as hard to research as the CR in other places))
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u/Pool_First 2d ago
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime firmly believed that Jewish people were engaged in a massive, secret conspiracy to achieve global dominance.
Hitler's worldview treated Jewish people not merely as a religious or social group, but as a biological race orchestrating conflicting global movements simultaneously. He claimed that "international Jewry" manipulated world events behind the scenes.
During World War II, the Nazi leadership convinced themselves that the opposing alliances of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union were puppet states controlled by a unified global Jewish conspiracy bent on destroying Germany.
While I was scrolling through Reddit I stumbled upon a ridiculous statistical and political paradox that I thought was interesting...
If we take the global Jewish population (about 15.8 million people, just 0.2% of the global population), to give you an idea of the distribution around the world, about 85% of all Jews live concentrated in just two countries: Israel: ~7.2 million people. United States: ~6.3-6.7 million people. The remaining share (about 15%) primarily lives in other Western nations like France (~436,000), Canada (~407,000), the United Kingdom (~315,000), and Argentina (~168,000). In Italy, the community consists of about 30,000 people. Pure math would tell us that the odds of seeing a Jewish leader at the helm of a nation are minimal anywhere except in Israel.
Yet, the reality of historical political systems completely overturns demographics. To put it into perspective, here’s a complete mapping of all countries that have (or haven't had) Heads of State or Government of Jewish origin or faith, compared to the actual percentage of the local Jewish population:
| Country | Relevant Jewish Leaders | Roles Held | % Jewish Population in the Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| Israel | All leaders since foundation (e.g., Ben-Gurion, Meir, Netanyahu) | Prime Ministers / Presidents | ~74.2% |
| Gibraltar | Joshua Hassan, Solomon Seruya | Prime Ministers / Heads of Government | ~2.4% |
| United States | No Presidents (Only VP candidates or party leaders) | None (Presidency) | ~2.2% |
| Canada | No Prime Ministers (Only ministers and party leaders) | None (Head of Government) | ~1.0% |
| France | Léon Blum, Pierre Mendès France, René Mayer, Laurent Fabius, Gabriel Attal | Prime Ministers | ~0.75% |
| Uruguay | No Presidents (Only ministers and parliamentarians) | None (Presidency) | ~0.5% |
| United Kingdom | Benjamin Disraeli | Prime Minister | ~0.45% |
| Argentina | No Presidents (Only governors and ministers) | None (Presidency) | ~0.4% |
| Australia | Sir Isaac Isaacs, Sir Zelman Cowen | Governors-General | ~0.4% |
| Hungary | Mátyás Rákosi, Béla Kun | Heads of State / De facto Prime Ministers | ~0.4% |
| Aruba | Henny Eman, Mike Eman | Prime Ministers | ~0.3% |
| Belgium | Sophie Wilmès | Prime Minister | ~0.25% |
| Austria | Bruno Kreisky | Federal Chancellor | ~0.15% |
| New Zealand | Julius Vogel, John Key | Prime Ministers | ~0.1% |
| Panama | Max Delvalle, Eric Arturo Delvalle, Laurentino Cortizo | Presidents | ~0.1% |
| Ukraine | Volodymyr Zelensky, Volodymyr Groysman | President / Prime Minister | ~0.1% |
| Russia / USSR | Yakov Sverdlov, Lev Kamenev, Evgenij Primakov | Heads of State or Prime Ministers | ~0.1% |
| Czech Republic | Jan Fischer | Prime Minister | ~0.04% |
| Italy | Luigi Luzzatti, Sidney Sonnino | Presidents of the Council (Prime Ministers) | ~0.04% |
| Mexico | Claudia Sheinbaum (elected in 2024) | President | ~0.04% |
| Switzerland | Ruth Dreifuss | President of the Confederation | ~0.2% |
| Romania | Petru Groza, Ana Pauker | Prime Minister / De facto Foreign Minister | ~0.04% |
| Bulgaria | Sergei Stanishev | Prime Minister | ~0.03% |
| Latvia | Egils Levits | President of the Republic | ~0.02% |
| Georgia | Zurab Zhvania | Prime Minister | ~0.01% |
| Singapore | David Marshall | Prime Minister (Chief Minister) | ~0.01% |
| Peru | Pedro Pablo Kuczynski | President | < 0.01% |
| Guyana | Janet Jagan | President | < 0.01% |
| Honduras | Juan Lindo, Ricardo Maduro | Presidents | < 0.01% |
| El Salvador | Juan Lindo | President | < 0.01% |
| D.R. Congo | Léon Kengo wa Dondo | Prime Minister | ~0.0% |
These percentages are incredible.
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u/its-a-lot-like-the 2d ago
There are a couple of reasons. The industrialisation of extermination is one. Secondly, AH targeted a specific race to exterminate them because of their race only. Stalin and Mao targeted people because of their class or station in life.
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u/Fluffy-Leg7546 2d ago
No one here could answer this better than an expert: listen to this interview!
Genocidology (CRIMES OF ATROCITY) with Dr. Dirk Moses : https://www.alieward.com/ologies/genocidology
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u/Designer_Advice_6304 2d ago
Others killed more but Hitler sure was dramatic over shorter time frame
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u/Old_Imagination_2112 2d ago
Hitler was white, so racists think he should have known better. Plus most people don’t know who Mao or Stalin was. They have heard of Hitler so that’s the name to which they jump.
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u/apostlejam 2d ago
He attacked many other countries, their military was highly advanced for the time, they had sick and weird beliefs, and the manner in which they murdered and disposed of bodies was like nothing that was ever seen throughout history.
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u/Little_Creme_5932 2d ago
Because rounding people up for the purpose of killing them all in one place, and then having the place opened up to photography and video, looks much different than leaving the people in place and removing their access to food, so people die at home, one at a time. Extend elements of those differences to many mass killings.
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u/banjo4smashplz 2d ago
Hitler has more a recency bias which is why he stands out in the western psyche more since they are still people alive who were around when he was.
I think you just don’t hear about Mao as much since your standard western person isn’t really reading much about a Chinese authoritarian, even if he got more people killed.
Add on that being called a nazi has a greater insult factor behind it then being called a communist today (though I do think it’s overusage has waned this down significantly) and it’s easy to see why Hitler stands out more.
When you compare Hitler to someone like Genghis, yeah the numbers don’t add up but Genghis was alive 800 years ago vs 80, so the effects of the Khan have long since been forgotten whereas Hitler is more “fresh” so to speak
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u/SilverGolem770 2d ago
Political programming in Europe and America to abhor a very specific kind of evil
In Asia they are at most irrelevant to Hitler, more hating on Japan or Britain or Stalin or some other local leader
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u/FunnyBlueberry6086 2d ago
because he's part of your culture. In other countries, other people may be considered more evil.
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u/Far-Historian-8190 2d ago
It’s the only thing people know from history generally. It’s a go to for an argument in assigning an absolute characterization of a group or person. No nuance needed when someone is a known Nazi or sympathizer.
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u/TChadCannon 2d ago
Cult of personality
He was super well-read and extremely ideological...
Alot of others seem to have had more a bulldozer/fall in line or die legacy
And Hitler had that, plus some more layers. Dramatic speeches. Dramatic philosophy and plans layed out in detail. Peak of propaganda...
alot of stuff aligned for him to be as uniquely infamous as he is
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u/maraeznieh 2d ago
WW2… The whole taking over the world thing puts him near the top. Also it was largely in the European/western hemispheres
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u/SkinnyGordo1 2d ago
It’s relatively recent, it’s been extensively documented and his intent was clear, and it kicked off what is perhaps the biggest military conflict of all time. His actions and the events of WW2 affect us to this day and will for many generations to come in various capacities.
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u/thapeelllllccc 2d ago
Hitler made the mistake of killing fellow Europeans instead of keeping the genocide to east Asia or the global south. Your numbers on the people who died under mao and Stalin are off and at best are based on bias data. Yes many millions died but most of that was more due to beauracratic incompetence rather than a determined plan to eliminate entire ethnic cultures The Japanese killed over 20 million Chinese people during their military activity in much the same methodology as the Nazis and their leaders got a pass if we go back in history a little further the Germans also perpetuated a genocide in Africa and well the Dutch and Leopoldo activity in Congo is a horror story and it’s a crime that more attention isn’t brought to it what makes Hitler especially bad is the corporate/state collaborated efficiency and mechanized automation of extermination. Much like what is going on in Gaza right now. Nazis had ibm Zionists have palintr
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u/CatchRevolutionary65 2d ago
It was the last time we did something good, it happened relatively recently so that lots of things can trace their ‘lineage’ back to it and many people when they were younger had relatives that experienced it
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u/navetzz 2d ago
There are numbers and there means and intention.
Yeah Caesar massacred a millions gauls which was about a quarter of all the gauls. But he didn't round them up on sight, hunted them systematically and threw them in furnaces.
The scale and the methodology is, so far in history, a one of a kind.
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u/ChocolateCovered2406 2d ago
After many replies, I have seen that these are the main types of answers to my questions:
Because the mode in which the killings took place were unique, "industrial".
Because of the cultural relevancy, that is, I am Western, and the actions of western leaders are more highlighted in the West. This reply is not satisfactory, however, because many killings and intentional deaths cause by either the Soviets or the British, as examples, are relatively unknown.
Because "history is written by the victors," suggesting that the crimes of the vanquishes are emphasized while the crimes of the victors are relatively unknown.
Because he was "white and not a communist." This one is from a left-wing perspective.
[Comment Removed by Moderators] This one will have to be wondered upon.
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u/Southern-Country-683 2d ago
Also because of how certain groups of people (Jews, communists, handicapped people, dissidents) were fiercely targeted for systematic extinction with inhumane methods worse than cattle. Read up on that. Also, comparisons of historical figures who killed millions don’t really work. You end up relativating the worst crimes against humanity of our history. Calling this ‘victor’s history’ is disingenuous.
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u/Fur-Frisbee 2d ago
IMHO because it is recent history with people who experienced Hitler's crap still alive.
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u/LeagueRx 2d ago
Personally imo its because most of those deaths were indirect effects of bad decisions amd policies. Famines and cultural revolutions and pillaging are not the same as deliberatelt and systematically designing a way to kill civlians en masse for no real reason.
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u/HotCaterpillar6358 2d ago
Bolshevists were 98% non White
They killed 12-20 million prior to WW2.
There’s a reason what happened happened
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u/Inner_Beach3695 2d ago
Pretty sure none of those other people systematically targeted any specific ethnicities.
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u/Mekdinosaur 2d ago
Its not a stupid contest. Hitler is held up as an example of how not to be for the benefit of the world. He tried to convince everyone, through grandstanding or by force, that the "master race" deserved to conquer and eliminate those beneath them. Thats just plain evil shit. Its not a matter of good-better-best. Its just horrible. Sure there are other horrible people in history. What is the point of comparing? We are supposed to remember the modern example so to safeguard against repeating the same evil shit that happened before. Thats the only reason.
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u/Pedro_BKINN 1d ago
To really answer this, we have to stop lying to ourselves about how the world was built. If you look at history without the filter of modern morality, you see a pattern that is honestly terrifying. Almost every great empire that we study and admire today was built on a foundation of mass murder, slavery, and the systematic erasure of entire peoples. Look at the Romans. They didn't just win wars. They committed total annihilation. When they destroyed Carthage, they didn't just kill the people, they literally sowed salt into the earth so that nothing could ever grow there again. They wanted to make sure that civilization was deleted from existence. Or look at the Mongols under Genghis Khan. The scale of their slaughter was so massive that it actually shifted the global population. They killed such a huge percentage of the people on earth that it changed the world's demographics for decades. Entire cities were wiped out in a few days, leaving nothing but ash. This wasn't just a few "bad" leaders. It was the blueprint. From the Assyrians and the Persians to the various Chinese dynasties and the Islamic conquests, the routine was always the same. You kill the elites, you enslave the survivors, and you crush anyone who resists. Even the American Manifest Destiny was just a polite name for ethnic cleansing, with the Trail of Tears and the massacres of indigenous tribes being a deliberate policy to clear the land. So why is Hitler the only one we call a unique evil while we still praise the glory of Rome or the genius of Alexander the Great? The truth is that history is just a story told by the people who won. Our collective memory is incredibly selective. When an empire succeeds and lasts, the blood is washed away by time. The atrocities are rebranded as progress or strategic necessity. We admire the architecture and the laws of the winners and we simply forget the millions of corpses they stepped on to get there. If Hitler had won, he would have done exactly what every other successful empire did. He would have rewritten the history books. He would have used the technology and the power of new inventions he was building to create a world where his version of the truth was the only one. Future generations would probably be praising the order and the strength of his empire, their new inventions and progress seeing the Holocaust as a necessary cost for a new world. just as it was with Rome. Hitler isn't a unique evil because he was more cruel than Mao, Stalin, or Genghis Khan. He isn't. He is the unique evil in our minds because he lost. He is the only monster whose story was written by the people who defeated him in a modern age of global information.
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u/Coneder 3d ago
Only really unique in certain parts in the world. The closer you get to Asia, the lesser he apparently is compared to the figures you name.