Please stop using Cap Locks, IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU'RE SHOUTING

I am sorry to insist, but I must insist in saying that Hitler (and in fact most of 20th C totalitarianism) was a monster created by reason.

Nonsense. Hitler and Stalin alike believed in controlling the population through terror and police state tactics. You have nothing to justify your irrational belief. I have history on my side in this regard. Education was suppressed, propaganda was used as a mass-brainwashing tool, and people could be executed for questioning too much. 

I wrote about the relationship between Nazism and religion here: 

And if you have time, read Todangst' work on Hitler and Martin Luther

You can say the same for Stalin, who created an Orwellian death cult who worshipped him as though he was God, and he was. You could apply that to Kim-Jong Il, to Mao Zedong, to anyone else you wish.

Totalitarianism and despotism are always based on mass terror, suppression of education, and control of free thought. There is no rationality behind it whatsoever.

If you have any facts to support your proposition henceforth, as opposed to fantasies, I suggest you present them.

(and in fact most of 20th C totalitarianism)

Where did you study history? Fantasyland? The most barbaric dictatorship of the 20th Century probably belonged to WWII Japan. I wrote a long article about that. See what you think about the atrocities of Japan, and the religion that justified it:

By 1941, Japan’s dictatorship had morphed into a quasi-religious state that worshipped the Emperor Hirohito as the descendant of the Sun Goddess who had burst forth from Mount Fuji at the time of creation. They adopted Bushido, the strict moral code of the ancient samurai, and in doing so they created the most controlling dictatorship of all time. The Japanese were ruled by a corruption of Bushido spun from the twisted mind of Hideki Tojo, Japan’s ruling dictator.

The deranged military leadership had produced a power structure of top-down violence, a strange twist of Bushido, where elevated status was nonexistent. The ruling warlords had militarized Japan to a degree never before seen, with schoolchildren performing army drills, and teachers behaving like drill sergeants. The whole population was transformed into a military machine.

Their racist rhetoric spilled over into pure insanity. Brainwashing of Japanese society by the military machine was so thorough it outdid even the Nazis. The Japanese believed they were the Shinzo Minzuko, the divine race, and that it was their duty to cleanse the Earth of the Americans, the Chinese, and a host of other peoples. Fanatical commanders threw away countless lives in banzai charges, choosing to rely of seishin, spirit, because of their material inferiority, a classic example of the psychosis that held Japan’s military at the time. The Americans reacted to this with horrified fascination. On Saipan in 1944, US Marines discovered that Japanese soldiers had ritually disemboweled themselves, and of course, the American press devoted many inches to the terrible Kamikaze at Leyte Gulf. The Japanese held similar view of their enemy’s capability that the Americans held of theirs. Japanese cryptographers dismissed fears that the Americans had broken their naval codes on the grounds that they were not smart enough. Japanese destroyer skippers neglected antisubmarine precautions because they believed that the Americans did not have the stamina for the rigors of undersea warfare.

And of course...the Kamikaze

Throughout the appalling cruelty, death and destruction of the war, the kamikaze really stand out, they are in many ways the embodiment of the horrific physce driving Japan’s insane military conquest, that same mindset that drove them to justify setting unarmed men on fire and burying people alive. The word kamikaze means divine wind, a word with etymology from the 13^th century, when a miraculous typhoon drove back the Mongol invaders of Japan.

The kamikazes were suicide pilots, Japanese airmen who loaded their planes with as much ordnance as possible and smashed them into the decks of American ships. Seeing as the Japanese had run out of trained airman, once the world’s most elite air force, their cadre had been lost at Midway and Guadalcanal, the Japanese were losing airman faster then they could train them. The Kamikaze was the solution for these ill-trained pilots eager to throw away their lives. It was much simpler then conventional naval air attack. Some of the kamikazes were 15 years old. It is estimated that 3,000 kamikazes were sent to their death, and they wreaked tremendous havoc on the Americans, sinking 30 ships and killing 6500 sailors. They would be the divine wind, driving back the American hordes from the sacred Home Islands.

The Japanese beleif in their religious supremacy, that they were the divine race of their God, allowed them to justify the following:

Unit 731...

Colonel Shiro Ishii and the Japanese Army Biological Warfare unit let their revolting, Mengle-like talents loose upon the prisoners of war. These Japanese perfected strains of anthrax, botulism toxin, cholera, Black Death and malaria by testing it on prisoners. To gain deeper insights into the anatomy of functioning humans, Japanese Army surgeons performed live amputation, live vivisection and live dissection on prisoners of war. Weapons, flamethrowers and explosives would be tested on prisoners tied to stakes. To test the limits of human endurance, prisoners were subjected to forced starvation, gassing, rapid air pressure changes, lethal gamma ray dosage, intense G-forces and centrifugal spin, blood loss and shrapnel wounds. None of these men were ever seen, buried by history, cremated alive by their captors as they evacuated in 1945.

Invasion of China...

Fuelled by a master-race mentality, a military dictatorship that discarded the individual in place of a nation that would soon be called the Aryans of the East, the Japanese developed a foreign policy principle, called, without irony, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The Japanese proceeded with “Co-Prosperity” by raining terror upon the continent in 1937 with a full scale invasion of China, and a horrific military genocide that would result in 25,000,000 deaths.

And at Palawan Island in 1944...

Suddenly, a cadre of soldiers rushed into the camp carrying sloshing buckets. The smell was unmistakable. The Japanese, with a quick hand motion, doused the prisoners in High Octane Aviation Fuel and then tossed in incendiary grenades. The trench exploded in flames. The stench of burning flesh was overwhelming as hundreds of prisoners were engulfed in the conflagration. The screams and cries of men were smothered by the choking flames. The fire swept through the easily flammable filthy clothing and skin soaked in octane. In seconds, men were charred to the bone. Mercifully, a flash-fire plume shot through the trench, incinerating lungs like rice-paper. Machine gun fire ripped through the crowded ranks. Prisoners who tumbled out aflame were mown down without any mercy. The prison doctor, Dr. Hibbs, threw himself over the lip of the trench engulfed in fire and screamed “for the love of God! Show me some reason” but he too was sawn down.

James Stidham, who’d been rendered quadriplegic by a stray bullet several weeks before, watched his comrades rendered human torches, moaning in terror. A soldier stepped over him, tipped over his wheelchair, and fired two slugs into his face.

And on the Bataan Death March...

the Imperial Army replicated the Visigoth revenge on the Romans at Tuetonberg by nailing prisoner’s heads to trees. When their code was applied to a full army the results were appalling. Soldiers were told it was acceptable to cut the fetuses out of pregnant women’s bellies or set prisoners alight

any prisoner who fell behind was slain by bayonet or gunshot to the face and since so many could not walk on their gangrenous appendages; quite a few met this fate. The ground ran pink, red, then black with blood as crippled prisoner’s heads were mercilessly sawn off. Most were denied any provisions, forced to eat grass and dirt. In their lust for liquid, prisoners turned on comrades, murdered them and drank their fluids. 10,000 men perished by the time the POWs reached the death camp.

And on the Hell Ships from Lingayen Gulf...

With the rapid erosion of their empire, the Japanese were taking all the “healthy” prisoners from Cabanatuan and packing them “like sardines” into the holds of hell barges, and sending them to Japan to work as slaves, coal miners and stevedores in the docks of Nagasaki or the mines of Yokohama. Cabanatuan had become a major transshipment point for the Japanese. All that the Japanese had left at Cabanatuan were the dregs of the dregs, the cripples, crazies and malaria patients, the POWs whose throats had been painted by diphtheria or whose vision had been destroyed by malnutrition. These POWs were hated with even more vehemence than the Japanese usually reserved for prisoners, they couldn’t work and they consumed food needed for troops. The Imperial Army would have liked nothing better than to line them up and turn them into roadkill.

Of the original population of 75,000, half were now dead and most of the other half was on these ships. Those sent to the ships fared no better than those in the camp. Thousands upon thousands of prisoners were packed into the holds of rotting barges, to the point where there was no oxygen. In addition, the Japanese refused to provide water, leaving the prisoners to fight for the elixirs of life. The screams of men arose in fervent pitch as the oxygen supply dwindled, men went delirious as the blood supply to their brains thinned, turning on comrades and murdering them in their half-crazed state. Desperate for water, many tried to lick condensation off the sides of the hold, and when that failed, they drank each other’s blood. This is already enough to charge the Japanese Navy with serious war crimes, but it did not stop there. The Japanese had not painted “POW” on the ships, and these treacherous waters were controlled by Allied submarines and aircraft, at least 20,000 American prisoners met a watery grave by the actions of American submarines and aircraft, unaware that they were sending thousands of their countrymen to the bottom of the sea.

I also have my hands on the opening abstract from the Tokyo War Crimes Court 1945:

The Supreme Allied War Crimes Tribunal Tokyo has unequivocally found that the Imperial Japanese Army has been guilty of the following atrocities towards American, Dutch, British and Australian prisoners of war between December 1941 and August 1945, as well as against the citizenry of numerous nations across the region. These unspeakable acts were not isolated incidents, but rather en masse depravity with full backing and knowledge of Imperial General Headquarters and the Emperor. These are in direct violation of every article in the Geneva Convention and any regard for human life. Any Japanese soldier, sailor or airman convicted of any of the crimes below is to be considered a Class A War Criminal deemed to have committed a “Crime Against Humanity” and will be given fair trial and then justly punished. If convicted, the penalty is execution by firing squad.

The atrocities are as follows:

Count 1 Summary Execution of Prisoners without trial

Count 2 Using illegal tortures on prisoners as a means of extracting information, including water torture, electric shock treatment, and amputating extremities and fingernails.

Count 3 Feeding prisoners starvation rations (as defined as 600 calories per day or less)

Count 4 Using prisoners as illegal slave labor

Count 5 Setting prisoners on fire

Count 6 Raping civilians

Count 7 Refusing basic medical care for prisoners

Count 8 Coercing prisoners to murder each other in gladiator-style duels for scraps of food

Count 9 Cutting off the heads of quadriplegic/paraplegic prisoners as they were of no use to the war effort

Count 10 Using prisoners as surgical and medical experimentation guinea pigs

Count 11 Illegal transportation of prisoners without painting POW on the ship, deliberately making it a target. In addition, illegal transportation by packing the prisoners into the hold to the point where they were deprived of oxygen, and refusing them water for days.

Count 12 Live amputation

Count 13 Live vivisection

Count 14 Testing biological weapons on prisoners

Count 15 Practicing cannibalism on prisoners. At least one Japanese officer is known to have dined on the liver of an Australian pilot shot down over Kwalajein in 1942.

Count 16 Using prisoners as human shields in battle zones

Count 17 Using prisoners as target practice for rifle ranges

Count 18 Using prisoners as bayonet practice

Count 19 Testing experimental weaponry on prisoners

Count 20 “Human endurance tortures”, including using prisoners to test the gamma ray dosage, air pressure change, lack of food and water, toxins and psychotropic drugs that a human can endure.

Count 21 Burying prisoners alive

Count 22 Cremating Prisoners alive

Also, 20th Century totalitarianism is dead. Communism is gone. The worst atrocities now are being commited by Islamic nations ruled by Sharia, which I also wrote about...

It was oil that was the catalyst for the spread of militant Islam. Wahabbi militants had seized Mecca and Medina 200 years ago with the intent to restore Islam to its puritanical form. Starting in 1979, the Arab world was largely taken over by a Sunni Fundamentalist sect called Wahhabism, a very extreme form of Islam founded in Riyadh 250 years ago. In 1979, Iran was seized by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who stunned the world with the first theocracy of modern times. When massive oil fields were struck across the peninsula, the money and resources starting pouring in, and with it, Wahhabism spread across the Middle East to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen and Oman by the 1970s. The West never lifted a finger to stop it because they depended on the oil from these nations and when the Arab world decided to flex their muscles by embargoing the precious crude, we cringed.

Soon reports came filtering in about the brutal Shariah courts, where horrific torture masquerading as justice was occurring. In Iran and Saudi Arabia, there were public floggings, public decapitations, in Oman, people were having their right arm amputated for petty theft, in Jeddah a man was decapitated for owning a Bible. Iran has executed 4,000 people since 1979 for the crime of being a homosexual. In Saudi Arabia, it is not uncommon to receive 5,000 lashes for food theft. In 2000, a horrific incident occurred in the Saudi holy city of Mecca, where a girl’s school was on fire. The ultra-religious police of the city considered the girls to be improperly clothed, so they linked arms and wouldn’t let them out of the building. Most were burned alive.

The salient points to take away are hopefully crystalline, considering the terrible history of religion, no-one could make any excuses for it’s conduct, but it is very clear that the black pearl of religious intolerance has passed to Islam. It is the only religion still in existence where proselytizing, religious debate, atheism, Judaism, apostasy, blasphemy, homosexuality, premarital sex and adultery are still punishable under the criminal code. Far worse, all of the above-mentioned offences carry the death penalty.

Please, sir. Before making your argumentum ad ignoratium, study some history. It's a good subject.

now that's just rape in the first degree.

Well, deludedgod... this is.... Let's take it step by step.

"I have history on my side in this regard. Education was suppressed, propaganda was used as a mass-brainwashing tool, and people could be executed for questioning too much."

 I see... so, Hitler suppressed education and brainwashed germans before they voted him in 1933... interesting. You have history on your side, no doubt. It's also interesting to note how easy it seems to brainwash a highly educated people like the germans undoubtedly were back in the 1930's. Reality is a bit different, I'm afraid.

"You can say the same for Stalin, who created an Orwellian death cult".

Actually this is not exact. "1984" and "Animal Farm" were inspired by Stalin's regime, not the other way round. Where did you study literature?

 "If you have any facts to support your proposition henceforth, as opposed to fantasies, I suggest you present them."

Facts are there for you to see. The Great War, the II World War, Communism, Hiroshima, the Holocaust, Fascism, Nazism were all produced by western civilization, by highly sofisticated, advanced societies and after 150 years of optimistic belief in the idea of progress based on REASON... Is this a fantasy? I'd love to hear what you have to say about it. I think you are deluding yourself if you think you can blame religion or irrationality or superstitions for such a legacy.

All those things were produced by high civilization... by countries in which religion had already given way to rationality and lost much of its power and influence, where it was openly challenged and questioned. The reality is that 1914 marks the begining of a historic process that would prove the failure of western values.

"So how do you explain all the wars, horrors, massacres, autocratic regimes and acts of insanity prior to 'the age of reason?"

Don't need to, because my point is not trying to blame "reason" for all those horrors, but to prove the failure of reason to prevent them.

By the way, I think 1914 established new standards for horror, never imagined before in human history. The horrors of fascism, nazism, communism, the atomic bomb have no match in the gallery of human cruelty. They stand alone.

The standards of horror were only raised by the technological ability to inflict harm.  Bullets, bombs, and gas chambers made killing large quantities of people possible.   The Spanish Inquisition was certainly comparable to any of the above ism's on any measure of horror except body count. 

"The standards of horror were only raised by the technological ability to inflict harm."

You are right. But those technological advances were the result of a few decades of an "age of reason"-inspired Industrial Revolution. And the Atom Bomb was produced by good willing scientists.

Body count is important... one single atom bomb killed more people than the Spanish Inquisition in decades. What's more: the atom bomb killed "everything", in an undiscriminated way. At least, the Spanish Inquisition had a criterium.

****

Deludedgod,

sorry but I am not familiar with japanese fascism during II WW. Anyway I am familiar enough to know that kamikazes were mostly not voluntary.

About my fantasies and my pathetic babling, maybe you should bother to just try to explain the apparent paradox. The germans who followed Hitler were not like those in the Middle East who follow Osama Ben Laden. And Germany was not Afganistan.

About Kamikazes:

about 4.600 kamikazes died during II WW. The vast majority of them were under 20 years old... We can be quite sure that from 1945, those who died as kamikazes didn't volunteer at all and many of them were fooled and forced (under penalty of death) to do it. We have plenty of documents to prove it, but we can start by taking a look at the letters those poor guys left to their families (one of the best compilations was published in France, entitled "Those voices that come from sea&quot.

 But we also have survivors like Ayo Tabinashi, who told a british journalist his experience as a "frustrated" kamikaze. As he put it he never chose to sacrifice himself that way, he was forced to it.