The evil that men do:
7/12/11 10:09![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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talkpoliticsThe Nazis, as people know, were seriously intent on exterminating the Jews and Slavs of Europe, which meant for them a war with the Soviet Union, under Josef Stalin, was as inevitable and irresistible as any clash in human history. Now, the USSR in its own way was a pretty vicious, evil society in its own right. Soviet leaders had consigned entire groups, like Kazakhs, Ukrainian peasantry, Chechens, and so on to suffer the hard hand of a dictatorship more brutal than anything seen in the history of the Tsarist Empire. The Soviets had also shot almost all their good generals before the war started, showing that they could be not just evil but Stupid Evil. To further belabor the point, both Hitler and Stalin were one-party state autocrats with cults of personality and had no scruples about killing anyone, literally anyone, that they did not like.
For that matter, the USSR emerged from a civil war, and it proved the most enduring and resilient totalitarian state of them all, lasting from the 1920s to the 1990s and becoming a global superpower, one which actually won the Cold War in the Third World. This state, again, had origins that were pretty vicious, sordid and evil, with the Cheka/NVKD in some occasions rivaling the SS in terms atrocities in scale and type (though genocide, of course, is not a Soviet vice). So from this, we should conclude that the two regimes were identically evil in all ways, as evil itself is a monolithic thing, right?
Wrong. The USSR did not begin big wars. Where it began wars, it sought small, quick, easy-to-win wars. The USSR did engage in fifth-column activity in other states, but it engaged in that through politics. The Nazi idea of a fifth column was its own political prisoners dressed in enemy uniform. The Soviet Union would sign and adhere to treaties, being much more of a Jackass Genie than the Nazis, who signed treaties to break them before the ink was dry. The Soviet Gulag system was ultimately disbanded in the later years of the USSR, and under Stalin the USSR wound up letting its generals do their thing and thus being able to win the war, while making much better use of its own professionals than the Nazis did.
Too, the Soviet Union did have its own massacres during WWII, but it never did anything approaching the scale of what the Nazis did on a regular basis. The differences in this regard between Stalin and Hitler, and between the endurance of the Nazi and Soviet empires indicates that not only is it possible for some to say that they will not shoot Jews, but for entire countries (oh hai Bulgaria and Denmark) to save Jews, but it's also possible even for the *other* evil overlord to be evil in a very different, much more able-to-be-co-existed-with fashion.
So, my question to you, based on that other thread, is from a perspective that accepts that some ideologies and leaderships are inherently evil, is it possible that some evils are different from others to the point that living with them is not only feasible but acceptable? Can evil be nuanced enough that in terms of its own nature it can be co-existed with? Finally, is it possible that those who are evil can make choices in what kinds of evil men do, meaning that arguing from and generalizing from one example of evil is itself flawed?
And to clarify any of a particular stripe of comments that might appear here-the Soviet Union's leadership in WWII were nasty, unpleasant sonsobitch bastards, and I would never say they weren't. They were, however, our bastards.
For that matter, the USSR emerged from a civil war, and it proved the most enduring and resilient totalitarian state of them all, lasting from the 1920s to the 1990s and becoming a global superpower, one which actually won the Cold War in the Third World. This state, again, had origins that were pretty vicious, sordid and evil, with the Cheka/NVKD in some occasions rivaling the SS in terms atrocities in scale and type (though genocide, of course, is not a Soviet vice). So from this, we should conclude that the two regimes were identically evil in all ways, as evil itself is a monolithic thing, right?
Wrong. The USSR did not begin big wars. Where it began wars, it sought small, quick, easy-to-win wars. The USSR did engage in fifth-column activity in other states, but it engaged in that through politics. The Nazi idea of a fifth column was its own political prisoners dressed in enemy uniform. The Soviet Union would sign and adhere to treaties, being much more of a Jackass Genie than the Nazis, who signed treaties to break them before the ink was dry. The Soviet Gulag system was ultimately disbanded in the later years of the USSR, and under Stalin the USSR wound up letting its generals do their thing and thus being able to win the war, while making much better use of its own professionals than the Nazis did.
Too, the Soviet Union did have its own massacres during WWII, but it never did anything approaching the scale of what the Nazis did on a regular basis. The differences in this regard between Stalin and Hitler, and between the endurance of the Nazi and Soviet empires indicates that not only is it possible for some to say that they will not shoot Jews, but for entire countries (oh hai Bulgaria and Denmark) to save Jews, but it's also possible even for the *other* evil overlord to be evil in a very different, much more able-to-be-co-existed-with fashion.
So, my question to you, based on that other thread, is from a perspective that accepts that some ideologies and leaderships are inherently evil, is it possible that some evils are different from others to the point that living with them is not only feasible but acceptable? Can evil be nuanced enough that in terms of its own nature it can be co-existed with? Finally, is it possible that those who are evil can make choices in what kinds of evil men do, meaning that arguing from and generalizing from one example of evil is itself flawed?
And to clarify any of a particular stripe of comments that might appear here-the Soviet Union's leadership in WWII were nasty, unpleasant sonsobitch bastards, and I would never say they weren't. They were, however, our bastards.
(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 17:02 (UTC)If I'm evil - you are not?
Watch out!
Date: 7/12/11 17:18 (UTC)Re: Watch out!
Date: 7/12/11 17:33 (UTC)Re: Watch out!
Date: 7/12/11 17:37 (UTC)Re: Watch out!
Date: 7/12/11 22:05 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 18:05 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 18:30 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 18:39 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 19:33 (UTC)You now, I often ask my students - imagine the Earth without people, please. What do you see?
Know the answer?
PARADISE, - they say.
(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 19:37 (UTC)"I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs, a very endearing sight, I'm sure you'll agree. And even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen. Mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that is when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior." -Terry Pratchett (by way of Havelock Vetinari, Unseen Academicals).
Paradise has no meaning without the ability to appreciate it, and such an amoral state as that of nature cannot be paradise, which by definition (mine, anyway) has a perfect moral character.
(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 19:43 (UTC)The people...
Date: 7/12/11 18:55 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 22:06 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 22:31 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 18:24 (UTC)There are many things with which I disagree.
Date: 7/12/11 17:17 (UTC)As for shades of evil, not only are there shades, but there is also polarity. The US does things that people see as evil, but that patriotic flag-waving Americans see as marks of virtue and justice. One person's vice is another person's virtue.
As for men doing evil, women are capable of evil far more subtle than the deeds of men.
Re: There are many things with which I disagree.
Date: 7/12/11 17:35 (UTC)Exactly!
Re: There are many things with which I disagree.
Date: 7/12/11 18:25 (UTC)Re: There are many things with which I disagree.
Date: 7/12/11 18:45 (UTC)Re: There are many things with which I disagree.
Date: 7/12/11 18:54 (UTC)Re: There are many things with which I disagree.
Date: 7/12/11 20:15 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 17:46 (UTC)Not really. It's evil. Coexisting means inevitably you don't act when you should have acted. Then things go to hell, however metaphorically you want to take that.
I'm confused at the comparison of massacre to massacre. It kind of implies there's an acceptable level of massacre.
(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 18:18 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 17:52 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 18:19 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 18:54 (UTC)I lived in USSR and can say that in my school there was great propaganda of PEACE, BROTHERHOOD INTERNATIONALISM. Never ever I was told by our teachers, that one nation is good or bad. We all knew about horros of war and were afraid of new world war.
(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 18:15 (UTC)Since I assume that you have read large passages from the Manifesto as well as Mein Kampf, you know as well as I, that one is very hateful in places and tries to create a vision where that is incorporated. The other is simply a vision in a more neutral sense, whether it is considered a horrible or a great idea.
So already on an ideological basis I am willing to state that there is a difference - a difference which didn't carry as much weight as it should, due to other factors, non the least failures of human nature, but still.
The other difference is corruption. One society (the USSR) struggled with very turbulent changes for 1-2 decades there in the beginning, without going into detail, we still know that it laid the grounds for further structural corruption along with its totalitarianism and that corruption continued to grow and follow the country into any ideological format it switched to. Today, Russia is suffering from corruption just as it did under the Tsars, it has only escalated over many decades. This is a country which at best, has only enjoyed very short snippets of democracy over pretty big time spans of our modern era.
Nazi Germany however, actually had very low levels of structural corruption in their system (unless you count common syndromes of the late war), their "mistakes" are more singularly attributed to cult of personality, brainwash and weak personal choices. As countries go, in a sort of half-baked and somewhat simplistic analogy, one can compare USSR to a brute force killer in moments of passion, and Nazi Germany to a sociopath with a plan. But I'm not sure these analogies are any good really, except on some illustrative poetic level of the war era.
I think, had Nazi Germany survived, been able to make peace treaties and not engage the reluctant US in the war, etc (I realize this is *very* hypothetical), they would have buried and hidden their past and evolved into some form of surface democracy too, due to the order that existed in their very structure. In fact, Robert Harris' political thriller "Fatherland" is probably no such a bad idea of what Germany would have been had they won the war. Polished and forgiven on the outside, but with atrocious cultural/sociological effects and undercurrents.
(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 18:34 (UTC)The Soviets were much smarter about that when they did this, preferring to do that behind closed doors and giving themselves plausible deniability. The USSR had the ability to de-Stalinize, after all the NEP and the 1980s showed there was some ability of the USSR to exist in a not-vicious-monster fashion. The Nazi regime started bad and wound up in cartoonish supervillainy precisely *because* it was ideologically radicalizing. For fascism, Nazism is Democratic Kampuchea, there is no means the Nazis will ever de-radicalize, and the Nazis were busy chopping off the knees of German science, industry, and the like on top of it all.
Ultimately the USSR had elements of being a more vicious version of an ordinary dictatorship, the Nazis had no means to even get to the milder Soviet era societies without fundamentally collapsing their entire system into a hellhole that looks like today's Democratic Republic of the Congo without the foreign armies invading being required.
(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 19:24 (UTC)The USSR system was not equivalent. Their corruption, albeit accepted in certain times, if compared to what was written in regulations, could be called nothing else than corruption. Human flaws not matching the ideology.
(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 21:00 (UTC)Ideological disconnects.
Date: 7/12/11 18:53 (UTC)The USSR was far removed from the Communist Manifesto. There are a number of layers of historical and organizational disconnect. The Soviet Communists were not intellectually nor ideologically unified. In fact, they were pretty well decapitated by Stalin. Even the intermediate literature of Lenin does not predetermine the path that the USSR actually pursued.
Re: Ideological disconnects.
Date: 7/12/11 18:57 (UTC)The Soviet Communists were ideologically unified, certainly by comparison to their opponents, and Stalin's agreement with Trotsky on industrialization was there from the first. He just had to neutralize his opponents, in accordance with Lenin's precepts of being a true believer passionate enough that nothing could discredit the ideology.
(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 19:25 (UTC)Of course it was simple on the paper, but in reality this ideas produced dramatic social conflicts and many people died. But the difference with the nazis ideas is great. The most important is that there was no SPECIAL goal of killing people of another nation or even killing the reach. The PROPERTY was the question. Communists began to ROBBER, not to kill, but than it became the civil war with all its nightmares. Reach people didn't want to give their property (and who will do that without struggle?), so... seas of blood. But that was not the aim.
Nazis WANTED TO KILL other nations, to exterminate them.
(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 22:11 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 19:37 (UTC)If you have one person who has nothing but nasty bloody thoughts all day but is outwardly generous and respectful, is he a good person?
The flipside being, is there any ideal or intent sufficiently noble to make any atrocity forgivable?
I know this doesn't really answer your question but in my opinion people who view good and evil as an either/or dichotomy are missing the lessons of history.
(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 21:29 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 21:00 (UTC)Stalin averaged around 650,000 a year, Hitler averaged 3.7 million a year. Maybe Stalin was nicer, maybe he didn't have Hitler's drive, or it could have just been the weather.
(no subject)
Date: 7/12/11 21:31 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 8/12/11 00:13 (UTC)