White Supremecists Slay 49 in NZ Mosques

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

(03-15-2019, 04:49 PM)Dill Wrote: The number?

You might have a point there.

Short of a nuclear war, I doubt we'll never see another body count like the one the Nazis piled up.

Josef Stalin and Mao would disagree.  But honestly, not trying to get us off on a tangent.

[*bfine32*]

(03-15-2019, 04:49 PM)Dill Wrote: The number?

You might have a point there.

Short of a nuclear war, I doubt we'll never see another body count like the one the Nazis piled up.

Pol Pot gave it a shot.

[*bfine32*]

(03-15-2019, 04:57 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Josef Stalin and Mao would disagree.  But honestly, not trying to get us off on a tangent.

Too late. I already went there. Looks like Communism is the biggest killer in history.

[Dill]

(03-15-2019, 04:57 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Josef Stalin and Mao would disagree.  But honestly, not trying to get us off on a tangent.

Actually, I don't think they would disagree.  Anti-communists would, though. Bfine too.

Not a tangent, if we are working out how to measure atrocities, danger from ideologies/religions, and the like.

[Dill]

(03-15-2019, 04:59 PM)bfine32 Wrote: Pol Pot gave it a shot.

Not even close. Lucky to break 2 million. He could have killed everyone in Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand, and still fall short by 30 million.

[Matt_Crimson]

(03-15-2019, 04:49 PM)Dill Wrote: The number? You might have a point there. Short of a nuclear war, I doubt we'll never see another body count like the one the Nazis piled up.

 

Ahh yes. The old "But Nazi's killed a lot of people 80 years ago" argument. Lets be honest here Dill. How relevant is Nazi Germany to the argument of how dangerous white supremacy is today vs Islamic extremism? I find it odd that people always run back to Nazi Germany to support their arguments against white supremacy today. Well, actually I don't because it's convenient for them to go back and talk about how many people died to white supremacy 80 years ago vs the amount of people dying to white supremacy today. 

Answer me this Dill. Are the amount of people who have died from the actions of white supremacists in the last 5 years greater than the amount of people who have died to the actions of Islamic extremists in the last 5 years?
 

Quote:LOL bit of a non sequitur there. 

Or how are you measuring "problems"?

And for whom? Would it be fair to say that pretty much any white person can be a white supremacist?

There are only 850 million of us honks, so that falls short of the number of Muslims worldwide. 

Care to elaborate on the claim that what I said is a non sequitur?

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

(03-15-2019, 05:01 PM)Dill Wrote: Actually, I don't think they would disagree.  Anti-communists would, though. Bfine too.

I'm not sure that being anti-communist is necessary, Although why anyone wouldn't be anti-communist is beyond me as it has a horrifying track record.  I could find other sources but I'm at work and am using this as a momentary steam release as I'm under the gun on a rather large task

https://historyofrussia.org/stalin-killed-how-many-people/

Mao is estimated to have killed ~40 million with Stalin in the ~20 million range.

Quote:Not a tangent, if we are working out how to measure atrocities, danger from ideologies/religions, and the like.

Ok, then.  In any event Stalin, Hitler and Mao were all mass murderers who caused the deaths of millions.  Just to be clear I'm talking about deaths not related to the prosecution of a war, i.e. soldiers killed, civilians killed in combat, by bombing etc.

[Benton]

(03-15-2019, 05:46 PM)Matt_Crimson Wrote:  

Ahh yes. The old "But Nazi's killed a lot of people 80 years ago" argument. Lets be honest here Dill. How relevant is Nazi Germany to the argument of how dangerous white supremacy is today vs Islamic extremism?  

https://www.jta.org/quick-reads/polish-weeklys-front-page-teaches-how-to-recognize-a-jew
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/seven-suspected-neo-nazis-arrested-allegedly-plotting-terror-attack-n915331
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/jewish-restaurant-in-german-town-chemnitz-attacked-by-neo-nazis-1.6464348
https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/national/deadly-charlottesville-car-attack-what-know-now/K2eySRjiJAoCmXpttltBSK/

Etc, etc.

But white supremacists and radical Muslims aren't very comparable. But I would note that, in general, a key difference is that radical Muslims tend to avoid violence in places that don't fit into the never-ending self-imposed genocide between their major factions, unless of course you step in between that fight, whereas white supremacists tend to search out the folks their opposed to. 

[Matt_Crimson]

(03-15-2019, 06:41 PM)Benton Wrote: https://www.jta.org/quick-reads/polish-weeklys-front-page-teaches-how-to-recognize-a-jew
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/seven-suspected-neo-nazis-arrested-allegedly-plotting-terror-attack-n915331
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/jewish-restaurant-in-german-town-chemnitz-attacked-by-neo-nazis-1.6464348
https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/national/deadly-charlottesville-car-attack-what-know-now/K2eySRjiJAoCmXpttltBSK/

Etc, etc.

But white supremacists and radical Muslims aren't very comparable. But I would note that, in general, a key difference is that radical Muslims tend to avoid violence in places that don't fit into the never-ending self-imposed genocide between their major factions, unless of course you step in between that fight, whereas white supremacists tend to search out the folks their opposed to. 

But I would argue that where radical Muslims "tend" to do their attacks etc... isn't really the point here. The point is, what do these radical Muslims want, how much are they progressing towards these goals, how influential are they to the overall world population in terms of their goals, and how many people are dying because of their goals in current times.

The suggestion that white supremacists are moving at as fast as a destructive pace as radical Muslims because Nazis murdered a bunch of people 80 years ago isn't a good argument imo. 

Sure, I get it, white supremacy is a bad thing and caused a lot of people to be killed. But who is causing the most destruction around the world in recent years and influencing more people to do evil?

[Dill]

(03-15-2019, 06:17 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: I'm not sure that being anti-communist is necessary, Although why anyone wouldn't be anti-communist is beyond me as it has a horrifying track record.  I could find other sources but I'm at work and am using this as a momentary steam release as I'm under the gun on a rather large task

https://historyofrussia.org/stalin-killed-how-many-people/

Mao is estimated to have killed ~40 million with Stalin in the ~20 million range.

Ok, then.  In any event Stalin, Hitler and Mao were all mass murderers who caused the deaths of millions.  Just to be clear I'm talking about deaths not related to the prosecution of a war, i.e. soldiers killed, civilians killed in combat, by bombing etc. 

Anti-communism is an ideology, a kind of filter through which some groups view history onesidedly to support pre-established views of communism. It has a horrifying track record as well.

One of the first things I noticed in your source was that attribution of some 12 million deaths to "the Gulag." One finds such estimation in the work of writers like Solzhenitsyn and pre-1991 historians like Robert Conquest (The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s (1968)). So right away that is way off the range currently given by professional historians, which runs from 850,000 to 2 million.

Stephen Wheatcroft has a good discussion on this, sifting through the work of historians pre- and post-1991, when Soviet archives were made available to Western historians for a brief time.  If you don't like that sort of thing, scroll down to the conclusion on p. 1348.  (in "The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Mass Killings, 1930-45."  Europe-Asia Studies Vol. 48, No. 8 1996 1319-53.)  http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/WCR-German_Soviet.pdf

There is a definitional issue here as well, as all people sent to Gulags were not "political" prisoners. One must allow that the Soviet Union had at least SOME garden variety murderers and thieves and the like.  According to historian Michael Ellman, about 34.4% of Gulag prisoners in 1939 were "counter revolutionaries," while another 21.7% were ambiguously classified as "socially dangerous" elements."  Also muddying the waters is that Gulag commandants often freed people who were unable to work or near death, to drive down death statistics.  Even so, we are probably still 10 million short of your 12 million figure. (See Ellman's "Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments," p. 1156, EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES,Vol. 54, No. 7, 2002, 1151–1172. http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/ELM-Repression_Statistics.pdf)
 
More on definitions, this time of "mass murderer." Two notes, at least:

1) there is a kind of double standard here. Anti-communists don't distinguish people who die by execution and in gas showers from people who die in famines and other negative results of policies.   Some one who starves because Mao sent peasants to dig a canal rather than plant rice therefore becomes a "murder victim," even though Mao would have preferred he not die.

2) On the other side of the standard, people doing this sort of accounting never have time to add up the deaths amassed under, say, British colonialism (at least two mass starvations in India, each resulting in millions of deaths), or the U.S. conquest of native Americans and or their enslavement of Africans. Doing so would make Queen Victoria and Andrew Jackson "mass murderers" too.

This is not a digression if, armed with an awareness of how ideology can drive definition, we can bring the question of (double)standards to bear on current assessments of terrorism--its origins and threat level.

[SunsetBengal]

(03-15-2019, 09:29 PM)Dill Wrote: Anti-communism is an ideology, a kind of filter through which some groups view history onesidedly to support pre-established views of communism. It has a horrifying track record as well.

One of the first things I noticed in your source was that attribution of some 12 million deaths to "the Gulag." One finds such estimation in the work of writers like Solzhenitsyn and pre-1991 historians like Robert Conquest (The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s (1968)). So right away that is way off the range currently given by professional historians, which runs from 850,000 to 2 million.

Stephen Wheatcroft has a good discussion on this, sifting through the work of historians pre- and post-1991, when Soviet archives were made available to Western historians for a brief time.  If you don't like that sort of thing, scroll down to the conclusion on p. 1348.  (in "The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Mass Killings, 1930-45."  Europe-Asia Studies Vol. 48, No. 8 1996 1319-53.)  http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/WCR-German_Soviet.pdf

There is a definitional issue here as well, as all people sent to Gulags were not "political" prisoners. One must allow that the Soviet Union had at least SOME garden variety murderers and thieves and the like.  According to historian Michael Ellman, about 34.4% of Gulag prisoners in 1939 were "counter revolutionaries," while another 21.7% were ambiguously classified as "socially dangerous" elements."  Also muddying the waters is that Gulag commandants often freed people who were unable to work or near death, to drive down death statistics.  Even so, we are probably still 10 million short of your 12 million figure. (See Ellman's "Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments," p. 1156, EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES,Vol. 54, No. 7, 2002, 1151–1172. http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/ELM-Repression_Statistics.pdf)
 
More on definitions, this time of "mass murderer." Two notes, at least:

1) there is a kind of double standard here. Anti-communists don't distinguish people who die by execution and in gas showers from people who die in famines and other negative results of policies.   Some one who starves because Mao sent peasants to dig a canal rather than plant rice therefore becomes a "murder victim," even though Mao would have preferred he not die.

2) On the other side of the standard, people doing this sort of accounting never have time to add up the deaths amassed under, say, British colonialism (at least two mass starvations in India, each resulting in millions of deaths), or the U.S. conquest of native Americans and or their enslavement of Africans. Doing so would make Queen Victoria and Andrew Jackson "mass murderers" too.

This is not a digression if, armed with an awareness of how ideology can drive definition, we can bring the question of (double)standards to bear on current assessments of terrorism--its origins and threat level.

So, are you saying that an anti-communist group is just as dangerous as a communist regime??  I'm having trouble understanding exactly what the point that you're trying to make is.

[Dill]

(03-15-2019, 05:46 PM)Matt_Crimson Wrote:  My biggest problem when it comes to comparing white supremacists to Islamic extremists is that it forgets one very important factor. Pretty much anyone can be an Islamic extremist if they follow the faith. 
Only white people can really be white supremacists.

My point being, the two aren't really all that comparable in terms of the problems they create.

Quote:LOL bit of a non sequitur there. 
Or how are you measuring "problems"?

Care to elaborate on the claim that what I said is a non sequitur?

Sure.  Your conclusion is about "problems they create," which in this case, I'm assuming, would be terrorist murder.  Does that accurately represent your point? Or did you have other problems in mind?

Mass shooting of people in a night club in one event, and in  a mosque in another, are not comparable as terrorist acts if one was done because some crazy guy was fired from his job and his girlfriend left him, and the other was perpetrated because of who the victims were and what they represented--and with the intent to terrorize all members of that group. 

But if people in one Synagogue are killed by a white supremacist because they are Jews and people in another synagogue are killed by an Islamist because they are Jews, then I would say the acts certainly are comparable as terrorist acts. And the perps are comparable as actors--especially if their goals form mirror images of one another. They would legally be tried under the same statutes in the U.S.--at least until there is one distinct set of statutes for White Supremecists and another set for Muslims.

The premise to your conclusion is a kind of tautology--only Muslims can become Islamic extremists.  If I am a Baptist, I cannot be a Muslim extremist.   Followed by a second tautology--only white people can be white supremacists. "White" can be a fuzzy category, but even if you have a clear idea of what you mean, neither tautology implies that terrorist acts are not comparable because only a "white person" can do one kind and only a Muslim can do another. Race and religion are not built into any current definition I can think of. Your tautologies don't shed light on the situation any more than any other claim true by definition, e.g., that only terrorists commit terrorists acts. They don't make things "incomparable" which are already subject to general definition.

So, so long as there is a general legal/political definition of terrorism not based upon ethnicity or religion, then the acts will be comparable. It cannot follow then that such acts are incomparable if perpetrated by a racially motivated group in one instance and a religiously motivated in another. 

[GMDino]

(03-15-2019, 05:01 PM)Dill Wrote: Actually, I don't think they would disagree.  Anti-communists would, though. Bfine too.

Not a tangent, if we are working out how to measure atrocities, danger from ideologies/religions, and the like.

Hey, as long as a few people can make sure we're not lumping all white people into a group.  

[Nebuchadnezzar]

Why are you all playing the "Who's the better killer?"

It don't matter what color skin has killed or murdered the most people.

What matters is that there are people out there murdering other because of a made up feeling.

[Dill]

(03-15-2019, 10:00 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: So, are you saying that an anti-communist group is just as dangerous as a communist regime??  I'm having trouble understanding exactly what the point that you're trying to make is.

The premiere anti-communist regime that history offers us is the Third Reich, which I think was certainly more dangerous than the Soviet Union (but not worse than Democratic Kampuchea). But I am not connecting that directly to U.S. anti-communism or to each and every person today who dislikes communism. I am myself not a fan of Communism, but that doesn't mean I accept distortion of the historical record.

Anti-communism in the U.S., particularly in government officials, has led the U.S. to do a number of shameful things, e.g., to overturn democratically elected governments and support dictators in the suppression of their own people, not to mention harass our own, especially civil rights leaders. (that is the "horrifying track record" I was referring to, not an American "group") 

Today anti-communism is an ideology held to widely different degrees by people in many countries--and in the U.S. from neo-Nazis to ordinary Americans who don't know a lot about Communism but know they don't like it. They have seen the internet memes with the high body counts and know it is "anti-capitalist" and "failed everywhere it was tried" except China, the next super power.

Do keep in mind that I am addressing a point made by SSF about Stalin's body count in his source, which I find way to high. I was not trying to make a point about anti-communists' bad behavior so much as point out how that filter continues to distort history.  Many people whom I would not classify as anti-communists nevertheless are exposed to it and repeat its shibboleths, keeping them alive long after the Cold War.

[Dill]

(03-15-2019, 05:46 PM)Matt_Crimson Wrote: Ahh yes. The old "But Nazi's killed a lot of people 80 years ago" argument. Lets be honest here Dill. How relevant is Nazi Germany to the argument of how dangerous white supremacy is today vs Islamic extremism? I find it odd that people always run back to Nazi Germany to support their arguments against white supremacy today. Well, actually I don't because it's convenient for them to go back and talk about how many people died to white supremacy 80 years ago vs the amount of people dying to white supremacy today. 

Answer me this Dill. Are the amount of people who have died from the actions of white supremacists in the last 5 years greater than the amount of people who have died to the actions of Islamic extremists in the last 5 years?
 

Lets be clear that today's white supremacists do "run back to Nazi Germany to support their arguments [for] white supremacy today."  That is why it remains in the conversation after 80 years. Because its ideological foundations have been kept alive and are currently finding new life In Europe and the  Anglophone world, today's white supremacists find it convenient to go back and talk about how Hitler managed racial undesirables and fought for Western Civilization.

Since there are currently wars in the Levant, Subsaharan Africa, and Central Asia which pit Islamic extremists against other Islamic extremists and various state actors, I would say, globally, more have died from Islamists in the last five years.  Though Islamists in Niger may not be a current threat to the U.S. or NZ.

But I don't see that as a good ground for dismissing the rise of white supremacy, especially given increasing tendency world wide for liberal democracies to fall into illiberal, or outright authoritarian regimes, frequently repeating Nazi-style arguments for national or racial purity, denigrating the free press, and undermining their judiciary.

If we are speaking of the US, do you see grounds for fearing Islamists more than White supremacists?  Do you see any ground for Muslims and Jews having greater fear of the latter than non-muslims and non-Jews?

[Dill]

(03-15-2019, 10:23 PM)GMDino Wrote: Hey, as long as a few people can make sure we're not lumping all white people into a group.  

I get that SOME white people are white.

But it sounds like you are saying that ALL white people are.

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

(03-15-2019, 09:29 PM)Dill Wrote: Anti-communism is an ideology, a kind of filter through which some groups view history onesidedly to support pre-established views of communism. It has a horrifying track record as well.

Anti-Communism is an ideology?  This is literally the first time I've ever heard someone make this assertion.  As I stated previously, communism has such an abysmal track record that I'd question the sanity of anyone who wasn't anti-communist.

Quote:One of the first things I noticed in your source was that attribution of some 12 million deaths to "the Gulag." One finds such estimation in the work of writers like Solzhenitsyn and pre-1991 historians like Robert Conquest (The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s (1968)). So right away that is way off the range currently given by professional historians, which runs from 850,000 to 2 million.

Stephen Wheatcroft has a good discussion on this, sifting through the work of historians pre- and post-1991, when Soviet archives were made available to Western historians for a brief time.  If you don't like that sort of thing, scroll down to the conclusion on p. 1348.  (in "The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Mass Killings, 1930-45."  Europe-Asia Studies Vol. 48, No. 8 1996 1319-53.)  http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/WCR-German_Soviet.pdf

There is a definitional issue here as well, as all people sent to Gulags were not "political" prisoners. One must allow that the Soviet Union had at least SOME garden variety murderers and thieves and the like.  According to historian Michael Ellman, about 34.4% of Gulag prisoners in 1939 were "counter revolutionaries," while another 21.7% were ambiguously classified as "socially dangerous" elements."  Also muddying the waters is that Gulag commandants often freed people who were unable to work or near death, to drive down death statistics.  Even so, we are probably still 10 million short of your 12 million figure. (See Ellman's "Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments," p. 1156, EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES,Vol. 54, No. 7, 2002, 1151–1172. http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/ELM-Repression_Statistics.pdf)

This is a fair point, however, it's not as decisive as you seem to think.  Do you really think that everyone categorized as a criminal was an actual criminal?  One of the best ways to discredit a person and the ideology they represent by showing them to be a reprehensible person, i.e. a murderer or a pedophile.  Your own source acknowledges the category as nebulous.
 

Quote:More on definitions, this time of "mass murderer." Two notes, at least:

1) there is a kind of double standard here. Anti-communists don't distinguish people who die by execution and in gas showers from people who die in famines and other negative results of policies.   Some one who starves because Mao sent peasants to dig a canal rather than plant rice therefore becomes a "murder victim," even though Mao would have preferred he not die.

Nor should they.  Stalin imposed forced famines.  Mao didn't give a damn about people dying of starvation either.  A point can be made the accidental deaths caused by imposing the failed tenants of communism are not the same as a direct decision to cause the death of a group of people.  However, when these "accidental" deaths are caused by horrible decisions and you make little to no effort to save these "accidental" causalities they should no longer be categorized as accidental. 

Quote:2) On the other side of the standard, people doing this sort of accounting never have time to add up the deaths amassed under, say, British colonialism (at least two mass starvations in India, each resulting in millions of deaths), or the U.S. conquest of native Americans and or their enslavement of Africans. Doing so would make Queen Victoria and Andrew Jackson "mass murderers" too.

They absolutely both where.  The numbers don't come close to Hitler Stalin or Mao, but they absolutely are mass murderers.  It is a sad truth that every great civilization was built on the backs of someone else.

Quote:This is not a digression if, armed with an awareness of how ideology can drive definition, we can bring the question of (double)standards to bear on current assessments of terrorism--its origins and threat level.

Except I'm not engaging in double standards.  Acknowledging the deaths caused by the imperialism of the UK and the founding and growth of the USA in no way lessons the deaths caused by Hitler, Stalin and Mao.  If you were to build a Mt. Rushmore of mass murderers those three are shoo-ins.  Hopefully we never have a viable fourth candidate to add.

[*michaelsean*]

Every time I feel the need to defend Stalin I just take a breath and remember that it's OK to criticize him. He is, after all, a super Caucasian. Literally from the area from which the term was derived. I've never heard anyone but neo-Nazis and white supremecists try to explain why Hitler's death toll might be lower, but Stalin? Whoa...some of those people were probably criminals to begin with.

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

(03-18-2019, 11:46 AM)michaelsean Wrote: Every time I feel the need to defend Stalin I just take a breath and remember that it's OK to criticize him.  He is, after all, a super Caucasian.  Literally from the area from which the term was derived.  I've never heard anyone but neo-Nazis and white supremecists try to explain why Hitler's death toll might be lower, but Stalin?  Whoa...some of those people were probably criminals to begin with.

There is an odd tendency for people to actually defend, or minimize, how much of a monster Stalin was.  I think it's largely due to two reasons.  Some people think elevating Stalin to Hitler level monster somehow diminishes how evil Hitler was.  It obviously doesn't, but I do see this mentality at work.  The other camp are those attempting to defend communism as an ideology and thus downplaying how many people have been murdered and brutalized due to its tenants.