Hitler.

[jon1959]

No one comes anywhere near Hitler, its naive and very poor taste to even compare his ideology with anyone since .

Sorry to all those who display antisemitism with every word they type and crave for some comparison to the babarain , gassing / massacring 6 million jews , just because of what they were , not matter if they were germans ,children , edeley ,infirmed, disabled ..

27 million Russians died because of his appalling behaviour, 19 million were civilians .

Couldn't agree more. It's all best cringy when people make such comparisons, at worst ignorant.

He was the worst of the worst, although interestingly not the most murderous leader in history. He comes in third for that. Can anyone name the top two?

Putin is not a Hitler (although he is a murderous authoritarian Russian nationalist); Netanyahu is not a fascist (unlike some of his government, he is 'just' a murderous, authoritarian Jewish nationalist). Both are 'little shits' though to use Bill's expression.

But it is blind ignorance to claim that Hitler's ideology died with him and his party. There are plenty of modern Nazis and neo-Nazis (a description that LOM always chokes on for some reason). But they do not hold major governmental power, or have the ability to carry out atrocities on the scale of the Nazis. There are many admirers of Hitler in the world today and the ideology that shaped the Nazis. In my opinion the rise of right wing populism (it is different on the left) feeds that and has many echoes of 1920s/30s Europe.

But legitimate comparisons with the ideas and actions of people in the past help us to understand what is happening today. I think some features of the regimes in Russia, in Israel and in other countries mirror those in Nazi Germany - but there are also major differences.

Under the 'new anti semitism' (the one where any criticism of Israel or Zionism - including from Jewish people - is now labelled anti semitic) that cannot be said and you end up with newspeak and the pathetic slurs that people like LOM throw out. When one of the board's most consistent racists (and misogynists) calls others racist you know it is time to turn the irony meter to max.

On the 'most murderous leader' in history I expect Stalin is up there, maybe with Mao or Genghis Khan? But I expect Queen Victoria has been given a free pass?