Hacker News Reader

Comment by gcatalfamo | Hacker News Reader

> In hindsight Stalin was a bad dude

That's a great understatement for the single guy responsible for an amount of deaths 10 times greater than WWII casualties.

edit: number typo

View on HN

No matter how bad Stalin was, please don't post unsubstantive flamebait to Hacker News.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think that was awkwardly worded, but seemed to be expressing the stance of the US in 1945.

I don't think it's entirely accurate, though. Yes, the US had to align with USSR, yes the public face was he was our ally, but the US was already aware he was a "bad dude." In fact, the US would have no reservations kicking off a public campaign to that end immediately following the war.

"Yes, the US had to align with USSR" to take 50% of the cake while paying 5%.

I don't think you're engaging in good faith here.

HN guidelines include "Assume good faith". Please do.

Charles Lindbergh's views that the US should stay out of the war, allow Germany and Russia to fight each other to exhaustion, then show up to mop up the weak remainder of the military, seem rather prescient...

Actually, Patton proposed marching the US Army to Moscow in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi surrender but was pushed out of active leadership, in part for suggesting that. For some reason, Americans (then and now) are a little defensive about Stalin's legacy of mass murder on a scale greater even than Hitler. It's inexplicable.

I don't think we're saying different things.

So 85 millions died in ww2, that's not even casualties. How did you get to 850 millions?

> 10 times greater than WWII casualties

Any actual data on that? As far as I know it was exaggerated a lot, and real numbers show different view: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/01/27/hitler-vs-stalin-wh...

That is untrue.

Yep, it’s only around 2x as many.

The public count was over 60million deaths (he moved entire populations from a country to another), without accounting for all those not coming from direct orders but caused from small villages militia in an era of speech and thought repression.

1984 was written at that time, after all.

5x seems like a good approximate however, long-term consequences of the genocide against the russians are huge, e.g., the population size would be comparable to the one in the US

If people die of famine during your reign and not from a direct kill order, that doesn't make it not your fault.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com