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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
, 6 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
I don't know why some people say Stalin killed more people than Hitler. Hitler killed about 7 million more Soviet citizens than Stalin did, plus a lot of other people besides.
In terms of intentional killings (rather than e.g. Mao's famine), Hitler almost certainly killed more human beings than any other leader in human history. He definitely deserves his reputation as the archetypical bad guy.
People seem to think that the 27 million Soviet citizens killed by the Nazis were all killed on the battlefield. Nope. Most were civilians, starved to death intentionally as part of a massive genocide plan of which the Holocaust was just one part.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalpl…
If you have a strong stomach, read "Bloodlands". People know that Hitler was really bad, but actually he was *much much worse* than most people realize.

amazon.com/Bloodlands-Eur…
As an ironic coda, a leftist dude on Twitter once called me a Nazi for recommending "Bloodlands". Although the book reveals Hitler to be much worse than people realize (and worse than Stalin) it also details Stalin's genocides, which he felt created a moral equivalence.
I guess the lesson of this thread is "Don't be Hitler".

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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
We're taught to see the 50s as a time of peace, stability, and contentment, marred by rigid social inequalities.

But when I read stuff written in the 50s, it feels more like a period of mass PTSD.
50s sci-fi (e.g. A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Stars My Destination) is often filled with the brooding certainty that the world is about to end.

50s nonfiction often takes the normalcy of mass movements and total war for granted.
No doubt the mass experience of WW2 was the main reason for this. You send a whole nation out to get shot at and bombed by Nazis and fanatics, they're going to come back with some major issues.

My grandfathers certainly did.
Read 3 tweets
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
From Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer".

"Intensely discontented but not destitute" sounds exactly like my image of the disappointed educated class that forms the backbone of the new American socialist movement.
In a way, the social justice movement and the alt-right were also both revolutionary movements, after a fashion.

Maybe the disappointments of the 2000s and early 2010s left a great many Americans intensely discontented but not destitute.
Hoffer says that people who join mass movements often feel like failures, and see the movement as their chance to redeem their lives.
Read 13 tweets
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
I don't see Warren as anti-corporate at all. In fact, I see her as wanting to move us back toward corporatism (in addition to increasing the welfare state). Many of her policies are designed to help corporations in exchange for them taking a greater role in boosting workers.
I see Warren as wanting to harness corporations to do more for their workers (and consumers) rather than their shareholders. I don't think she unconditionally sees them as villainous, I think she just sees them as misbehaving a lot under the current system.
In fact I see signs of a similar attitude from Bernie, who has pushed companies to pay workers more in order to make them less dependent on government welfare payments.
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