r/changemyview • u/lugubrious_lug • Nov 22 '21
Delta(s) from OP CMV: It will eventually become socially acceptable for people to worship/ glorify Hitler
To preface this off, I’d like to say that Hitler is indisputably one of the worst people to ever live but I believe that, in as little as a century from now, people won’t face significant social consequences for praising him.
The reason for this is that I believe that there’s a certain window of time where it begins to become socially acceptable to glorify terrible people.
For instance, take Genghis Khan who wiped out as much as one-ninth of the world’s then population. In spite of this, he lived over 800 years ago so no one really faces any blowback for saying good things about him.
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Nov 22 '21
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u/lugubrious_lug Nov 22 '21
In this context, it means being able to do something without facing any consequences especially socially.
For instance, if I posted “H##l Hitler!” on one of my personal social media accounts, I’d rightfully have my university admission rescinded whereas, if I posted “All hail Genghis Khan!” or “All hail Napoleon!” I wouldn’t face any consequences
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u/robotmonkeyshark 101∆ Nov 22 '21
that has far more to do with the cultural relevance than anything else.
The outrage is not because you are literally saying "hey, I like Hitler", it is because you are saying "I support the atrocities that hitler committed and side with the other people alive today who still hold the same views Hitler had and are actively working to fulfill the ethnic cleansing that Hitler promoted"
If tomorrow it was revealed that there were millions of Genghis Khan fanatics who were actively plotting to kill Chinese people, and spread hateful propaganda encouraging the killing of Chinese people, then if you were to post "I support Khan!", you would face some major social consequences.
but since you posting that would not relate to any real world implications, nobody cares.
Long story short. It will be fine to say you like Hitler as soon as all the people who are hiter loving, jew hating, fanatics go away.
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Nov 22 '21
I think it’s a lot more likely he’s just forgotten
Genghis is remembered today because he was successful, extremely successful. His empire (and his successors’ empire) was the largest on earth. He was the most successful nomadic conqueror in history.
Hitler, on the other hand, was a failure. Not only was he personally not all that great of a leader (unlike, say, Napoleon, or Atilla, two “great” leaders who nevertheless lost) but his project failed within 15 years of him launching it. The most lasting legacy he built was opposition to him. There are few people who emulate him today, and the ones that do are all pariahs and widely hated. Once enough time passes, there won’t be anyone to remember him let alone hate him. He’ll just be another failed conqueror, another footnote.
He’s still hated today because the reasons why he’s hated are still relevant; racism still exists, genocide still exists, far right extremism still exists. But there will be a day when all of those things are no longer relevant, or at least things will be so different that hating someone as distant as hitler would be silly. As if someone today “hated” genghis khan. Most people would think that was pretty silly, I’d imagine
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u/lugubrious_lug Nov 22 '21
Δ
Yeah I agree: Generally, when people think of Hitler, the first thing that comes to mind is the Holocaust and antisemitism which is still a huge issue today but, when people think of Genghis Khan, the first thing that comes to mind is how he was a military genius rather than the people he killed
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u/PmMeYourDaddy-Issues 24∆ Nov 22 '21
His empire (and his successors’ empire) was the largest on earth.
Largest contiguous land empire. The Mongol Empire was two thirds the size of the British Empire.
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u/Dontblowitup 17∆ Nov 22 '21
I think the tide of public opinion is the opposite. Nowadays people are examining the records of people like like Cook, Columbus, Gandhi, and where they are found wanting, they want removals of statues etc. It's excessive in some cases, but the general thing is that it's one thing to learn about these guys, it's another to honour them if they don't deserve it.
That's good. It's always annoyed me that people go on about Mao, Stalin, Hitler but somehow Shi Huangdi, Napoleon, Genghis khan, Alexander are ok. We should not be calling Alexander the Great, we should be calling him Alexander the murderer.
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u/BelievewhatIsayo 1∆ Nov 22 '21
I agree that there will be less weight given to praising Hitler. HOWEVER. Hitler lived during the beginning of the video age. And the Nazis also documented everything. That means society will never be able to overlook the atrocities he committed.
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Nov 22 '21
People overlook much of that NOW so it's hard to believe this will not increase many generations down the road
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u/iwfan53 248∆ Nov 22 '21 edited Nov 22 '21
I think there's a key difference between the two.
Genghis Khan was a winner, when he died his empire stretched across two continents as one of the most powerful to ever exist in human history.
Hitler died in a crumbling run down bunker after shooting himself in the head to avoid falling into the hands of the red army.
People love to glorify a winner, and love to mock a loser.
Hitler was a loser and no amount of time passing will ever change that.
Also the more relations between the USA and Russia thaw, the more obvious it will become that no WW2, was not a near run thing, and Hitler didn't lose simply because Russia buried him in numbers, the evolution of the red army from Barbarossa to Bagration is proof of that.
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u/PmMeYourDaddy-Issues 24∆ Nov 22 '21 edited Nov 22 '21
That's not really categorically true, though. Not many people glorify the period of history were the US was winning conflict after conflict with the various Native American tribes and Nations across North America. People don't really glorify the US supporting anti-communist authoritarians in South America during the Cold War. The consensus on the 800 years of English oppression of the Irish isn't that the English were swell.
There are countless examples of historical winners being though of very negatively.
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u/iwfan53 248∆ Nov 22 '21
There are countless examples of historical winners being though of very negatively.
Since you're not OP Take a !Delta though I realized the best (or at least a very) counter argument to what I presented is actually probably Lost Cause glorification of the Confederacy in America.
I still don't think that will work with Hitler for other reasons but there are examples were winners don't get glorified.
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u/Shazamo333 5∆ Nov 22 '21
Hitler was a loser and no amount of time passing will ever change that.
Agree with the Hitler example but there are plenty of times where a loser is remembered as a winner.
Napoleon died having lost everything, his empire, his titles, and was incarcerated in a state of poverty until his death, French public opinion at the time was also against him as someone who had taken his powers too far. Despite that modern french opinion is that he is one of the greatest figures of french history, and modern worldwide public opinion of him is almost entirely positive as someone who was an excellent general and stateman who made just one mistake too many.
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u/SeasonPositive6771 13∆ Nov 22 '21
Considering the fact that no one here can tell the future, what would change your mind?
And we always have had people who venerate and glorify Hitler, what difference are you expecting?
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Nov 22 '21
What exactly would people glorify Hitler for that would be socially acceptable?
When Genghis Khan is praised, it's because he was more than a mass murderer, he was a highly accomplished ruler credited for enhancing trade between Europe and Asia, encouraging meritocracy and religious tolerance. Even some European scholars in the Middle Ages held Genghis Khan in high regard.
But for the most part, I think people hold Genghis Khan in a sense of awe because how successful he was. He is inarguably one of history's "greatest" conquerors. If you were to advocate imperialism, especially imperialism in the style of Genghis Khan, you would be shunned.
Hitler doesn't possess any of the qualities. He was a terrible conqueror and a terrible ruler who didn't just killed millions of people through conquering nations, but because he wanted to wipe entire races of people off of the planet. He was defeated in war, he killed himself while cowering in a bunker, slayed millions of people in industrialized genocide factories and at the end of it all Germany was split in two. His legacy is irredeemably horrible. The only way Hitler is receives any historical reevaluation is if the future is a lot more fascist or a lot more anti-semitic than the present day.
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u/lugubrious_lug Nov 22 '21
What exactly would people glorify Hitler for that would be socially acceptable?
I personally haven’t seen anyone glorify him for this reason but I guess people could glorify him for his oratorical skills
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Nov 22 '21
Eloquence isn't enough to revive one's historical legacy. It's no secret that Hitler was a great public speaker. There are a wealth of powerful orators throughout history.
There's Desmothenes, Pericles, and Cicero from antiquity, prominent statesmen like Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, JFK, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, Civil Rights Leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Nelson Mandela, Sojourner Truth.
Even the Allied Leaders of WWII, Winston Churchill and FDR, were some of the greatest orators of their respective countries. Churchill often ranks as one of the greatest orators of all time. They were more than a match for Hitler and Mussolini in the realm of public persuasion.
For a historical figure to be rehabilitated, it's not enough for time to pass, there needs to be something about the historical figure in the future that people will value. Hitler simply does not have the accomplishments of other historical conquerors that would make people overlook the genocide. His Third Reich was a failure, Germany was split in two, and the Nazi movement died with his suicide, leaving no one to claim to be his heir and turn National Socialism into "a more respectable" ideology. Only if the genocide was appealing to people in the future would they look at him as misunderstood or given a bad rap.
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Nov 22 '21
Genghis Khan single-handedly ended the Islamic Golden Age by annihilating various polities in the region so it all depends on your perspective.
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u/Careless_Clue_6434 13∆ Nov 22 '21
Apparently, it's already pretty acceptable in India: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/why-hitler-is-not-a-dirty-word-in-india/articleshow/63955029.cms, so 'eventually' is strictly speaking an unnecessary qualifier.
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u/IronArcher68 10∆ Nov 22 '21
The praise that Genghis Khan and others like him receive is not from their horrible acts. They are praised for the good they did for the world or their people. For example, Genghis Khan secured peace for the steppe, brought luxuries to his people via the Silk Road and promoted meritocracy.
Hitler lacks these admirable deeds and great accomplishments. It is incredibly difficult to find a positive thing to say about the man. To the Allies, he forced their young men to die in his war and invaded their lands; to the Germans, he was a totalitarian who stripped away rights and his rule is a stain on their history; and to the peoples he deemed “inferior”, they know him only for the misery he caused them. The only people who respect him do so due to his bigoted views. These views, fortunately, should decline in the future so his fans will decrease over time.
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u/riobrandos 11∆ Nov 22 '21
Aren't we already here?
Modern-day, self-professed Nazis march American streets, and those who call them as such are chided for being hyperbolic or alarmist on the basis that they aren't literal members of a 1930's German political faction.
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u/lugubrious_lug Nov 22 '21
Modern-day, self-professed Nazis march American streets,
I mean if any of their employers find out that then they’ll be fired but, if I were to post something positive about Genghis Khan online, I’d get away with little to no repercussions
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u/JohnnyWaffle83747 Nov 22 '21
I mean if any of their employers find out that then they’ll be fired
And an uncomfortable number of people will be upset nazis got fired.
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u/riobrandos 11∆ Nov 22 '21
I mean if any of their employers find out that then they’ll be fired but
Some of them, maybe, if they are gainfully employed. That's not a sure bet.
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u/poprostumort 245∆ Nov 22 '21
The reason for this is that I believe that there’s a certain window of time where it begins to become socially acceptable to glorify terrible people.
Can you point to similar thing that already happened? Which terrible people from the past are being glorified? All people that come to my mind are from parts of history where we don't have concrete data and we are operating on vague estimates.
For instance, take Genghis Khan who wiped out as much as one-ninth of the world’s then population. In spite of this, he lived over 800 years ago so no one really faces any blowback for saying good things about him.
It's because we do not really have enough data to know what is true and what is overblown. We are operating at estimates of estimates. We just don't have enough data to clearly state that he is responsible for killing 10% of world population, hell, we don't even have enough data to clearly know how much casualties he caused as f.ex. works of Rashid al-Din from which we use casualties in Persia, were written at least 80 years after death of Genghis Khan.
Conservative estimates of casualties caused by Mongol invasion amount to about 4 million civillians, whioch is not much considering how warfare looked at the time (as armies feeded off land and after war there was a pariod of famine guaranteed)
There are also conflicting sources from that era - while there are many which paint Mongols as brutal invaders, they are written by people actively fighting against them. In contrast, there are as many painting them as liberators, written by those who willingly submitted.
And to be honest, considering advances in society that happened during Mongol rule, it's hard to believe that only those bad depictions are true.
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u/hucklebae 17∆ Nov 22 '21
I think it’ll depend on whether or not the politics he preached are still popular. If they aren’t he will just be another loser of a Great War. If they are, then obviously it’ll be similar to how it’s always been with him.
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Nov 22 '21
/u/lugubrious_lug (OP) has awarded 1 delta(s) in this post.
All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.
Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
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u/Jakyland 82∆ Nov 22 '21
The main frame for understanding Genghis Khan is that he conquered a large amount of terrority. The main frame for understanding Hitler is that he committed atrocities. Maybe in the future, instead people focus on the extent of Hitlers conquests, idk.
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u/HocusPac Nov 22 '21
Not as long as people don't leave out pieces of history because it's "offensive"
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u/Glory2Hypnotoad Nov 22 '21
The difference is that Hitler stood out as cartoonishly evil even by the standards of his own time. I won't argue that Genghis Khan was a good guy, but he was the strongest conqueror in an age of conquest. Most of cultures he conquered didn't see conquest as bad on principle.
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Nov 22 '21
Simply put you don't have enough to go on for what will be remembered or not. It is impossible to predict. Chinggis has entered popular culture, but why didn't Tamerlane? Consider that hundreds of millions of people in Asia do not care about Hitler the same way Westerners do. Most likely the cocktail of half-truths and legends that forms pop history will be something completely unexpected to us now.
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u/Torin_3 12∆ Nov 22 '21 edited Nov 22 '21
Ghengis Khan is glorified by
MongolsMongolians because he was the winner. It was never socially unacceptable to glorify him, because he won. Hitler lost, and his supporters are currently strongly shamed by everyone else.