The worst revisionism

[buritobr]

Sometimes, the mainstream view might have some distortions, but then, a revisnist version comes and this version is much more distorted. That's why I listed some examples. I explain why:

1) The negative view on the Middle Ages influenced by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment might have been overrated, but it is not possible to say that the life in Europe between 500 and 1500 was good

2) Most of the people know more the WW2 than the WW1 and so, they have the image of the WW2. Of course, Germany in the WW1 was not as evil as it was in the WW1. But the pro-kaiser revisionism might be wrong

3) Stalin ordered the execution of enemies, sent other ones to the gulag, his political decisions might have cause the number of deaths similar to Hitler's. But it is impossible to compare to a industrial killing machine built because of racial motives

4) "Médici, Pinochet and Videla saved Brazil, Chile and Argentina of the possibility of becoming new Cuba" is wrong because these dictators were worse than Fidel Castro and because the Cuban Revolution took place during Batista's dictatorship and not during a liberal democracy, so, right-wing dictatorships make countries closer to a communist revolution, and not more distant

5) If you make some cherry-picking, Bill Clinton administration had some policies more conservative than Nixon's policies. But we have to remember that both presidents didn't have majority in the Congress. And the world in the 1990s was different of the world in the 1970s

6) The leftism of the nordic countries might be overrated (we have talked about this in other threads), but a very wrong view is to say that the nordic countries are sucess stories of the world's most free economies. This view is supported by Heritage ranking, which is not considered in the academic world.

I didn't include "national-socialism was a left-wing movement" in the list, because this is hors concours

[HisGrace]

My answer is 4. Just a completely wrong opinion that is still harmful today in that it could lead to people supporting right-wing authoritarian governments as a "bulwark" against leftists.

As for the others-

1. This just seems like edgelord trolling to me, I don't think anyone actually believes this

2. This is debatable and has little to no impact today so it is harmless.

3. Debatable and not really objectionable unless you are saying Hitler wasn't bad

4. Covered it

5. Debatable, he was on certain things and saying so does not cause any harm

6. Not true but also does not cause any harm

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The first one depends on what you mean by "not so bad". Life in medieval Europe wasn't the unending slog of complete misery that it is in Game of Thrones or whatever, but there's still a reason the Renaissance humanists reacted against it.

The others are all completely wrong and #3 and #4 are the worst of a bad lot. I voted for #3.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

3 usually accompanies some form of Holocaust denial.

[John Dule]

It's objectively true that Stalin killed more people than Hitler did-- so unless you have some other metrics for "evil" that I'm unaware of, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that one isn't so much "revisionism" as it is "fact."

In any case, I voted for #1 because it's the excuse used by trad-Christian LARPers who fantasize about the "simpler times" when people died in their 40s and lived under repressive religious brainwashing institutions that halted social and scientific progress for centuries. Oh boy, I sure do miss the days when psychopathic kings used religious dogma to justify their absolute authority and treated their subjects as little more than cattle! Those were the days, man. Who needs electricity anyway?

[Big Abraham]

It's objectively true that Stalin killed more people than Hitler did-- so unless you have some other metrics for "evil" that I'm unaware of, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that one isn't so much "revisionism" as it is "fact."

Not really. According to the Soviet archives opened up by Yeltsin in 1993, Stalin had officially executed 799,455 people between 1921 and '53, officially 1,053,829 died in the gulags (some modern scholars put this number at 1.5 million), and about half a million during the forced resettlement programs. That put the number killed by the Stalinist regime at about three million, which is just half the number of the Jews by Hitler alone, let alone all the other groups and political prisoners he had put to death.

The "20 million" figure you sometimes hear thrown around is a hyperbolic estimation from Robert Conquest and other anti-Communist right-wing Westerners from before the de-classified records were opened up and were quite obviously ideologically motivated. The only way to arrive at such a ludicrously high number is if you count all the unnatural deaths and high mortality that occurred in Russia during those years from famine, pestilence, etc., which obviously is not the result of systematic extermination but rather mismanaged policy. And before you scream "Holodomor!", there is no evidence that Stalin systematically and consciously engineered the famine in order to attack Ukrainians specifically, and tons of evidence to the contrary - like the fact that widespread suffering that also affected other nationalities, like the Russians; ethnic Poles and Bulgarians died in similar proportions to ethnic Ukrainians.

In any case, I voted for #1 because it's the excuse used by trad-Christian LARPers who fantasize about the "simpler times" when people died in their 40s and lived under repressive religious brainwashing institutions that halted social and scientific progress for centuries. Oh boy, I sure do miss the days when psychopathic kings used religious dogma to justify their absolute authority and treated their subjects as little more than cattle! Those were the days, man. Who needs electricity anyway?

I'm not any kind of neo-feudalist or "traditionalist," but it is false that "people died in their 40s" in large numbers in medieval Europe (lower life expectancies were highly influenced by a higher infant mortality), and it is also myth that "the Church held back scientific progress." This is a remnant of Reformation-era polemicism from Protestant thinkers who sought to discredit the "Dark Ages" (which they named) by tying it to their ecclesiastical enemy - Rome. The mainstream view among historians is now that the Church actually helped scientific progress by proving to be a massive patron of the sciences, the prolific foundation and funding of schools (such as the university, a product of the Church), hospitals, and many medieval clergymen were active in the sciences. Consider Roger Bacon, who founded the scientific method, and Aquinas for example.

[Cassius]

I think the Hitler vs Stalin (or Mao!) evilness debate is a little silly. I don’t particularly see how a Willy-waving contest over ‘who killed more’ is useful for determining ‘evilness’ (something that I don’t think is a useful concept in serious history). If you preside over the killings of millions of individuals then the fact that another person killed a few million more than you did doesn’t make you a ‘less evil’ person. Surely morality isn’t simply a numbers game? That’s without getting into a more nuanced arguments of responsibility. Sure, Hitler was an inveterate anti-Semite who made the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people from Europe a top priority, but on the other hand I think it’s pretty well established that, at least by the time the Holocaust began in earnest, the course that that ethnic cleansing ended up taking was as much determined by other individuals, such as Heydrich and Himmler, as it was by Hitler himself. Stalin on the other hand can be argued to have played a much more ‘hands on’ role in most of the atrocities that he presided over. This doesn’t make either one ‘better’ than the other (Hitler of course played a very direct role in many of the atrocities committed by his regime), but I am of the opinion that, at least in terms of good historiography, more nuance is needed than ‘Hitler was uniquely evil’, which for me has always carried the undertone of his being a kind of secular Satan, something that leads us out of the realms of historiography and into those of ideology.

[Diabolical Materialism]

I don't mind #1 all that much tbh. Yes it is incorrect and ahistorical, but boy am I sick of people talking about the "Dark Ages".

[LAKISYLVANIA]

1. Life in Europe in the Middle Ages was not so bad Obviously not true of course. But does it cause harm, i don't know

2. France and Britain were more evil than the German Empire in 1914 Causes no harm at all, and it's actually a debatable thing, i think they all three are kinda neutral, perhaps HP but France and Britain at the time certainly were.

3. Stalin was more evil than Hitler Also debatable, unless you say one of the two is of course not evil.

4. The military dictatorships in South America in the 1970s were a necessary evil against a Cuban dictatorship LOL, absolutely not true

5. Bill Clinton was on the right of Richard Nixon Also debatable, and causes no harm, and I believe Bill Clinton (certainly at the time) wasn't more left-wing than Nixon (also considering at the time)

6. The nordic countries are examples of Reaganomics Of course not true, but i suppose this causes no harm either

For me it's 4!

[John Dule]

It's objectively true that Stalin killed more people than Hitler did-- so unless you have some other metrics for "evil" that I'm unaware of, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that one isn't so much "revisionism" as it is "fact."

Not really. According to the Soviet archives opened up by Yeltsin in 1993, Stalin had officially executed 799,455 people between 1921 and '53, officially 1,053,829 died in the gulags (some modern scholars put this number at 1.5 million), and about half a million during the forced resettlement programs. That put the number killed by the Stalinist regime at about three million, which is just half the number of the Jews by Hitler alone, let alone all the other groups and political prisoners he had put to death.

The "20 million" figure you sometimes hear thrown around is a hyperbolic estimation from Robert Conquest and other anti-Communist right-wing Westerners from before the de-classified records were opened up and were quite obviously ideologically motivated. The only way to arrive at such a ludicrously high number is if you count all the unnatural deaths and high mortality that occurred in Russia during those years from famine, pestilence, etc., which obviously is not the result of systematic extermination but rather mismanaged policy. And before you scream "Holodomor!", there is no evidence that Stalin systematically and consciously engineered the famine in order to attack Ukrainians specifically, and tons of evidence to the contrary - like the fact that widespread suffering that also affected other nationalities, like the Russians; ethnic Poles and Bulgarians died in similar proportions to ethnic Ukrainians.

In any case, I voted for #1 because it's the excuse used by trad-Christian LARPers who fantasize about the "simpler times" when people died in their 40s and lived under repressive religious brainwashing institutions that halted social and scientific progress for centuries. Oh boy, I sure do miss the days when psychopathic kings used religious dogma to justify their absolute authority and treated their subjects as little more than cattle! Those were the days, man. Who needs electricity anyway?

I'm not any kind of neo-feudalist or "traditionalist," but it is false that "people died in their 40s" in large numbers in medieval Europe (lower life expectancies were highly influenced by a higher infant mortality), and it is also myth that "the Church held back scientific progress." This is a remnant of Reformation-era polemicism from Protestant thinkers who sought to discredit the "Dark Ages" (which they named) by tying it to their ecclesiastical enemy - Rome. The mainstream view among historians is now that the Church actually helped scientific progress by proving to be a massive patron of the sciences, the prolific foundation and funding of schools (such as the university, a product of the Church), hospitals, and many medieval clergymen were active in the sciences. Consider Roger Bacon, who founded the scientific method, and Aquinas for example.

And why exactly should """accidental""" deaths under the Soviet policy dictated by Stalin not be counted? For example, it's a generally accepted statistic that Mao's policies-- especially the Great Leap Forward-- killed about 40 million people. Are we absolving him of his crime because he didn't order them dead on purpose? Does his incompetence make him a better person than if he had done this intentionally? I say no. Choosing whether or not to take power in the first place is a moral decision. If you do not understand the system you are trying to run, you are a true villain if you attempt to run it anyway.

The idea that the Church was a net positive for either social change or scientific advancement is absurd and I think you know that.

[AtorBoltox]

'Stalin is worse than Hitler' due to the inherent implication that the way history and society progressed is no better than if Generalplan Ost had been carried out

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Is #3 revisionism people who argue that it was a mistake for the West to ally with Stalin against Hitler? I'm of the Churchill school in that regards (i.e. if germany invaded hell, i would provide a positive reference to the devil).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

"Scientific progress" in the Middle Ages prioritized fields other than those that we associate with "scientific progress" today. There was a heavy focus on advances in agricultural technology because of the overwhelmingly rural population.

[Lord Halifax]

It's objectively true that Stalin killed more people than Hitler did-- so unless you have some other metrics for "evil" that I'm unaware of, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that one isn't so much "revisionism" as it is "fact."

Not really. According to the Soviet archives opened up by Yeltsin in 1993, Stalin had officially executed 799,455 people between 1921 and '53, officially 1,053,829 died in the gulags (some modern scholars put this number at 1.5 million), and about half a million during the forced resettlement programs. That put the number killed by the Stalinist regime at about three million, which is just half the number of the Jews by Hitler alone, let alone all the other groups and political prisoners he had put to death.

The "20 million" figure you sometimes hear thrown around is a hyperbolic estimation from Robert Conquest and other anti-Communist right-wing Westerners from before the de-classified records were opened up and were quite obviously ideologically motivated. The only way to arrive at such a ludicrously high number is if you count all the unnatural deaths and high mortality that occurred in Russia during those years from famine, pestilence, etc., which obviously is not the result of systematic extermination but rather mismanaged policy. And before you scream "Holodomor!", there is no evidence that Stalin systematically and consciously engineered the famine in order to attack Ukrainians specifically, and tons of evidence to the contrary - like the fact that widespread suffering that also affected other nationalities, like the Russians; ethnic Poles and Bulgarians died in similar proportions to ethnic Ukrainians.

In any case, I voted for #1 because it's the excuse used by trad-Christian LARPers who fantasize about the "simpler times" when people died in their 40s and lived under repressive religious brainwashing institutions that halted social and scientific progress for centuries. Oh boy, I sure do miss the days when psychopathic kings used religious dogma to justify their absolute authority and treated their subjects as little more than cattle! Those were the days, man. Who needs electricity anyway?

I'm not any kind of neo-feudalist or "traditionalist," but it is false that "people died in their 40s" in large numbers in medieval Europe (lower life expectancies were highly influenced by a higher infant mortality), and it is also myth that "the Church held back scientific progress." This is a remnant of Reformation-era polemicism from Protestant thinkers who sought to discredit the "Dark Ages" (which they named) by tying it to their ecclesiastical enemy - Rome. The mainstream view among historians is now that the Church actually helped scientific progress by proving to be a massive patron of the sciences, the prolific foundation and funding of schools (such as the university, a product of the Church), hospitals, and many medieval clergymen were active in the sciences. Consider Roger Bacon, who founded the scientific method, and Aquinas for example.

"Mismananaged policy" Stalin was responsible for as the autocratic ruler of the Soviet Union. It doesn't really how many people a ruler intentionally kills, what matters is how many people die as a consequence of his actions.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

"Scientific progress" in the Middle Ages prioritized fields other than those that we associate with "scientific progress" today. There was a heavy focus on advances in agricultural technology because of the overwhelmingly rural population.

Without which, of course, the forms of scientific progress we're more familiar with would not have been possible. Another interesting one from the period is the mechanical clock, which Lewis Mumford considered to have been the most important technological innovation since the wheel as it changed completely our relationship with something as utterly and truly foundational as time.

[Diabolical Materialism]

"Scientific progress" in the Middle Ages prioritized fields other than those that we associate with "scientific progress" today. There was a heavy focus on advances in agricultural technology because of the overwhelmingly rural population.

Medieval innovations in construction and architectural technology are also underrated

[HisGrace]

Is #3 revisionism people who argue that it was a mistake for the West to ally with Stalin against Hitler? I'm of the Churchill school in that regards (i.e. if germany invaded hell, i would provide a positive reference to the devil).

Thought about addressing this in my post. You can think Stalin was a morally worse person than Hitler while also thinking Hitler was the bigger threat in the 1940's so it was right to ally with the USSR against him.

Also have to laugh/sigh/eyeroll at the naivety on display elsewhere thinking Stalin's famines were "accidents". They were coordinated as part of a larger effort to subjugate Eastern Europe.

[buritobr]

3 usually accompanies some form of Holocaust denial.

Some of them use it for Holocaust denial.

Some of them are the ones who say that national-socialism was left-wing. They say like "Look how the commies are bad. Stalin and Mao were the greatest mass murders, they were worse than Hitler, and even Hitler was a kind of commie too"

Some of them try to increase the reputation of non-nazi far-right dictators, like Mussolini, Franco, Salazar and Dofluss. This is connected to the item number 4 of this list, about people who use Fidel Castro in order to build a positive image of Médici and Pinochet.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Most people forgot about chain gangs among poor AA males and Jews, from 1865/1955 after Slavery, due to fact Miranda and Public Defenders didn't exist until 1963, and lynching

Majority of AA lived in the South not the North and states rights Dems, not Rs, put AA in chain gangs

Revisionist history

That's why Brandeis, Cardoza and Frankfurter sided with Secularist instead of Conservatives due to poor Jews having to work on Chain gangs like the Nazis did to them during Holocaust.

Later, Latinos were put on chain gangs

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

I think though I don't know whether I can say either Hitler or Stalin were worse than one another, the Nazi regime's crimes were far more uniquely awful than the USSR, in their industrialised approach to mass slaughter. Both the USSR and Nazi Germany engaged in utterly atrocious behaviour: the mass internment of civilians, systematic rape, collective punishments of entire communities, mass murder planned at the highest levels of government etc. But the death camps of Treblinka, Auschwitz and Belzec were unique to them - nothing quite like them had ever been seen before or since - not by the USSR, nor by the Empire of Japan. Of all the great villainous regimes we have ever seen - the Mongols, the latter Ottomans, the Timurids, the Congo Free State, the Spanish conquests of Cortez etc, the Khmer Rouge, Suharto's Indonesia, the European slave colonies etc - the nature of the Nazi killings were one of a kind.

[GALeftist]

I have the same issue with the Stalin-Hitler comparison that I do with people who say North Korea is better than the USA because the USA bombs more people. Even if you accept that Stalin killed more people than Hitler (which I'm not sure I do, although to be clear both were horrific mass murderers), Stalin ruled for three decades and ruled one of two superpowers for almost a decade, while Hitler ruled a great power for just over a decade, so their death tolls cannot be directly compared like that; to illustrate this point, I don't think it would be fair to say that Hitler was close to morally neutral if he ruled in, like, Andorra or something. If Hitler ruled one of the world's two superpowers I'm sure the world would be as much or more of a hellscape as if Kim Jong-un ruled the world's sole superpower.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I don't mind #1 all that much tbh. Yes it is incorrect and ahistorical, but boy am I sick of people talking about the "Dark Ages".

The keyword here is "so." For a long time there has been an effort to portray the Renaissance as this wonderful period where people made beautiful art and understood themselves as individuals, when in fact life during the period from 1350-1700 was arguably more "nasty, brutish, and short" than during the Middle Ages. The honest-to-God "Dark Ages" (200-800 AD or so) were obviously awful, though.

[darklordoftech]

I don't mind #1 all that much tbh. Yes it is incorrect and ahistorical, but boy am I sick of people talking about the "Dark Ages".

The keyword here is "so." For a long time there has been an effort to portray the Renaissance as this wonderful period where people made beautiful art and understood themselves as individuals, when in fact life during the period from 1350-1700 was arguably more "nasty, brutish, and short" than during the Middle Ages. The honest-to-God "Dark Ages" (200-800 AD or so) were obviously awful, though.

I have a hard time seeing belief in literal witches as “enlightenment”.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I don't mind #1 all that much tbh. Yes it is incorrect and ahistorical, but boy am I sick of people talking about the "Dark Ages".

The keyword here is "so." For a long time there has been an effort to portray the Renaissance as this wonderful period where people made beautiful art and understood themselves as individuals, when in fact life during the period from 1350-1700 was arguably more "nasty, brutish, and short" than during the Middle Ages. The honest-to-God "Dark Ages" (200-800 AD or so) were obviously awful, though.

I have a hard time seeing belief in literal witches as “enlightenment”.

Well, exactly: witch trials were (for the most party) a feature of the so-called Renaissance, Monty Python notwithstanding, as I'm sure you know.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

I think the main issue with the "Dark Ages was awful" notion that I have is less the idea that enlightenment was a bad thing, more that it's often contrasted with a supposedly great Greco-Roman world. I say this as someone who loves classical history; the Roman Empire absolutely would have sucked arse to live in, and many of the things you can lob at the medieval era apply to the Roman world as well, even at its "peak".