A Demented Boy Scout

Allister Cooke is the world’s most prolific weblogger (He is also in his mid 90’s). He has been giving a weekly radio diary broadcast for the last 50 years. A recent piece ponders why Hitler’s crimes are more famous than Stalin’s even though the Kremlin recently calculated that he had put 27 million people to death. Cooke writes:

In the end, put it this way: is there a listener who has not seen a hundred sickening times the clanking skeletons of Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz?

But have you ever seen a single picture of a company of colonels dead on the ground, of a whole horizon of burning villages and their smoking corpses, of the execution of a favourite general, a son-in-law, of any of the Kremlin’s listed 27 millions?

In the result we see Hitler with his mad, sincere vision of a perfect Nordic race.

By comparison with Stalin – the paranoiac of the century – Hitler was a demented boy scout.

Biographical Note: : Binkley (aka Brian Oxley) was my college roommate, and one night we had a heated argument about whether Hitler or Stalin was responsible for more deaths. I insisted that Hitler had killed more people, but Binkley insisted that Stalin’s camps and executions had resulted in 20 million people. That number seemed absurdly high, so I called my high school world politics teacher, Tom Kulick, who knows everything . We called him up at about 11:30 PM, and I was surprised to learn that Mr. Kulick had indeed sided with Brian’s estimate, saying that although the exact number will never be known, 20 million is closer to the truth. And alas, now the number is 27 million people–4.5 million of which were forcibly starved in Ukraine. I am shocked! Shocked!