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[–]cianastro 250 points251 points252 points  (4 children)
Hitler did good things and they have been aknowledged, it's just that they get kinda overshadowed with, you know, genocide and stuff (rightly so).
Just like the article said, Gengis Khan was a bloody murdering conqueror BUT forbade thing you would think a mongolian warlord did not give a shit about, period.
Nobody is saying the guy was good, and pointing fingers at people and screaming 'evil' never solved much. I'd rather contextualize evil figures and try to understand why they did that than mindless hating.
People still think Gengis Khan was a badass because he was a warrior that put his ass on the battlefield, had a pretty shitty life and conquered a good chunk of the world for that. Nobody has ever praised him for neither good nor fair
[–][deleted]  (3 children)
[deleted]
    [–]cianastro 1 point2 points3 points  (2 children)
    Hitler's atrocities were spread all over Europe and part of Russia, Stalin's were mainly a russian thing. Culturally speaking, Hitler's impact was just bigger, being the Axis leader in WW2 probably didn't help either. I bet you could go to Russia and ask about Hitler and Stalin, any illiterate will churn out a lot more info about the full moustache guy than the nazi.
    It's not like people think he's a saint either, he's like the second most famous evil guy in the last century for most people.
    On the matter of people not knowing much about gulags is because there are a lot more sources about nazi camps than gulags. This is a bit less of common knowledge but still fairly known. You can spit numbers and point your fingers at facilities, but we will never know 99% of what happened there. Atrocities, for sure, they just don't stick in
    [–]Hatchet_boy 0 points1 point2 points  (1 child)
    Yes, you make very good points.
    As I mentioned in a separate reply, I do not mean to compare "evilness" and reduce WWII history to who killed more people. The general understanding of Hitler and the Nazi's can not even be remotely understood unless a person has a decent grasp of what was happening in Russia and the rest of Europe at the time, something most people are not exposed to unless they are in a particular study program or take it upon themselves. I attribute this to bias, from academia to the media all focus is on the Nazi's and how evil they were. We even often times paint Stalin as a victim of German aggression.
    History has been very soft on the Soviets as well as communism. I didn't even know until recently the depth of infiltration the soviets had within the US government. We often use the term "Spies" but that simply implies they were passing sensitive information to Moscow which is bad enough, in reality these agents were literally influencing US foreign policy and impeding anything not in soviet favor. This is some how glossed over in most history discussions.
    [–]cianastro 1 point2 points3 points  (0 children)
    It s not just an US thing. Russians were just that good at not leaking any possible info. That was kinda the point of the gulags in the first place, to seclude people that could say how much it sucked. But mainly their spy net was top notch at the time, really, adversing a just recently born american spy 'network'. Back then, it wasn t even a fair fight intelligence-wise.
    While I could tell you I did study a lot about communism in high school, stuff like the Holodomor were grossly glossed over and a special emphasis was put on the nazi camps. Crossing concentration camps with literature is much easier to do than with the russian evil-doings, and nazi Germany is expected to be underlined on its every aspect as THE leading power over all WW2.... but i can definitely see why you would think WW2 russia doesn t get the attention it deserves in everyday history education.
    To add to that i live in Italy, which had kind of a role into the whole thing, so that would most likely vary from other countries, though not that much from other european countries AFAIK
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