Was Alexander the Great worse then Hitler

[Gray Beard]

I've read Mien Kampf. Because my PhD dealt with Martin Heidegger (A really nasty piece of Nazi work) I've really read more NAZI material than I'd ever like to admit. I've read the primary sources in many cases.

Hitler didn't start out OK and then go bad as was stated above. Nazism was the culmination of probably 200 years of German antisemitism that had been simply ignored by polite society. The NAZI's were, like all evil people pretty good at latching onto a couple of issues that most people could agree with and then piggy-backing their evil ideology into the mainstream that way. If the German economy had been good then the Nazi's would have found different issues to champion. I believe you see the same thing happening in the nation of Turkey right now. They just elected a government that wants to turn the nation into another Iran because the radical Islamist are, in some ways a little less fiscally corrupt. People voted for an honest government and will get an Ayatollah. The NAZI's did the same thing.

Moral equivalence when you talk about dictators is a strange concept to me. I wouldn't want to live in the USSR under Lenin, Stalin or anyone who came after them I wouldn't have wanted to live NAZI Germany, I probably would have been killed if I lived in Mao's China. (I currently live in China BTW).

Most nations from antiquity until fairly modern times had harsh, draconian legal systems. Rulers were often arbitrary and cruel. But Hitler raised the concept of cruelty to new heights. That said, peruse through a copy of the "Black Book of Communism" and you'll see he wasn't alone in killing huge numbers of his own populations and there is a sound intellectual basis for believing that Mao and Stalin were as bad or worse as was Pol-Pot. The above poster is correct when he says that Pol-Pot is not mentioned enough in threads like this.

The Hutu's in Rwanda however, I believe, currently hold the all time record for killing and maiming the most innocent people in the fewest number of days. On a day by day basis they made the Nazi's look like rank amatures

I believe there is also a qualitative, if not quantitative difference between killing enemy armies and even civilian populations in a war and killing citizens of your own country simply because of their ethnicity or political affiliations. Hitler's government would have killed every Jew it could have whether WWII happened or not. The two things were not dependent upon each other. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon (Who may have invented the Police State BTW), The British, or Joshua in the Old Testament for that matter, were building an empire and would kill the populations in order to control the city, state or geographical area. Populations who joined the cause were spared and given a place in the society.

Question, would you prefer the Assyrian way of controlling conquered population which was to enslave everyone and also cut their thumbs off so they couldn't effectively fight back? You could argue, and I think make a pretty strong argument, that in some ways both Alexander and Joshua were being merciful when they killed a population because it might be better to be dead than to be a slave.

For what it is worth, I'd put the Aztec up there with the Nazi's too as far as brutality genocidal behavior goes.