Imperializt Russia wrote:All the other regimes you listed killed people for being "enemies of the state" and political opponents. Disgusting, unquestionably so, but impossibly far removed from the systematic, industrialised slaughter of the Nazis who used racist pseudoscience to artificially categorise people into what amounted to "human" and "non-human" races and have them killed because they believed in the inferiority of these races.
I think your broader point is partially valid, but you're simply wrong here. One of the regimes listed in the OP is the Khmer Rouge, who most certainly
did engage in the systematic slaughter of people based on race and other factors besides political opposition to the regime. They actually killed people for
wearing glasses, because glasses were seen as "bourgeois." They also attempted to exterminate all non-Khmer ethnic groups within Cambodia. The notoriety attached to the symbolism of the Nazis is not just because they were particularly evil.
Vassenor wrote:So we're doing the "why are we vilifying the Nazis and not the communists" shtick again?
Brace yourselves. NSG Summer is coming.
If the OP were a right-winger out to engage in a petty political points-scoring competition, would they have mentioned Franco's Spain alongside the Khmer Rouge and the USSR under Stalin? I know that being offended by things is basically the
raison d'être of much of the modern left, but you're really stretching here.
I think there are a number of factors contributing to the ill reputation of the Hakenkreuz. The nature of the Holocaust is certainly relevant- it's the largest scale attempt to exterminate a given population in modern history, and was unusual for the systematic and industrialised fashion in which it was carried out, as Imperializt Russia noted. The genocide served no practical ends; the extermination of those the Nazis deemed "inferior" was an end in and of itself, and resources that could have been put to use on the front line were actually
redirected into carrying out the genocide. There's little doubt that the Nazi regime represents one of the most flagrant examples of humanity's capacity for evil in the history of the world, but it was not quite a unique event. In my opinion the particular reputation of the Nazis and their symbolism in the western world has as much to do with the way in that the Second World War has been mythologised by succeeding generations, as it does with the Nazis simply being outstandingly awful. For many nations in the western world today, the war is an integral part of their national myth, and it also forms the basis and supporting founding myth for the modern international order. The Nazis are as close to a thing as a secular representation of absolute evil as exists in modern culture.
Another difference between the way Nazi Germany and, say, the USSR or even Imperial Japan is viewed today is that the latter two states were around for a lot longer than Hitler's regime. The Nazis governed Germany for twelve years, and their most notable actions in those years were starting the single bloodiest conflict in world history and attempting to exterminate millions of people on the basis of their ancestry, religious beliefs, sexualities and disabilities being incompatible with the Nazi ideal. It's not suprising that Nazi symbolism should be associated closely with those actions. On the other hand, the USSR was around for almost a century and in that time was known for more than just Stalin's purges. Much of the Soviet symbolism is also associated with the broader communist and socialist movement, which predated the Russian Revolution and was more universal than German National Socialism. So the association between, say, the hammer and sickle and Soviet atrocities is not so strong as the association between the Hakenkreuz and the atrocities of the Nazis. Likewise with the Imperial Japanese war flag, the "Rising Sun Flag," which has a long history in Japan and is still used in a modified form by the Japanese military today. Attitudes may be somewhat different in those nations more directly affected by the aforementioned states, of course- e.g. Eastern European nations occupied by the Soviets during the Cold War and East Asian nations invaded by the Japanese in the Second World War and preceeding conflicts.