Are you summing up all his actions, and written works with one quote from one essay... He wrote when he was young?

And some how it's evil?

People act. Sometimes they do things that hurt other people.

But they are not "evil". Including serial killers: they can be mentally ill (physiologically), or have severe psychological problems because of childhood abuse and such.

Hitler, for example, was the elected leader of a huge country, with a grassroots following for years. Millions of people agreed with his actions, and thousands in upper echelons helped him execute his ideas. From the persecution of the Jews to the invasion to other countries, all of those ideas were quite popular in German thinking and public dialogue for decades before Hitler. It's not as if he was some evil creature emerged from nowhere and fooled everybody.

More to the point, nobody calls the leaders of the allies evil, despite they having done equally abominable actions, like killing 250.000 civillians (men, women, elderly, children, babies, kittens et al) with two nuclear bombs, or bombing hundreds of thousands of civillians in Dresden to shreds. But they are not called "evil", because they were on "our" side, and because they won and so official history (never far away from state sponsoring) accepted their justifications.

How about the bloodshed that was the colonial era? European powers killed, enslaved and exploited a BILLION people, in their countries that they invaded and conquerer. Were they "evil"? That would make every leader of those countries at the time to be equal to Hitler * 10.

Not to mention socially established wrong-doing, like people in the South having millions of blacks as slaves, abducted from their villages in Africa. Were the thousands of South slave owners "evil"?

Stalin and Mao are another kind of thing. Their rule led to millions of deaths, but it's not like they enjoyed killing people (as is probably the understanding of naive people calling them 'evil'). Part of the massacres were result of the inevitable power plays in huge countries with hundreds of millions population under a revolution (or regime change) -- the same way that 50.000 people were executed in the French Revolution.

Also I'm not going to get deep into your halfassed retelling of history but (per capita) genocide is worse than murder is worse than bombing cities is worse than bombing armies is worse than enslaving people is worse than exploiting people. So stop trying to fucking godwin with incomparable numbers. Some of those people were evil but I am not going to go point-by-point with that mess.

Yes. Mental illness is something that can be objectively examined and testified by medical experts.

"Evil" is a BS non medical pulp journalism term that takes us back to the witch-hunting days...

>'severe psychological problems' that cause people to deeply hurt others for their own happiness is within spitting distance of a definition of evil.

Only one is a SPECIFIC case of an actual mental evaluation by a professional and the other is a word that can used to mean anything.

>Also I'm not going to get deep into your halfassed retelling of history but (per capita) genocide is worse than murder is worse than bombing cities is worse than bombing armies is worse than enslaving people is worse than exploiting people. So stop trying to fucking godwin with incomparable numbers.

Really? Do you want to go tell the victims of slavery that they were better off than the victims of German's genocide? Including the tens of millions of people that died under slavery? And that their suffering is somewhat "not comparable" to Germany's victims. Let's see how they'll take your fair and balanced ordering of what's better and what's worse.

Oh, and that "per capita genocide"? Plenty of it in the hands of European powers too. Check this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history

Also I don't know why you're acting like giving more examples of evil acts is going to make me decide the word evil is useless.

OK, got it now. In that case, European colonialism has killed far more people than Hitler's camps. Heck, the death toll for the native populations of the Americas alone is in the tens of millions. And execution, mass killins, genocide and starvation was not at all of the table for colonial powers either. Here's an example: http://www.thehobgoblin.co.uk/journal/h32002_RC_Leopold.htm

>Also I don't know why you're acting like giving more examples of evil acts is going to make me decide the word evil is useless.

What I said is that "evil" is useless in the sense that it doesn't have any explanatory power. That is, "Why did he do that? Because he was evil" is BS.

Perhaps this book might convince you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem

In it Hannah Arendt describes how what we perceive as "the great evils in history" like the Holocaust, were not executed by "evil" people (fanatics, etc), but by ordinary folks who "accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal".

So, even some of the greatest of evils, like the Holocaust, can be explained by observing their underlying mechanisms, the societal pressure, ideology and such, and not by some mystical "evil" quality in people.

In the same vein there is the Milgram experiment, which showed how anyone can be a torturer without having any "evil" quality in them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Yeah, here we go with the strawmen again. I never said "someone did X because they were evil". I said they were evil, implying what they did is evil in my books. But then you wouldn't have anything to whine about, would you.

In it Hannah Arendt describes how what we perceive as "the great evils in history" like the Holocaust, were not executed by "evil" people (fanatics, etc), but by ordinary folks who "accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal".

What makes you think that not questioning enough isn't already enough to be considered evil by me? Someone asked ME if I consider Mao evil, I said yes. Which wasn't even to say "as opposed to me or anybody else".

Oh, and I saw videos of the Eichmann process and I saw no love in that man, no awareness, no nothing. And to me lack of love is already evil enough. Someone who mindlessly, coldly carries out orders is evil in my opinion, yes; that is, they are to be fought and not remembered once overcome. I DON'T CARE ABOUT THEIR MOTIVATIONS. I only care for how cancer grows in so far as it helps to excise it more efficiently better.

You can call it by other names, and you do; mentally ill for example. Yet, there is no rational objective reason to declare anything wrong, evil or whatever; not even the extinction of all life in the universe, or torture for all. There is no "objective evil" any human could declare, it boils down to opinions; so I make up my own mind. Deal with that, not with strawmen.

More to the point, nobody calls the leaders of the allies evil, despite they having done equally abominable actions, like killing 250.000 civillians (men, women, elderly, children, babies, kittens et al) with two nuclear bombs, or bombing hundreds of thousands of civillians in Dresden to shreds. But they are not called "evil", because they were on "our" side

No, because that was in response to a huge campaign to conquer Europe (let's ignore the death camps and whatnot for a moment). I am German, and I would laugh into the face of any German crying about Dresden. All things considered, Germany was treated a thousand times better than it deserved during and after the war. You haven't been to a whole lot of historical museums dealing with the topic, have you? Or seen movies, that kind of thing? Anyone who murdered and ultimately defeated Nazis was on my side, no quotes needed. I know the allies were and are full of crap as well, and did and do plenty of evil (my subjective idea of it, get it?) things, but in the case of the Nazis, no response could have been too brutal. I would not say this about other dictators, but "as a German" that's how I feel about the Nazis, who weren't just horrible to Germans and German Jews, but to all of Europe. But that doesn't mean I buy into any dichotomy making the Allies holy or something. Just that I'm glad they were stopped somehow, seeing how shamefully Germany handled herself.

it's not like they enjoyed killing people (as is probably the understanding of naive people calling them 'evil')

No, that's just a strawman. Fact is, they didn't mind. In my books that's enough.

Part of the massacres were result of the inevitable power plays in huge countries with hundreds of millions population under a revolution

Let's grant that; what about the other parts? The personality cults? How convenient to tell me what I think and then refute it.. and I feel kinda bad because all of this is off-topic to begin, but I couldn't let this slide.

Someone once said the following, what do you think of it?

Quote -

History is always written by the victors.

Considering the absolute defeat of Germany during WW2 (and complete victor control of it afterwards), I would argue that the last place you'll find an accurate, unbiased, and neutral depiction of what really caused and transpired during WW2 would be in Germany - due to the total absorption of the Allied P.O.V. thrust into the country, into movies, into the news, and into the collective mind-set of the world.

No, I'm not denying the Holocaust or embracing Neo-Nazism, or whatever it is that people first think when they read the above. Bad and terrible things did happen.

But what I am doing is questioning History itself when it's so polluted with agendas, revisionism, redactions, and downright lies.

Hitler's War - First WW2 Documentary Ever From German Perspective http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBIoJc4k1uE

- End Quote

But that doesn't change and doesn't undo what the Nazis did, and how they went about it. And I really just mean reading THEIR material, watching THEIR footage, listening to THEIR speeches. Goebbels screaming for total war, and denouncing pacifists as the worst enemy right after the Jews... I also possess a 4th grade history book that was printed in 1942 I think, and it's so whiny and revisionistic.. basically the whole world is evil and brutish and the Germans try to make it all better and struggle for peace blah di blah, in such a plump fashion that it's hard to believe a lot of Germans really fell for all that. And yes, it's for kids, but still. The grown-up propaganda wasn't exactly more sophisticated.

These were a bunch of crippled and/or ugly people, the leader being an Austrian, talking about The German Master Race. Nuff said? And the conceit to think once they got going, the Brits might join in, being white and whatnot. That dude flying over the channel behind Hitler's back, I forgot his name, probably being disappointed by his welcome. Silly Nazi with bad English and a dumb grin. I really, really wish they wouldn't have killed so many people, or I would find them kinda funny.

And then there's Neonazis. No revisionism needed, they're generally dumb as doorknobs. I could prove that to myself whenever I should forget by interacting with them.

Ironically, that youtube video is blocked in Germany. So I can't speak to that. I doubt that title though. Germany did a lot of reflection and introspection, what does "from a German perspective" even mean? German filmmakers, German research, German witnesses -- there are lots of documentaries that consist of that, so what is "from a German perspective"? I'm not sure if I want to fire up a proxy to watch something that could turn out to be some kind of revisionistic BS.

The video details the world events at that time that question if Germany was really the aggressor the Allies made it out to be, or if it was instead provoked into a war step-by-step.

People don't have to stand for anybody "making up his own mind", the same way that people don't have to respect your opinion if you believe in creationism for example. Even if you are in the majority, there is one correct way to look at the thing, and there are no two ways about it.

Especially since the words and notions we opt to use has consequences to what we perceive and how we treat other people. It's important to choose the correct ones, or the less wrong ones.

The notion of harm (and the common-sense ethical notion of good) are well understood. The notion of evil, OTOH, is theological bullshit, and only helps to obscure the matters at hand (by making it difficult to get to the actual reasoning and motivations of the person, for example).

>No, because that was in response to a huge campaign to conquer Europe

And Hitler's rise to power and actions was a response to the "treaty of Versailles", which was considered unfair, humiliating and suffocating the Germans. See how it works both ways?

And who said that killing civillians with nuclear bombs is an acceptable "response to a huge campaign to conquer Europe"?

>I am German, and I would laugh into the face of any German crying about Dresden.

You might, but millions of other people, German or not German, would not. Civillians are civillians and people killed by bombs are still people, whether German or not. And I'm talking as a citizen of a country that suffered much under German rule in WWII.

>You haven't been to a whole lot of historical museums dealing with the topic, have you? Or seen movies, that kind of thing?

Well, you guys have bombed my city, destroyed some of it's more important monuments, --and killed my grandmother's brother. I don't have to visit "a lot of historical museums". Which I have, plus read tons of books on the matter.

>No, that's just a strawman. Fact is, they didn't mind. In my books that's enough.

Well, fact is Truman didn't mind dropping two big bombs on civillians either. Or France didn't mind slaughtering 50.000 Algerians protesting to get their freedom back. Just two examples...

Where did I claim otherwise? Nowhere! I actually said "seeing how it's subjective". Yet you just won't stop with your strawmen. Consider yourself ignored, this is useless, especially your "oh yeah? X was bad too!" stuff, which I never denied either.

Wait what? All your reply is based on the notion that it's ok to have this subjective use of "evil".

I say the opposite: it's not OK, and we are better to use more objective ways to describe reality.

Objectively, the heat death of the universe trumps any and all considerations, ever.

Also you are now claiming the exact opposite of what you said earlier:

Evil is a BS theological notion. ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982366 )

But now you want to tell me what is objectively wrong? I dare you go ahead and try, haha..

For one, I fail to see where I claim the "exact opposite". Throughout the discourse I maintain that "evil is a theological notion" and one that doesn't describe reality (the two go hand in hand).

I also fail to see the "dare" in wanting me to say what is "objectively wrong".

That the Earth is flat is "objectively wrong" for example.

That Cleopatra was in fact a guy from Bronx is "objectively wrong".

And that theological terms such as "evil" explain what people are in objective reality is "objectively wrong".

You cannot tell me what I mean by the word "evil". You can tell me how you interpret it, and I can tell you, and did so a lot of times, that you got it wrong. But then the ball just kinda flops around in your half of the court, repeating the same initial false claim about what I said.

That the Earth is flat is "objectively wrong" for example.

Wow? I was obviously talking about moral judgement, not factual correctness. I asked for an apple, you gave me an orange.

And that theological terms such as "evil" explain what people are in objective reality is "objectively wrong".

You must be some kind of masochist, because you STILL keep going on about that strawman. I told you, over and over again, I have my own compass for what I consider "good" or "evil", and anyone who isn't trying to be dense would know what that means. I never used to explain behaviour, but to describe.

And you must be dense because I'm not interested in what YOU do with "evil", but in what people do in general. I don't even know you, so it should be _obvious_ that I did not start this thread with _your_ usage of "evil" in mind.

The origin of the term evil is theological. But the word and concept of "evil" still is useful in a secular world.

My definition of evil: "A person is evil if they repeatedly cause large amounts of unnecessary suffering to innocent people, as a result of a correctable character deficiency." If someone repeatedly causes net increases in suffering due to greed, pride, vanity, callousness, self-serving ignorance, desire for power, lust, sadism, then I think that person can be accurately characterized as evil.

Hitler was evil because he caused a tremendous amount of suffering that would not have happened otherwise, due to his greed and lust for power. Large numbers of the German population at the time were also evil because they supported Hitler out of greed or self-serving ignorance.

Harry Truman was not evil. He dropped the A-Bomb on Japan because he honestly believed that it would bring the war to a conclusion in the fastest way possible. Even if he may have been incorrect in this analysis, from my knowledge of Truman's thought process, the mistake would have been an honest, tragic mistake, not a mistake due to a severe deficiency in character. Also, Japanese civilians were not innocents, World War II was a total war in which all rules of war had been violated and all parts of Japanese society were active contributors to the machinery of war. If Truman's generals had presented alternative military options for ending the war that would not have cost vast numbers American lives, and Truman had ignored these options due to callousness to the lives of the Japanese, then I would agree that Truman was evil. But I do not think this was the case.

Stalin and Mao were evil because they created vast amounts of suffering due to a combination of pride, will to power, and willful ignorance. They had a desire to rewrite the nature of society whole-cloth and did not make the effort to discover how their experiments were actually turning out in practice.

The captain of a slave ship enslaving Africans in the 17th century was certainly evil. He was creating enormous net suffering due to his own greed. A Rhodesian settler who wiped out the natives and stole their land would also classify as evil.

Was the Governor-General of the Belgian Congo in 1955 evil? And by proxy, were the Belgian politicians the people who elected them evil? I do not think so. He did not enslave the native or wage violent war against innocents. The colonial situation was inherited from his ancestors, and from what I have read, he did his best to make the situation quite a bit better.

Andrew Jackson was evil. He stole land from the Cherokee out of greed and will to dominate, and sent them on the trail of tears.

Was George Washington evil for being a slaveholder? That's an interesting question. I would argue no. His plantation was inherited, he did not net increase the suffering from slavery via his own character flaws. Instead, his virtues helped set in motion events which would ultimately rid I might concede that he was evil relative to the average American of modern times, but that he should still be celebrated for being so much less evil than the average person of his time period.

Was the average American colonial settler evil for stealing land from the Indians? That's also tricky. The vast majority of the deaths to the Indians were due to old world disease, and cannot be reasonable blamed on settlers. At the time, the new world was incredibly underpopulated, and meanwhile the old world was quite overpopulated with most people living in poverty and deprivation. So I don't think that the settlers were evil for settling the new world. I think the situation is more tragic that the two populations could not find a way to share the land. (And contrary to the politically correct histories, this failure to share was not just the fault of the white settlers, the violence was a two-way street with fault going both ways).

As far as I know, the settlers at least tried to use what is in fact a biological weapon on Indians on numerous occasions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_biological_warfare#N...

History is written by the victors.

This is a plain-and-simple fact, and the only fact you'll find in History.

Everything gets re-written to fit the winner's point-of-view.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_history#History_a...

To me it seems like your argue that the label "evil" has been applied inconsistently, which is a different matter (though a valid point, I believe).

Evil doesn't mean anything. It's just a label which amounts to "enjoys to doing bad things", which is a non-explanation. If anything, it's just a quick condemnation, without wanting to _understand_ or hear more on the issue.

As such, it acts as stop sign: it stops examination of what actually went on (which, besides hurting our understanding of history, it also hurts our chances of fixing it in the future).

E.g: "Hitler did so and so because he was evil". Err, no. For one, he didn't do it alone, second, lots of leaders all around the world did equally bad things (e.g Japan and Manchuria), third, the motivations and reasons behind Germany's actions are long, historical and sociological (you could find precursors to Nazi ideology 50 and 100 years before they appeared).

Second, "evil" has theological origin and connotations (whereas good and bad, harmful and beneficial and such are well known in any kind of society, including civic ones).

I think the "evil" tag is popular in the US, because of the countries long theological tradition and huge influence of religion on culture. Nobody is content to call even Hitler or a serial killer "evil" in Europe and leave it at that.

We always want to go deeper into the root of the issues.

I've seen it far too many times used as an explanation thought. Like, somehow, WWII can be explained away because "Hitler was evil", or complex events involving millions of people, like the USSR History can be explained by the "evil of Stalin".

(Lots of times "paranoid" is used in the same vein, despite having an actual medical meaning).

>To focus on something smaller and simpler, I would say that most serial killers, as in separate premeditated incidents over an extended period, are "evil".

What I take offense with is the way this puts all the blame in the persons itself (which might be abused in childhood, mentally ill, etc), and acts as a pseudo-explanation which justifies medieval punishments like the death penalty (after all, if one is "evil", what can you do? Just kill that "evil" guy).

I'm OK with using it as a label, as you say, but most people don't stop there -- they believe in the label's actual exegetical power.

And even if they don't, there's someone like you around to claim they do, which is the whole cause of this thread ballooning into such crap with lots of noise and no signal. Good luck with all that I guess.

Emm, who told you I'm a leftist in the first place?

The fact that I "defended" Hitler against the same accusation of ebing "Evil", shouldn't have rang a few alarm bells that I'm actually NOT a leftist?

Or is it because I wrote that Mao and Stalin wasn't "evil"?

That just makes me a realist -- or if you want it somebody that refuses to use religious terminology for historical affairs.

My guess is, your understanding of Mao and Stalin (or Hitler, for that matter and non-US history in general) cames from pulp books, popular documentaries, some internet articles and a couple of movies. Maybe the high school history class. Am I close?

Please, share your sources with us, because you'll find that you can substantiate what I wrote by reading almost all scholarly sources and definitive academic biographies of said historical figures.

That just makes me a realist

If you respond to my claim that they are evil in my subjective opinion, which I clearly labeled as such, that they're not "objectively, absolutely evil", that doesn't make you a realist, that makes someone who is talking to himself and his strawmen. You say you wished people would drop a notion you introduced into all of this to begin with. Stop being a clown.

The thing is, we're describing historical figures. Our "subjective opinions" are not really helpful guides. Or, to be more accurate, they don't matter at all.

You keep repeating it's your "subjective opinion" as if that somehow makes it OK. A subjective opinion can be wrong. It's not like one can get away with saying "In my subjective opinion gravity doesn't exist".

Or, to be more accurate, it's one thing to say that you find what Hitler DID was evil or that he was an evil-doer (as a substitute for "bad") and leave it at that.

And it's totally another thing to say "Hitler was evil", as if that is some kind of explanation of his actions.

The first is mighty fine. The second is not. And I'm concerned with the latter mistake here which is a BS non explanation, analogous to "cargo cult programming", and it doesn't matter if one means it as his subjective opinion or as an objective observation.

In both cases, it hinders further and real understanding.

To get to why Hitler was like that and why he did what he did you go for the underlying causes. For the person it's his history, his ideological influences, experiences, mental issues, abuses, etc. For the German society in general the causes are historical, sociological, economical, cultural, etc.

Nowhere in those cases does "evil" come into play at all.

But the concept of "evil" is still very useful. The point of defining evil is so that you can teach people not to be evil. Humans may not have a "conscience" that comes from God, but our brains have evolved for a sense of conscience that can be cultivated via the social pressure of parents, family, friends, teachers, and leaders. The point of calling a person evil is to tell people, "Do not be like this person! This person was evil! If you are acting like this person act, you are a bad human being, and you should feel very bad about yourself and stop immediately."

In the case of the rise of Hitler, yes, there were events that led to his rise. But the rise of Hitler was not inevitable. Had Hitler been raised with a stronger, better moral compass, had the people who enabled his rise possessed a better moral compass, the war and the Holocaust would not have happened. After the war, the American occupiers rebuilt the education system to teach people that what Hitler did is evil, in order to install a moral compass that would prevent a repeat of the Holocaust from happening again. The Holocaust was not a tragic accident, it was not a necessary proportional response needed to prevent some other acts of suffering, the Holocaust was an act of evil. It should be labeled as such so that people's consciences will work to prevent it from happening again.

>But the rise of Hitler was not inevitable. Had Hitler been raised with a stronger, better moral compass, had the people who enabled his rise possessed a better moral compass, the war and the Holocaust would not have happened.

Things could have happened differently, but the war was more or less unavoidable due to the Versaille treaty. Hilter was just one man -- millions of Germans wanted "war" and were enraged with the treaty even before Hitler became known.

>After the war, the American occupiers rebuilt the education system to teach people that what Hitler did is evil, in order to install a moral compass that would prevent a repeat of the Holocaust from happening again.

What? This is extremely condescending to the German people. They knew very well what they did, and the rebuilding of the educational system has nothing to do with their "moral compass". You really believe that they needed ...Americans to instill a "moral system" onto them?!!! As if Americans are ...morally superior people?!!!

Had the Versailles treaty actually been enforced, had the winning powers actually declared war on Germany early in the 1930's when Germany violated the treaty, and before Germany had significantly rearmed, Hitler would have been quickly defeated.

Hilter was just one man -- millions of Germans wanted "war" and were enraged with the treaty even before Hitler became known.

Yes, but Hitler was a genius at using that hate and at giving the Germans a renewed sense of their latent power. The desire to rearm and invade eastern europe to steel their land was the great brainchild of Hitler, no other German leaders at the time had anything close Hitler's level of megalomania.

What? This is extremely condescending to the German people.

To be clear, it was not just Americans who rebuilt the education system. It was the Americans in conjunction with the leaders of the German resistance (who were now promoted into power) and the general population who were disillusioned with war. The prestige of victory is such that the Americans did need to use all that repressive methods to wipe out Nazi ideology.

You really believe that they needed ...Americans to instill a "moral system" onto them?!!!

Well, the Germans sure did not do it themselves in the 1930's before the American occupation! Germans had an ethical system then, but it was the ethics of Jenger's Storm of Steel - "Time only strengthens my conviction that it was a good and strenuous life, and that the war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart..". The American victory taught Germans that the way of evil conquest was not an acceptable path, that it led only to ruin. The Nuremberg trials, the new German constitution, de-Nazification, a rebuilt education systen, etc, all ensured that German morals would be much more pacifist in the future.

As if Americans are ...morally superior people?!!!

The Americans of 1940 were morally superior to the Germans of 1940. Is there really any argument about this? Now, whether the Americans of 1835 were more moral than the Germans of 1940 is a different question. (It is striking how similar the concept of Lebensraum is to the concept of Manifest Destiny)

It means you make up stuff about my position and respond to that, instead of responding to my actual position. And now you just Dunning-Kruger on and on about generalities in a shallow way, as if I didn't know all of that and more of what you post. WTF.

it's totally another thing to say "Hitler was evil"

No, it's a shorthand for saying "I disapprove of his actions". It's stupid enough to outright claim what I mean by that, but now that I told you OVER AND OVER, to simply ignore it and bang on about your strawman instead is just pathetic. Cut your losses dude.

It's the worst possible way to say that you "disapprove of his actions".

Mao is evil to roughly the same extent Hitler is evil.

A combination of number and method. Death camps, for example, count very heavily, as do things like deliberate starvation.

The intent to exterminate should also be factored in, but that's frequently difficult to determine after the fact.

Of course, none of this matters to people who simply want to make a moral equivalence between every leader of every country through history; my rule of thumb is, when you're feeling morally conflicted about who 'should have' won the Normandy invasion in 1944, your morality is a bit off-kilter.

So putting pressure on international bodies to enforce crippling sanctions should count, right?

>my rule of thumb is, when you're feeling morally conflicted about who 'should have' won the Normandy invasion in 1944, your morality is a bit off-kilter.

My rule of thumb is: when you assume that all "our" killing is for "good" and "their's" is for "evil" your morality (as well as your knowledge of history) is off-kilter.

You really want that moral equivalence, don't you? OK, OK, Bill Clinton is Literally Stalin. Next, we equate Gandhi and Pol Pot. Happy?

Strawman.

>"as do things like deliberate starvation."

How do you think economic sanctions have affected populations in Cuba, Iran and Iraq over the years? Why do you think the rest of the world sees the US as a bully?

People like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot are easy. But when people trot around on their moral high horse like "our" own countries haven't done despicable (read: "evil") things is where the real problem lies.

In case you hadn't heard, we got rid of Hitler. But that took people on the outside to recognize what was happening on the inside.

If you value being flexible or adaptable, then you will certainly expand your goals and change things along the way. But the one thing that should never change is the vigor with which you pursue your goals (you should take breaks, rest, etc., but breaks and rest are arguably also just ways to optimize the pursuit of a goal).

And I agree with you, Mao was quite evil, and it would require a very twisted set of goals to lead to the death toll of his regime.