Was Hitler good for the World in any way?

A long while ago, in a conversation where I asserted that something good could be said about everyone...I was challenged to say something good about Hitler.

My response to the challenge:

With his own hands, Hitler killed the rottenest son-of-a-bitch the world has ever seen!

Yes, he was good for the world. In fact, his life has proven to be a goldmine for intellectually bankrupt people who like making asinine analogies. He is compared to everybody from George Bush to Osama Bin Laden. If it wasn't for Hitler, these people wouldn't be able to make half as many retarded analogies.

Asherman
" Hitler was undoubtedly a monster, but his legacy did have one redeeming feature. Hitler demonstrated the ultimate expression of racism, and revealed it for the ugly cancer that it is."

The Belgians had already done that in the Congo. The world did not need Hitler's gloss on the topic.

Hitler was a beast, but the Nazis did change the world, quite dramatically. Take the jet engine, for example. And rocketry.

Genocide wasn't invented by Hitler and his cronies. In ancient times it was not uncommon to kill, or enslave, every captured enemy. Cities were destroyed so totally as to be lost to history, and the city-state was often the equivalent of a modern nation.

Count dracula, the real McCoy, became famous for murdering by the thousands. He impaled so many in mountain pass that it could not be passed through by a man on a horse. The Count was lauded and rewarded for his mass murders. His troubles began when he began killing his own subjects, and babies began disappearing. The King had to arrest the Count, but The Impaler is still an important historical curiosity.

During the Wars of the Reformation, Catholics murdered Protestants, who murdered Catholics and other Protestants. Again whole cities were utterly destroyed and their inhabitants put to the sword without mercy. Some of those sects became extinct along with every living person who had any connection whatsoever with them.

Pogroms against the Jews were so common in Europe and West Asia, that seldom did a generation pass away without experiencing mass murder personally. Jews were driven periodically from one hostile State to another. There were times when finding a Jew in England was difficult. The Ghettos of Easter Europe were periodically bathed in Jewish blood. Spain drove out the Jews and confiscated their property about the time of Columbus's voyage. Today there is a large South American Jewish community that dates back to the earliest settlement of the New World.

When Lord Byron went to help fight the Greek revolution, he reported the following rather common experience: "In the distance we could see a pretty village surrounded by lush fields at the base of the mountain we were descending. As we drew closer, we could see a long wall extending along both sides of the road for about a mile leading into the village. As we approached the villiage the smell became terrible, and we discovered that the "wall" was actually built five feet high with the corpses of men, women and children. The villiage itself had been looted and abandoned." I have paraphrased this passage which was so vivid when I read it years ago that it remains in memory.

Many AmerInds hold that their ancestors were methodically mass murdered to make way for European settlement. That's a reach, but native American populations were reduced by something like 90% between the early 16th and late 19th centuries. Whole villages and tribes were ruthlessly killed, sometimes with no excuse at all. Smallpox was deliberately introduced as a means of killing tribesmen, and at least one tribe was totally wiped out by this means. Many Indian languages died with the last of their tribal speakers.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Turkey was being transformed into a modern state, but it also marked the first of the modern genocidal acts. Turkish policy was the complete extermination of the Armenians within their borders. Ask any Armenian about how brutal, and total the killing was. The Turks deny that their own little ethnic cleansing ever happened, but it did. Just a few years earlier during the Boer War, both British and Boers waged total war against the enemy, and you've already alluded to the mass killings in the Belgian Congo.

These are just a few of the mass murders that once were not regarded as crimes, or even something that the perpetrators should be ashamed of. So you don't really need to remind me that Hitler didn't invent mass murder. So why have I singled out Hitler's genocide as an object lesson?

The Nazi's put their business onto a "scientific" basis and made it as efficient as possible. Earlier mass murders were often spontaneous and executed with passion. The Final Solution was the application of modern mass production turned to the grisly business of mass killing. Organization of major national resources to carry out a long-term and persistent policy of mass murder specifically intended to drive a complete ethnic/religious group into extinction was very new. Earlier genocides, with the possible exception of the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians, was the result of a climate and attitude existing among the killers, but was not really the conscious, intentional and stated policy of the offending State. The attitude was most often, "Kill as many as possible, but we know that many more will survive ... so what?" Hitler's efforts were quite different.

Progressive elements in 19th century America fought hard for policies that in retrospect seem very similar to many of Hitler's hygienic Laws. The forced sterilization of the mentally ill is but one example of efforts to "improve the race". All over the world local communities regarded themselves as separate and better than their neighbors, who were often described as being less than human. It was common and accepted to divide the single human species, into a different races with supposedly different racial traits. Darwin was the excuse to apply ideas about evolution to the social order. The strong survive and the flawed go into extinction.

"Anglo-Saxons have obviously evolved further and faster than all the other races, so it alone deserves to survive. But, we are so advanced and compassionate, that we will civilize those Other and put them to good use so that they may eventually evolve to a higher and better state." This sort of argument was pretty common throughout the last half of the 19th century, and was used to discriminate against Eastern and Southern Europeans. The Irish were regarded as little more than animals, and people from the Balkans were regarded as only being valuable as miners. This example cites the Anglo-Saxon attitude, but it was common and accepted everywhere, with the mere substitution of the local identity for the Anglo-Saxon. This attitude lay at the foundation of the Jim Crow Laws, and served as the excuse for dominating the philippines. Chinese and Japanese chauvinism are rooted deep in their national cultures. And so it goes. It seems humanity is as tied to Chauvinism as it is to War, and with far less reason.

When the allies were finally confronted with the stench of the Death Camps, it was a clear lesson in where prejudice and chauvinism end up. Those camps weren't the doing of any single person, but were instead the expression of prejudice endemic in the whole society. A few madmen, or overzealous soldiers, didn't kill millions, the Death Factories required the willing and cold efforts of common middle-class people who were otherwise unremarkable. For the first time, the horrors of mass killing were seen world-wide. Photographs and motion picture, and radio broadcasts supplemented newspaper reports that brought the reality of Germany's policies into tiny villages all over the world. Racism became for the first time not a socially acceptable opinion to hold. Minorities saw what happened in the Death Camps, and began to wonder if they to might someday be the raw materials for a death machine.

As American G.I.s returned home, they came back with a different view of what American society should be like. Not all at once, but gradually the mass of Americans shifted more and more away from the racial chauvinism that had previously existed. Truman integrated the military within a decade of the end of WWII, and it got better not worse. Jim Crow Laws and lynchings became the open shame of the South. Pictures of burly policemen attacking peaceful marchers with german dogs, conjured up the SS on American soil. The Civil Rights Movement benefited greatly by the comparison of Jim Crow to Nazi Racial Laws. Of course, this is only one of many factors that fueled the social revolution that took place in this country during the 60's. If it had not been for Hitler's example, the fight for civil equality and rights might have taken a lot longer.

Unfortunately, the Nazi example of the horrors associated with the use of modern methods and management to exterminate large groups didn't seem to take very well in the rest of the world. Stalin went on to murder more people than Hitler did, but we rarely hear about it. Millions died as Chinese Communists pursued the ideal national structure. Death camps in the DPNK still exist. The Killing Fields of Cambodia are notorious. Africa as seemed at times during the last twenty years to be one large Death Camp as one tribe murders another into extinction. Balkan roads again were lined with piles of corpses. Saddam used poison gasses to exterminate whole villages of Kurds.

"When you march up to attack a city, first offer terms of peace.
If it agrees to your terms of peace and opens its gates to you,
all the people to be found in it shall serve you in forced labor.
But if it refuses to make peace with you and instead offers you
battle, lay siege to it, and when the Lord, your God, delivers it
into your hand, put every male in it to the sword, but the women
and children and livestock and all else in it that is worth
plunder you may take as your booty and you may use this plunder
of your enemies which the Lord, your God, has given you."

Deuteronomy 20:10

I am truly puzzled. What percentage would we have had to slaughter for it not to be a reach?

Greek "genos", means "race", "nation" or "tribe", while "cide" is Latin, meaning "killing".

Interestingly, there had been no attempt until afterWorld War II to construct a legal framework through which the international community could deal with cases of mass extermination of peoples - with genocide.

In 1946 the General Assembly of the United Nations affirmed that "genocide is a crime under international law which the civilized world condemns, and for the commission of which principals and accomplices are punishable".
In 1948 the General Assembly approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which went into effect in 1951.


Looking from that, 90% "reduce" of native Americans or the the massacre of Armenians by the Turks wasn't "a reach".

I believe that the contention that smallpox was intentionally introduced to the Indians in order to obliterate them is a fairy tale. I've never read a convincing account of the act, and as it would depend upon an understanding of a germ theory of medicine at a time when none existed among physicians and scientists, let alone racist frontiersmen, i find the entire contention too far of a stretch of the imagination.

Most of the loss of population resulted from the unintentional introduction of disease. That both Amerinds and Europeans were hot to exterminate one another, i do not doubt. The Iroquois, more than any other Amerind population, was responsible for more deaths of other Amerinds than all intentional slaughter by Europeans up to the 17th century, and, for that matter, for a long time afterward. They set out to exterminate all of the tribes of the Great Lakes region in order to engross the fur trade, to finance their obsessive war with the French.

From a larger perspective, the idea of exterminating one's enemies is ancient, and has been practiced in all civilizations. Immediately after the assassination of the emperor Giaus (Caligula), Sejanus sent members of the Guard to murder his son and daughter. As the girl was a virgin (about 9 or 10 years of age), and could not be executed legally under ancient customary law in Rome, they raped her first, then murdered her. There is no particular reason to believe the fairy tale in the New Testament that Herrod sent his soldiers to exterminate all of the first-born sons of the Jews, after hearing of the advent of a Messiah, but it can stand as a type for the activity which was so common in human transactions for most of human history. The Norge and Goths who "went aviking" would commonly "case" the landing place. If it looked well-defended, they'd send some boys ashore unarmed, and offer to trade. If it looked like easy pickings, they would wait until nightfall, and then land a force to attack--a "trade or raid" doctrine. In raiding, they would slaughter any children they found, and then rape any woman or girl of viable age--to extirpate the "seed" of the vanquished, and to spread their own "seed." From a certain point of view, this was simple pragmatism. The Sultans of the Osmanli Sublime Porte would routinely have all of their immediate male relatives strangled upon accession to the Sultanate, to eliminate any possible rivals. More than anything else, the extermination of Jews, and of Slavs and Gypsies, by the Nazis, was an appeal to a darker, but nevertheless common atavism.

Good post Set. I agree there was no deliberate plan to exterminate the Amerinds by spreading disease. But there were some pretty disgraceful characters amongst the early pioneers who made no disguise of their desire to seen a total end of indigenous tribes.

The thin veneer of civilisation is indeed pretty thin at times. Surely that's why its so important to hold onto ideas coming out of the Enlightenment and the rule of Law and resist being overtaken by more primitive urges.

As has already been pointed out, most of the reduction in AmrerInd population was not due to any conscious homicidal plan. The lack of immunity to European diseases was the principle killer, and that isn't genocide. Though there were numerous massacres in the struggle between AmerIndian tribes and european expansion into the continent, few were intended in any genocidal manner, on either side. That is why, I said that to term eurpean conquest of the Americas genocide is a reach. It has nothing to do with numbers, but with intent and policy.

I agree with Setanta that most of the smallpox blanket stories are probably false, but I'm reasonably sure that the Cayuse tribe was exterminated by smallpox infected blankets purposely to steal their horses. It seems to me I came across rather persuasive evidence to that incident many years ago when I was looking into bureaucratic abuses against the Mojave Indians. However, I haven't documentation at my fingertips, so doubts are certainly warranted ... and I would have doubts myself if it weren't for the recollection.

The Turks adamantly deny any sort of genocidal program against the Armenians, and the Armenians are just as adament that there was an officially sanctioned policy designed and executed to totally annhilate them around the turn of the 20th century. The documentary evidence strongly suggests that mass murder was very common in the area at the time, and that Turkish troops and officials were complicit. On balance, I believe that there was a program designed to totally eliminate Armenians from Turkish soil.

I'd agree about the attempt to exterminate Armenians in Turkey, and i'd lay the blame squarely on Enver Bey and the Young Turks.

Is there anything you don't know Set? Sorry, are there unknown knowns that you don't know about?

Lots an' lots, Boss, but i'm areadin' just as fast as i can . . .

He did teach us a lesson:
Expect anything

Sure the jews knew that something like this was coming, but no one knew it would be THIS bad

I guess I agree with you, squeakz. What an unabsorbable wake up. Once I knew about that, life was different. I saw some photos of Dachau when I was about ten. Those were horrible pictures for me, but I didn't have to go through it. Much much more horrendous to be there then.
Still, now I can imagine most anything. And sadly it keeps happening in different places.

So even though Hitler was a really bad human being, he taught people (mostly jews) , morals. I cant even imagine what they went through, my grandparents left on a ship when they killed my uncle, they survied obvisously. I seen pictures from it and the horror.

What are you saying, he taught Jews morals? You must be kidding.

Oh, I see you don't mean that exactly. Jews already had a moral culture, in case you aren't aware of that.

Hitler told our recent world how low man could go in despicable vileness. There have been examples of this before and after him, but the number of poeple affected under his watch was very large. I don't know if it was the largest ever, but it was fairly recent in world history and affected many people in what they call western civilization.

People have died by the millions (?) in Cambodia and similarly vast numbers in Ruanda more recently. We haven't always behaved so well ourselves.

The first I knew of all this kind of thing, though, was hearing about Hitler's death camps. This was no benefit - in fact it is a lifetime burden of knowledge.

I've said no in the past, but for the sake of argument, I would really like to point out an example. But I can't as yet.

Nearest I've got is as a very bad lesson from history, worth learning.

One thing that Hitler taught us...and PLEASE don't think I attribute anything positive to this...is that when science of all kinds is given free reign with no moral considerations...in other words "Let's see if we can do it" with no consideration of whether we should do it and with no concerns about who gets hurt in the doing or after.......then you can get a lot done and you can make the trains run on time.

So maybe the reason that we can put evil down for a time but never really dispose of it is because evil in and of itself is efficient.