Saddam, diabolical genius (was: Re: Jewish Collegians Prepare to Defend Israel on the Campuses)

Brad DeLong jbdelong at uclink.berkeley.edu
Tue Sep 4 21:05:40 PDT 2001



>In retrospect, you _did_ support the military victory of the Soviet
>Union over Nazi Germany, right? Remember, the Stalin regime was
>responsible for the deaths of more people than the Nazis, and in the
>liberal calculus, was just as "diabolical" - if not more so, since
>Stalin met with greater success - then Hitler.

If I understand you, you are saying that Roosevelt and Churchill chose the wrong side when they decided to ally with Stalin against Hitler, rather than with Hitler against Stalin--that the world would have been a better place than it actually was if the Nazi tyranny had ruled Europe for, say, fifty years after 1945.

I think that you are completely wrong. The Nazi death count is less than the Stalinist death count (if it is: it is not clear to me that it is) because the Nazis were *stopped*. Remember: the Nazis envisioned the demographic replacement of the peoples of Belarus and Ukraine by ethnic Germans--that's 50 million shot, gassed, starved, whatever right there. Recall that of the 3.5 million or so Russians who fell into Nazi hands as POWs in 1941, barely a quarter were alive a year later. If Jews were smart, deceptive, clever beasts to be exterminated; Slavs were dumb, stupid beasts to be exterminated.

And what do you think the fate of Africa would have been with Hitler and his ideological fellows ruling Europe for half a century?

As it was, the Grand Alliance against Nazism was a very near-run thing. Had things gone even slightly worse on the battlefields, we would now be looking back at a second half of the twentieth century full of horrors that would dwarf the GULAG or the Great Leap Forward. Think of Pol Pot on a Eurasian scale--that's the consequence of a Nazi victory in World War II.

Brad DeLong



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