There is no need to call all acts of atrocity that kill millions of people the same name.
Most of the people that died under Stalin starved and most emerged from the Gulags alive. The Holocaust was an attempt to brutally eliminate an entire group of people with torture and experimentation, systematically. It stands at the pinnacle of man’s inhumanity to man in scope & breadth.
Referring to the other instances as holocausts is correct but the Death Camps were a whole ‘nother level. Right now in Africa smaller scale holocausts are occurring. Brutal, animalistic though they are, abhorent, repellent, they too did not have gas ovens, picking through human remain for gold teeth, lampshades of skin, human bodies stacked like cord wood, or Mengele and his tortures...
I find it odd to want to argue over which unspeakable crime against humanity is worse and to want to claim parity== rather than mourning and attempting to learn from each but if parse we must, those are my thoughts.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/03/10/hitler-vs-stalin-who-killed-more/
Funny how some groups of people after an atrocity is committed upon them whine for generations. While others arm themselves stoically to prevent another atrocity.
“...Most of the people that died under Stalin starved and most emerged from the Gulags alive...the Death Camps were a whole ‘nother level...I find it odd to want to argue over which unspeakable crime against humanity is worse...” [JayGalt, post 59]
Don’t forget: New York Review of Books has long been committed to Far Left causes, and Soviet revisionism. Anything appearing there must be considered false until proven true. Anyone citing it in support on this forum must be considered either dimwitted, or intellectually dishonest.
Claims that the Soviets killed fewer than the Nazis did are untrue. Stalin himself conceded just after the war that it had cost the USSR dearly - but less dearly than the collectivization of agriculture.
One could argue that Nazis were “worse,” because they killed at far greater rates, over a shorter stretch of time, to reach their total.
But one could also argue that Soviet-style Communism was “worse,” because Bolshevik totalitarianism was applied over a much longer stretch of time, over a much wider area, to a far greater number of people: offenses less dire than the mass murder they also perpetrated, but somewhat more than trivial.
And - considering the many adherents and revisionists who still cling to the ineffably goofy notion of the Socialist Paradise under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat - it’s an idea that still gains traction, and is therefore still a threat. Present evils outmatch past evils.
The greatest feat of historical revisionism in the past 100 years is the transformation of our understanding of National Socialism, from being a movement of the Left, to a movement of the Right. It was a deliberate ploy, to permit supporters of Communism to play victim, and to legitimize the USSR: since it was the primary factor in the Allied defeat of Germany, everything else it did, or wanted to do, was also rendered legitimate. Or even desirable.
The same has been done with Fascism, which wasn’t the same as Nazism. Please recall that before World War One, Benito Mussolini was the leading socialist in Europe.