If I had a nickel for every time I replied to an HN comment to give the blindingly obvious example of "Adolf Hitler," I'd have two nickels. Which isn't much, but it's weird that it happened twice.
Sure, you got one and he is way bellow the most successful far left dictators in terms of numbers. First you claimed numbers are higher for far right and then you said they are close. Why would you even make up such nonsense?
I wasn't the one saying the numbers are higher for one side or the other.
I am curious how you conclude that Hitler is "way below" the others. Seems to me they're similar. Estimates are way too loose, and attribution way too sticky, to say definitively who's higher, but they're around the same magnitude.
Parent: "Or leftist politicians, where they can do it on an industrial scale by the millions in death camps, in the name of progress."
You: "I would point out that when it comes to these, right, far right and fascists win the numbers."
>> I am curious how you conclude that Hitler is "way below" the others.
Looking at various estimates by people who were researching this topic. The numbers are usually in ranges and vary between researches. But the highest estimate for Hitler was always lower then the lowest estimates for Stalin and nowhere near Mao's lowest estimates.
From a quick search, the lowest estimates for Stalin are about 6 million, and Mao about 15 million. Are you saying Hitler killed less than 6 million? Even 15 million would be way too low.
10-15 vs 15-20 is definitely comparable in my view, considering how fuzzy the numbers are.
I'd put Hitler much higher, though. That figure must be excluding a lot of war deaths. For non-war deaths, there are 6 million Jews, maybe 3 million non-Jewish Soviet citizens, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, plus a bunch of other groups with smaller numbers. Taking just those big ones, that gets us to 12 million non-war deaths.
But surely we should count at least some of the war dead. Deciding what to attribute to who is very subjective. Starting with the strongest case, 3 million Soviet POWs were killed in captivity, hard to blame anyone else for that. That's up to 15+ million. There's a good case for including Allied military deaths in the European theater, since they were killed by Axis forces. The vast majority of those are the Soviets, which accounts for another 5-8 million (not double-counting the POWs killed). I'd also include Axis military deaths under the general principle that you get credit for what happens when you start a war. That's another 5-6 million. That puts us at 25-37 million.
Then you can get really fuzzy. There's many millions of Soviet citizens who starved due to wartime disruptions, do they count? There's around a million German civilians killed during the war, or died in the immediate aftermath due to the Allies, do they count?
