Cruel To Be Kind

A Colorado high school teacher who drew parallels between George W. Bush's State of the Union address and the oratory of Adolph Hitler was recently reinstated after a brief investigation into his classroom conduct. Though ill-considered and utterly naive, his remarks do not interest me nearly so much as the phenomenon of the invocation of Hitler's name in general. In contemporary discourse, a comparison to Hitler basically expresses the most savage condemnation possible of another human being. However, in the annals of state-sponsored annihilation, Hitler "only" comes in third, after Mao and Stalin.

Mao Zedong, the architect of Chinese Communism, described himself as "a man without law or limit." According to a recent biography, his policies led to the deaths of perhaps seventy million people. This staggering number equals the combined populations of California, Texas, and New York, nearly a quarter of the current population of the United States. Mao's butchery proved so extreme that even the Communist Party of China, in 1981, repudiated his "Cultural Revolution."

Joseph Stalin, regarded for over half a century as the premier mass-murderer in world history, has now been relegated to a close second. He remains responsible for a mere sixty million deaths, an amount equal to the entire population of England. Stalin bequeathed to history his maxim that "a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." His successor, Nikita Kruschev, disavowed Stalinism in the so-called "secret speech" of 1956.

With such competition, Hitler but manages to take the bronze medal in killing. The death toll of Nazi Germany stands at around twenty million, certainly an appalling number, but insufficient to make Hitler history's purest personification of evil. My high school Global Studies teacher observed that "Stalin made Hitler look like a Boy Scout." Why, then, do commentators wishing to castigate heads of state whom they regard as oppressive not then compare them to Stalin, or better yet Mao?

Shockingly enough, while Hitler succeeded in discrediting Naziism, Stalin and Mao somehow failed to discredit communism in the popular imagination of the West - though not for lack of trying. Overall, communism worldwide may have claimed as many as 150 million lives in the 20th century, which makes it a force nearly eight times as destructive as Naziism. Still, many Westerners persist in their desperate romance with communism. Some believe that, if only the right people would implement it, then it would finally work. This attitude ignores Albert Einstein's definition of insanity, "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Others have more nefariously allowed their enthusiasm for what they regard as communism's noble ends to justify its most ignoble means. Such Machiavellian thinking enables them to decry the violence of fascism, while embracing the violence of communism. Who will proclaim "never again" for the victims of not merely Stalin and Mao, but Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Kim Il-Sung? Not the modern apologist of communism; to him, this legion of dead just counts as "collateral damage."

If someone believes that America has squandered its moral credibility in Iraq, he cannot turn around and regard Hitler as the quintessential tyrant. Such fallacious speech demonstrates that he cares, not for human life itself, but only that human life is sacrificed on the altar of an ideology which he finds personally satisfying. This brand of self-indulgent selective indignation represents the lowest moral ground that a person can occupy, for it involves only the barest pretense of morality. Those who truly feel this way should just admit it; but as for me, I stand on the side of life and reject wholesale slaughter altogether.