Stalin reversed his stance on the purges in 1938, criticizing the NKVD for carrying out mass executions and overseeing the execution of NKVD chiefs Yagoda and Yezhov. Scholars estimate the death toll of the Great Purge at 700,000 to 1.2 million
lol, leopards ate my face
This is what cracks me up about all the people calling for guillotines on Lemmy. You think they’ll stop with oil company ceos or whatever? No chance.
I mean, tbf, guillotines had a better record than firing squads, with only a few tens of thousands of innocent collateral
I imagine setting up a guillotine is harder than setting up some guns, so makes sense.
Guillotines were also public during the French Revolution, so you have to keep up the crowd’s appetite for guillotining people. The more innocents you send to the guillotine, the more they lose their taste for it.
It’s not exactly funny-haha, but it’s strange to think about the approval of a literal bloodthirsty mob as the limiting factor on violence.
A bloodthirsty mob is like a fire. It requires fuel or it can burn itself out but it also needs to be tended or it might blaze out of your control. And when you start messing with big enough ones, you run real risks of it killing you.
Tyrants ain’t like that. They can often abstract away most of their killing so they just gave orders while their subordinates are just following orders. And the thing is, a mob’s anger gets sated if it lets itself, but a tyrant’s only killing a little out of anger. Mostly its fear and greed. And once you become a tyrant those are two bottomless pits. Fear in particular because everyone you kill out of fear spawns a new people who want you dead.
This is democracy manifest!
"you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few million eggs’
