> 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.
>
>
Isn't it also relevant that much of the Stalinist death toll came from
policies, especially collectivization of agriculture, that were in the
part of the tradition of primary capital accumulation that involves
gross exploitation of technologically primitive rural populations so as
to feed urban populations which, for a time, were creating the basic
infrastructure of a more advanced society? This sounds more like the
kind of historical outrage that is an issue now in the discussions of
reparations for slavery and colonialism, and quite a different kind of
outrage than the Nazis' plans for extermination of whole populations
according to an essentialist racial theory. For one thing, primary
accumulationist mass killings were time limited, whereas the Nazis
showed every sign of instituting systematic mass murder as a permanent
component of social and government policy.
It's some years since I read THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM, but isn't something like this the basis of the distinction Arendt made between Nazism and Stalinism?
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema