White Supremecists Slay 49 in NZ Mosques

[Dill]

(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.

(03-18-2019, 11:58 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: 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.

"Defend Stalin"?   Diminish Hitler?

Let's maybe take a breath and remember that--for professional historians at least--it is ok to ground history in an existing factual record, and limit our inferences about "monsters" to what these facts allow.  In fact, that is the point of their endeavors, and the basis of their professional integrity.  What is NOT the point is making people look good or bad, especially to accord with popular images of history and "what everyone already knows."  

If professional historians, going by state records, put the number of deaths in Stalin's time (especially executions) at a much lower number than people with an ideological axe to grind and no such access, then, for professional historians of whatever political stripe, this is what they go with. They do not reject facts (or invent them) to make some people they study look good or others look bad.

If you invert this process, evaluating in the first instance whether historical work "defends" or "diminishes" historical figures you like or don't like, regardless of its relation to the aforesaid factual record, then you are not doing history as professional historians do.  What you are doing is closer to theology or ideological history (as opposed to history of ideology).