[boxed]

I mean.. we do all the time no? Hitler tried to make Germany great and made it shit. Mao tried to make China great and killed tens of millions. Stalin, Pol Pot.. the list goes on.

If we attribute accidental evil, why should we not attribute accidental good?

[rexpop]

Accidental evil? No.

Fascism is fundamentally driven by a realized nihilism where pure destruction is the actual goal, rather than an accident. From the very beginning, the Nazi party explicitly promised the German people wedding bells and death, including their own deaths and the death of the Germans. The population reportedly cheered for this not because they misunderstood the message, but because they actively desired to wager their own destruction against the death of others.

According to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler operated in a world "in which even success makes no sense,"[0] meaning the movement prioritized an "intense line of pure destruction and abolition"[1] over any constructive political goals.

This intentional drive toward self-destruction culminated at the end of World War II. In his 1945 Telegram 71, Hitler declared, "if the war is lost, may the nation perish". Instead of trying to protect his country in defeat, Hitler actively joined forces with his enemies to complete the destruction of his own people by ordering the obliteration of Germany's remaining civil reserves, water, and fuel. The devastation of Germany was therefore not an accidental failure to achieve greatness, but the logical, intended conclusion of the "suicidal state" fulfilling its death drive.

0. Joachim Fest, Hitler and The Face of the Third Reich

1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

[boxed]

That sounds very tin foil hat to me. Yea, people who are angry don't act super rationally, and when losing Hitler acted like a toddler having a tantrum. That doesn't mean the failure and suicide was the point.

[rexpop]

Yes, the entire fascist project is one big tantrum.

[stavros]

If Hitler was trying to find a gold mine under Germany and instead found a bomb there that killed a bunch of people, we wouldn't blame him for murder, it was an honest mistake.

Murdering millions of people wasn't exactly "accidental evil", it was very deliberate. Which parts of what these guys did do you think were accidental?

[vidarh]

Mao's campaign to kill sparrows was a result of a belief that they were a net loss for harvests.

Stalin's support of Lysenko was a result of thinking Lysenko was actually able to drive agricultural growth.

Both mistakes led to mass deaths.

We still tend to attribute those deaths to those leaders, because their brutally authoritarian rule was what allowed those mistakes to go unchallenged and get fixed before they caused that level of harm.

Both of them also killed a lot of people maliciously and intentionally, but a large proportion of their death toll as a side-effect of their oppression, not the goal of it.

[stavros]

> We still tend to attribute those deaths to those leaders, because their brutally authoritarian rule was what allowed those mistakes to go unchallenged and get fixed before they caused that level of harm.

What is the analogue here for attributing the rise of alternative energy sources to Trump? Being too incompetent to avoid harm isn't the same as being too incompetent to avoid benefit, because your job is to create benefit.

It's Trump's job to create positive outcomes. If he creates positive outcomes by accident while trying to create negative ones, he should get panned for trying to create negative outcomes.

[decimalenough]

Trump's stated goal of regime change in Iran would (likely) have been a positive outcome if it has actually happened. The problem is that it hasn't.

[stavros]

This is off topic for what we're discussing (whether his accidental positive changes can be attributed to him), and agrees with my general point.

[decimalenough]

No, it doesn't, because you're asserting he is "trying to create negative ones".

[deaux]

> Trump's stated goal of regime change in Iran would (likely) have been a positive outcome if it has actually happened

The number of Americans still believing this is baffling and saya everything about their history education.

"The previous 20 times we forced regime change ended up a net negative for the people in those countries, but surely this time it would've been different!".

[JumpCrisscross]

> previous 20 times we forced regime change ended up a net negative

Plenty of counter-examples, too. WWII. South Korea. Potentially Venezuela, mostly because we constrained our objectives.

I also don’t think it’s fair to constrain OP’s statement to “the people in those countries.” Regional impacts matter, too. An Iran that isn’t funding terrorist proxies everywhere could still be a net positive even if the average Iranian is no better off afterwards. (To be clear, I’m in no way supporting this stupid war.)

[xorcist]

> It's Trump's job to create positive outcomes

For whom?

[boxed]

> Murdering millions of people wasn't exactly "accidental evil", it was very deliberate. Which parts of what these guys did do you think were accidental?

His belief that the jews were the problem was the issue. But Germany has still not recovered scientifically or technologically. He was just as wrong about jews as Mao was about sparrows, or Stalin about wheat.

I don't see the distinction you're trying to make. Millions died in all three cases.

[stavros]

I'm not trying to make a distinction. I'm saying that they didn't kill millions of people accidentally.

[boxed]

Mao certainly did. So you're wrong there.