JP

The Gulag Archipelago

main currents of marxism

This guy is really fantastic, the best thing to come out of Alberta in forever, essentially. I went from having a vague idea about the controversy, to seeing a few of his videos and becoming a big ol' fan.

>I need more to better formulate my own ideas

You need to read and internalize more people's ideas to better formulate your own ideas?

>le The Gulag Archipelago

Lmao, this guy considers himself an intellectual but continually shills a book which has been proven to be sensationalist trash multiple times

And no, I'm not a fucking commie.

>which has been proven to be sensationalist trash multiple times

[citation needed]

Do you just pick a feeling and go with it? No research no reading just a dogmatic belief?

I want information, ideas and opinions from others as it helps to build a sound and structured opinion. How else do you look to learn things and move towards understanding? Are all your own ideas proprietary and pure of outside knowledge?
For fuck sake dude how did you think that was a reasonable response?

>generic mid tier moron
>goes on an anti-SJW rant
>HES OUR GUY BAE JESUS

/pol/ in a nutshell.

Look up the Russian records which were released in the 90s, 50 million people were not killed.

And before you start saying hur dur that's fabricated, what other evidence are you going to rely on?

...

His wife has publicly stated she helped him write it by making shit up.
Most of the book is citing a fact, sourcing it, and then continuing with unsourced rumors as if they are part of the cited fact.
Inflating numbers, always taking the highest in any estimate, and sometimes making it even higher than any other estimate.
Actually when you look up info about the gulags these days the highest numbers are always sourced to this book, and then are not sourced anywhere form the book; meaning this book is considered primary source now, thats how biased people are.

>hurrr commie marxist shill
I am not defending communism, I am defending the truth.
This book is propaganda, and regardless if it supports my personal views, as I dislike communism and the USSR myself, it is mostly lies.

You asked, specifically, for 'some reading on Marxism being problematic'. This isn't 'more information', this is more from the same vein you're already drawing from. If you were really looking to learn about a subject, like Marxism', you'd be seeking out all kinds of different opinions and sources of information, not just those that reconfirm your biases.

>Can anyone recommend some reading on Marxism being problematic.

The Road to Serfdom and The Communist Manifesto.

His "anti-SJW rant" is literally the least interesting thing about him. His thoughts on mythology, religion and science are way more interesting.

>Look up the Russian records which were released in the 90s, 50 million people were not killed.

Yeah, and the same argument is used by Holocaust-deniers, because there doesn't exist records that show 6 million Jews were killed either.

That doesn't mean it didn't happen.

His thoughts can be summarized by saying he believes in objective evil, and that every person who does something he'd consider bad is objectively evil, and doing evil on purpose, for evil's sake.
Those are shit thoughts and clearly the result of a third grade psychologist trying to do philosophy and ethics.

>Just because the evidence suggests Y, that doesn't mean that the truth isn't seven times Y!!!!

Link to his wife lying?

>Yeah, and the same argument is used by Holocaust-deniers, because there doesn't exist records that show 6 million Jews were killed either.
>That doesn't mean it didn't happen.

WRONG.

There are Nazi records. Specifically documents shown to Hitler outlining how many Jews were killed, including transport documents which were found to belong to Eichmann.

The Holocaust is based on a whole spectrum of facts

Its in her autobiography, that during the cold war the USA government insisted was actually a fake person and the KGB wrote her book.
Pretty funny stuff.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

The Russian government did try to levy her against Solzhenitsyn during the run-up to publication of The Gulag Archipelago.

What do you mean by this?
I don't think that evil is objective, nor do I try to mask new age psychology as ethics or philosophy.
He does, as evident by his lectures and videos. He, for example, says that Hitler achieved exactly what he wanted - to see Germany destroyed and many germans killed. He wanted it, because he is evil, and evil people want evil things. If you think this is stupid, it is because you aren't evil, and can't comprehend the evil mind.

You appear to just be giving me the "no u" canned response without making an argument.

Can you source that claim by quoting documents or other primary sources?

>What do you mean by this?

I mean, you're arguing that someone's thoughts is simplistic and third grade, by reducing their thought to third grade simplicity.

Hence, "talk about the pot calling the kettle black".

He's way more nuanced and well-thought out than simply "hurr durr is bad mkayyy", but I get that it's hard to actually listen to what people are saying.

Do you have a single fact to back that claim up?
Because I've watched several of his lectures, and they were always common sense combined with his idea of objective evil and people who disagree with him intentionally doing evil things because they are evil.

This isn't a primary source, but if you're clever you'll immediately perceive the avenue by which you might obtain a primary source:

>nytimes.com/2003/06/06/world/natalya-reshetovskaya-84-is-dead-solzhenitsyn-s-wife-questioned-gulag.html
>In 1974, when Mr. Solzhenitsyn was living in exile in the United States and preparing to publish ''The Gulag Archipelago,'' the Soviet authorities persuaded Miss Reshetovskaya to intervene with her former husband to try to get him to stop publication.

The author of that article is named Paul Lewis. He now works at the Guardian. You can contact him there. His information is available publicly.

Provide an actual quotation, and not your own interpolation

youtu.be/bjnvtRgpg6g?list=PL22J3VaeABQAGbKJNDrRa6GNL0iL4KoOj

Around 23:20 in his Lecture 01, and at least once in every lecture.

>Stalin intentionally killed his own people
>Stalin wanted nuclear war so more people could die
>Hitler never wanted to win, he wanted to punish the german people
>because they are EEEEVVVVIIIIILLLLL

And don't write back to me before you watch all of the lectures in this playlist, asking questions.
I've given you the material, study it. You'll soon be agreeing with me and distancing yourself from the lecturer.

Your source is "a guy said so" and you ask me to call the guy, so he can tell me so again.
Also I noticed that this is the only statement in the article that wasn't sourced to a previous publication.
Also the article itself supports her views that the book The Gulag Archipelago is rumors and "camp folklore".

That's not what he's saying is it?

I get that this is what you hear, but it isn't what he's saying.

>implying I am seeking to confirm a bias
Are you legitimately equating asking for further reading as a confirmation bias. The university I attend has plenty of material on Marxism as the answer, that is the bias of most western institutions (I can't speak for others cause I don't know). It is very difficult to find quality material on Marxism as problematic or at least I have found it to be.
Rather I find a lot of dogmatic and ignorant writing like yours that attempts to build a nice straw man to get their belief across.
I wouldn't be surprised if you were behind some of the first year papers I had to trudge though. Some empty millennial without that substitutes cynicism and self sanction in the place of understanding or at least a will to do so.

Watch the lectures instead of insulting me.
The guy is such a joke that his own words are the best argument against him.
Stop shilling anti-SJW youtuber #1450 and stop taking your views from morons on the internet.

The New York Times has fact checkers. It's not HuffPo, where you're just allowed and actually encouraged to publish things off-hand, blog-style, with no references. There's a whole chain of liability if something gets published that isn't true, particularly if it poses a potential libel suit. Being a news article, given limited space available in print, the citation isn't given in the text. But you can contact either Paul Lewis himself OR The Times, and they will gladly provide you with the source.

>Also I noticed that this is the only statement in the article that wasn't sourced to a previous publication.

I don't know what you're talking about, there are plenty of lines in the article that aren't 'sourced' to anything.

>Also the article itself supports her views that the book The Gulag Archipelago is rumors and "camp folklore".

No, it doesn't, it just states that that's what Reshetovskaya says of the work. Here:

>Pointing out that the book's subtitle is ''An Experiment in Literary Investigation,'' she said that her husband did not regard the work as ''historical research, or scientific research.'' She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ''camp folklore,'' containing ''raw material'' which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.

See? You can reprint something without endorsing the validity of that being reprinted.

"I don't get why we ever assumed that these guys were after victory", is not the same as your simplistic characterizations.

see Read the manifesto to see what Marxism and Communism were meant to be, ideally, and why they were designed like that.
Read the Road to Serfdom to see why this isn't achievable.

Here is my view:
1. Marxism sets to solve the outdated problems of a) needing a lot of money to make any money and b) the horrible and potentially fatal conditions of factory workers.
This is no longer the case. People can make money almost from scratch with small businesses like micro bakeries, pet food stores, web development, private car taxi services, and so on, and work conditions have greatly improved - people don't casually die at the job.
2. Marxism assumes that the natural state of people is cooperation and lack of private property. This assumption is based on the contemporary to it theory of per-civilization humans. We now know it to be false, so its build on false assumptions about the nature of man.
3. The good parts of Marxism are already implemented - women's liberation, retirement funds, working condition standards, gay rights, abortion legalization, minimum wage, and so on. Only the very radical ones - no private property, no money, no marriage, no trade, no army, no borders and so on, are not adopted.

Thus Marxism seeks to solve a problem that doesn't exist anymore, and does so after an assumption that anthropologists have proven is wrong.
It is a relic of its time, made sense back then, and doesn't today.

Still recommend reading the Road to Serfdom if you aren't convinced.

I'm not a Marxist, I just think you're a rube.

I won't make a 5 mile long list of quotes, I gave you the video source, go and watch it.
He is perfectly capable of making a fool of himself if you give him the time.
I mean, you might as well actually watch his shit if you will defend him.

Well, why did Hitler lead the Germans into a war he was perfectly aware they were incapable of winning?

I have watched almost everything he has on Youtube, and I while I don't agree with every single thing he says, you're still a blithering idiot who is just out to poison the well.

Because learn history before posting.

>i am aware of your argument, but i insult you, thus you are wrong!

>i am aware of your argument

Your whole argument is a strawman, and I don't care about arguing against strawmen.

>Because learn history before posting

Seems like the lessons of World War I should have been fresh in Hitler's mind, having lived through the hell of it himself.

My whole argument is repeating Jordan B Peterson's whole argument.
If you disagree with me, you are disagreeing with his main idea.
I don't know why you pose as if you are defending him, then disagree with his ideology of objective evil.

1. Hitler was told, as all germans were, that their army remained undefeated, they were close to winning, the bankers and politicians backstabbed them with the rushed peace.
2. He thought he could get away without war one last time, when war was started after demanding Danzig.
3. He thought he can win the war when it started, and it sure looked like that initially, after the surprising quick success in France.
4. Russia performed pathetically in her last few wars, and was selling ore and grain for german loans to be able to afford to exist, so it was reasonable to expect a quick victory there as well. Anything other than that is hindsight.
5. Japan's naval force appeared to be a match for the american one, and war was declared on the USA to prevent Japan from leaving the coalition to join with the allies, which was a definite possibility.
6. Learn history.

>back-stab theory /pol/tard

Yeah I'm out.

Now, see, you're doing precisely the same thing as Peterson is doing--that is, conjecturing about Hitler's knowledgeability and motivations based on some broad facts.

Except Peterson is conjecturing about Hitler's motivations from his *actions*, which is quite different.

Sweet, I've read Gulag Archipelago and The Communist Manifesto. I am keen to read the other suggestions especially Road to serfdom thanks a bunch

>i can't read
Hitler believed the theory, not I.
And you do well to fuck off, return when you learn english comprehension.

No, I am conjecturing about Hitler's knowledge and motivations based on his book that he wrote, his strategy that he purposed, his speeches, letters, documents, actions.
Peterson is conjecturing about Hitler's knowledge and motivations based on his personal views about objective evil. No facts suggest that Hitler was a fire worshiper who wanted to purge Germany by letting it get pillaged and set ablaze, as he straight up says.

>Peterson is conjecturing about Hitler's knowledge and motivations based on his personal views about objective evil.

Wrong.

Peterson would see a man falling down the stairs and assume that the man wanted to fall down the stairs all along. I mean, if he didn't, why would he?

An action is a fact. The way we discern motivations in others is precisely by interpreting their actions through our frames of reference for how humans behave.

dont make JP into a meme, a god or anything. He is a man and he is based and I want it to stay that way.

Hitler's ideals, plans and motivations aren't secret.
He didn't hide them. He wrote about them, gave speeches, planed city reconstruction, formed a strategy around them.

What Peterson is doing is exactly this Assuming that a person who failed must have wanted to fail all alone, because ?????

THIS

>Peterson would see a man falling down the stairs and assume that the man wanted to fall down the stairs all along.

No, he wouldn't because falling isn't necessarily caused by your own choice.

Causing a world war, and then committing suicide in a bunker when you're losing clearly isn't analogous to falling down a flight of stairs.

>No facts suggest that Hitler was a fire worshiper who wanted to purge Germany by letting it get pillaged and set ablaze, as he straight up says.

Well, this is Peterson letting some of his Jungian background show, but it's not explained is such a way that would make that clear to someone uninformed in Jungian psychology. And anyway, Hitler is certainly accountable for the utter destruction of Germany during the war.

Hitler failed to win the war. He didn't want to lose it.
This Peterson is wrong, and you are defending someone you don't even agree with, based on your points.

From reading the thread I think we all say that Peterson is wrong, but some of you are posing as if you are doing the opposite, and I can't understand that.

psychohistory.com/books/the-origins-of-war-in-child-abuse/chapter-4-war-as-a-sacrificial-ritual/

Well, it's kind of a throwaway point for Peterson. There's no actual way to discern Hitler's 'real' motivations. Yes, we have books and speeches from him, but they are mostly propaganda. Given how events unfolded, the claim that Hitler had no real interest in the success of Germany doesn't seem completely ludicrous, and anyway the notion that he actually had a kind of death-drive impulse that he was simply able to enact at a national level is, from a psychology perspective, compelling and interesting. It's a way of getting into some of the things that Peterson is ACTUALLY talking about, which don't have much to do with Hitler--or 'good' and 'evil', for that matter--but with personality and disorder.

You mostly just seem upset that your historical butt-boy is being 'misrepresented' and now you've got to CTR for everyone in the thread.

Well, Peterson prefaces his statements with "it's certainly possible", he doesn't say "It's a fact that X".

I don't get why speculation or conjecture hurts people's egos that much.

>Well, it's kind of a throwaway point for Peterson.
Objective evil is the backbone of his lectures that he returns to time and time again.

>Given how events unfolded, the claim that Hitler had no real interest in the success of Germany doesn't seem completely ludicrous, and anyway the notion that he actually had a kind of death-drive impulse that he was simply able to enact at a national level is, from a psychology perspective, compelling and interesting.
The same argument can be made for the man falling down the stairs.

>You mostly just seem upset that your historical butt-boy is being 'misrepresented' and now you've got to CTR for everyone in the thread.
He does the same for Stalin, for example, who is an ideological opponent of Hitler.
At any rate, insulting me based on the (wrong) assumption that I am a /pol/tard doesn't make you look any better.

He states its possible, and then continues to build on it whole semester long, when its about as possible as Russell's teapot.

>Objective evil is the backbone of his lectures that he returns to time and time again.

Where? I've watched the series, I have no idea what you're talking about. The foundational idea of his lectures is personality, and sub-personality routines.

And in any case, one of Peterson's top recommended books--of those that he says had the greatest influence on his work--is Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil.

>I've watched the series, I have no idea what you're talking about.
You must either be lying, or be stupid. Sorry, I don't see a third alternative here. Its not subtle.

And I recommended the Communist Manifesto in this thread, not being a communist myself.
Peterson mentions Nietzsche so he can argue against nihilism, as a proxy to argue against the objective evil.
He insists that being a nihilist instead of being good, and thus anti-evil, is evil in itself in one of his lectures.

>The same argument can be made for the man falling down the stairs.

And no, not really, because that man didn't convince an entire country and then also half of the world to fall down the stairs with him.

This only makes it less likely that Hitler was objectively evil, because it also demands that most the germans, and half the world, were also evil.

And what are 'good' and 'evil' here, for Peterson? They are nothing most 'objective' than what compels you to categorize matters in such a way. Committing to acts you understand to be 'bad' is 'evil', and likewise refusing to take a position against what you understand to be 'bad' or for what you understand to be 'good' is just bad faith, which is the basis for total license.

You reason with a retarded child's grasp of logical inference.

>Nietzschean-Jungian psychologist
>Objectively evil
Just stop. Peterson doesn't discuss things in those terms, evil is aesthetic to him.

>And what are 'good' and 'evil' here, for Peterson?
In the dozens lectures I watched, it is the popularly agreed on bad guys of the past century, plus war, genocide, dictatorships and marxism.
Maybe he goes in other directions when talking about other things, as this psychology course of his I saw was mostly politics for some reason.

My problem isn't with what he sees as evil, or undesirable. It is that he concludes people who do evil, must on purpose do evil.
I think, and most people will agree, that people try to do good, and are mislead, or mistaken, or otherwise wrong, and end up doing "evil", or achieve undesirable outcomes.
Thats not even to say that my good may be your evil, and vise versa.

>i insult u, thus ur wrong
Thank you, great logical guru.

Watch his lectures, they are posted here. He does it often, and not subtly, when talking about holocaust, war, labor camps, nukes, and lately even SJWs.

>My problem isn't with what he sees as evil, or undesirable. It is that he concludes people who do evil, must on purpose do evil.

Yeah, but he is being extremely specific when he talks about evil being an aesthetic, he's not just talking about it willy-nilly.

As he says in one of his interviews, you can make a rational accounting of why a society goes to war, but you'll fail to make a rational account when you try to explain a person like Jeffrey Dahmer or Japanese soldiers in Nanking who engage in competitive brutality, where some of the finer details include raping pregnant women with their bayonets.

Mental illness (even temporarily distorted view of the world brought by propaganda dehumanizing the enemy and the stress of war) and hedonism.
The guy in the bush is going to kill me. I'll kill him first, so I survive. Feels good, man, I didn't die, that guy who wanted to kill me is squirming in the mud. I'll show him, trying to kill me, let me kick his skull in, get me all pumped up for the next enemy.

There is rationality to it, its just not peace time posting online from the office with a cup of coffee next to me and music playing in the headphones rationality.
In war people are in a different perceived reality, where its okay, and encouraged to murder, and its okay, and expected to die trying to kill others.

I think you're arguing in bad faith. Dropping a bomb on a military installation is not the same as going out to gay nightclubs to find victims that you can rape, then murder, and then make altars of their bones in your apartment.

And neither is it the same as gassing millions of people to death, or have them carry wet sacks of salt until they die of exhaustion.

youtu.be/MLp7vWB0TeY?t=9m27s
>categories of human action
>it's more appropriate to consider it a form of demoniacally warped aesthetic

>Mental illness (even temporarily distorted view of the world brought by propaganda dehumanizing the enemy and the stress of war) and hedonism.
Yeah, this is precisely the insufficient kind of explaination that Peterson is trying to challenge. You're the one that say these people are sick and perverse when these kinds of patterns have repeated constantly through history and outside limit situations. Your thesis cannot account at all for systemic violence or genocide. You're the one that cannot fathom people not being materialistic rational beings. See You also didn't understand my point at all on Peterson's background. There can be no "objective facts" to a psychologist that is coming from Nietzsche's subjectivism and Jung's idea that the world as we experience it is determined by our psyche, let alone one that stresses that there can't be a reality at all without boundaries.

>going out to gay nightclubs to find victims that you can rape, then murder, and then make altars of their bones in your apartment
Nor is this something that you convince tens of millions of people to do with you, while parading and celebrating.
You are using the actions of broken, dysfunctional men to fight a proxy war against ideologies that are out of fashion at the moment.

>And neither is it the same as gassing millions of people to death, or have them carry wet sacks of salt until they die of exhaustion.
Again, individual acts of sadism, brought about the cruelty of war, the us vs them idea, and so on.
Most of the death camps were for practical purposes, to use slave labor.
You win one by arresting the undesirable people and confiscating their property and money in the bank, and many arrested were rich. Or you win if they bribe you to not arrest them.
Again you win because you feed the mob fuel to continue running, since you are doing things, and removing disliked people, and the rich or the odd are always disliked.
Then you win again since they work without being paid wages, under miserable conditions. These are all practical considerations. Slave labor and confiscating private properties are lucrative activities for the state, and punishing the odd is a good way to gather support from the disenfranchised masses.
Even the cruel and petty act if taking their hair to make socks for the troops, and their teeth fillings for metal, and their fat for soap and their bones for fertilizer, if we believe those to have taken place, are still practical and can be reasoned.
Terrible, of course. Unethical and, according to almost everyone, evil, but not unreasonable and not irrational. It was the very, very farthest edge of pragmatism. Extreme practicality, yet still practical.

Read the above, it argues against your views.
Regardless, the crazy dog can lead the sheep off the cliff, and its not the sheep that are unwise for following their shepherd.

Also you dwell too much on him quoting Nietzsche, he also quotes others who disagree with him.
That is actually a sign of a good psychologist and philosopher, and is a thing I like about him, that he quotes and considers conflicting views and systems.
I wish he'd also do this when talking about evil men doing evil things.

>Nor is this something that you convince tens of millions of people to do with you, while parading and celebrating.

Sure you could. Unit 731 did exactly that, but under the guise of "scientific venture".

>individual acts of sadism

The Holocaust was *not* "individual acts of sadism".

>Unit 731 did exactly that, but under the guise of "scientific venture".
They were attempting to advance science, which is rational and can be reasoned, regardless of their methods being horrible.

>The Holocaust was *not* "individual acts of sadism".
No, it was a strategy of confiscating property from private individuals, while arresting undesirables and using slave labor to prop up the war economy, which is rational and can be reasoned, regardless of being horrible.

Both these examples can be closer compared to killing and eating your friend instead of starving, and not going to a club to kill and eat people and build shines from their bones for fun.

>They were attempting to advance science, which is rational and can be reasoned, regardless of their methods being horrible.

And yet people who aren't "evil", wouldn't do such a thing, regardless of it "advancing science".

>No, it was a strategy of confiscating property from private individuals, while arresting undesirables and using slave labor to prop up the war economy, which is rational and can be reasoned, regardless of being horrible.

Again, your arguing in bad faith. Indiscriminate murder of civilians, including women and children, to the point where you want to cause them pointless suffering before you kill them, is *not* rational.

How is us vs. them mentality rational at all? Why is the state somehow immune to the prejudices of the people? Seriously, do you have any documents where Hitler or however expressed it in those terms and not "we must remove the vermin"? Because otherwise you're just a conspiracy theorist.

>attempting to advance science, which is rational and can be reasoned
No, it isn't. The "advancement of science" as an excuse for genocide isn't reasoned, it's either zealotry or an excuse.

>And yet people who aren't "evil", wouldn't do such a thing, regardless of it "advancing science".
Some people will go further when chasing a goal, and putting the line in an arbitrary position to argue that objective evil exists is not reasonable.
The goal is set, you can rationalize why they'd want to go there, and you may disagree on the path taken and sacrifices made, but can't disagree on the goal itself.

> Indiscriminate murder of civilians, including women and children, to the point where you want to cause them pointless suffering before you kill them, is *not* rational.
It wasn't indiscriminate, they were by definition discriminated, only the unwanted ones were selected. And the micro cases of sadism and wartime cruelty was not the reason for the macro strategy of using them for slave labor, which is productive and useful

>Seriously, do you have any documents where Hitler or however expressed it in those terms and not "we must remove the vermin"?
Bringing doctors, dentists and food to the camp is counter productive if they just wanted to kill them.
Ceasing to care for them when the economy was strained after the problems east suggest that caring for them was exactly for economic benefit, to use slave labor.

>No, it isn't. The "advancement of science" as an excuse for genocide isn't reasoned, it's either zealotry or an excuse.
You sound like a dark age man arguing against autopsy.
Also again you act as if Unit 731's views are my own. They aren't. However, just like Peterson said he can reason why someone would steal his car, so can he, despite choosing not to, reason why someone would experiment on prisoners to achieve scientific advances.
It is rational. You can see why its done. There is reasonable purpose to it.

>And the micro cases of sadism and wartime cruelty was not the reason for the macro strategy of using them for slave labor, which is productive and useful

It might be "productive and useful", but the point is that it isn't rational to discriminate swathes of people as "undesirable" so you can do whatever you want with them, to begin with you moron.

It is rational, its just not ethical or moral.
I think you are arguing from a position of objective good and evil, which defeats the point.

>It is rational, its just not ethical or moral.

It's neither.

>Bringing doctors, dentists and food to the camp is counter productive if they just wanted to kill them.
So what if it's counter-productive? Nothing about it is productive to begin with. Productivity doesn't factor in if it's irrationally motivated sadism. It *would* be counter-productive if they were attempting to make money off of them without regard to ethics as you propose.

>Ceasing to care for them when the economy was strained after the problems east suggest that caring for them was exactly for economic benefit, to use slave labor.
No, it only suggests they couldn't do it anymore. If you're torturing someone you're not going to give them your food when you don't have any money, the WHOLE POINT is to degrade and put them under you.

>You sound like a dark age man arguing against autopsy.
And you sound like an ideologue.

>Also again you act as if Unit 731's views are my own. They aren't.
That assumption is purely yours.

>It is rational. You can see why its done. There is reasonable purpose to it.
That you can understand how and why someone would do it doesn't make the action itself "rational". It has a rationale, yes. It doesn't mean it is calculated, which is what "rational" means here.

>It wasn't indiscriminate, they were by definition discriminated, only the unwanted ones were selected.
You're being obtuse. An indiscriminate action and discrimination aren't the same thing.

1. You are an absolute leader of a state.
2. There are people who disagree with you and will rebel.
3. Your supporters dislike these people.
4. These people have money and property.
5. Your economy is bad.

How is arresting the undesirables, confiscating their property, and sending them to work for free in agriculture, mines and other such production efforts, not rational?

>How is arresting the undesirables, confiscating their property, and sending them to work for free in agriculture, mines and other such production efforts

Because we both know that this isn't what happened. What happened was a genocide where 11 million people died.

And 11 million people don't die over the course of 5 years purely by happenstance.

>So what if it's counter-productive?
How is sending people you want to murder to the dentist not counter productive to your plan of murdering them? It makes no sense.
However, if you want to use them as slave labor, it makes sense to take at least the very minimum care of them, because they are a useful tool. No reason to kill your slaves, they benefit you.

>you are obtuse
>you are an ideologue
>you dont understand
All of your post is already addressed in my previous posts, this is going nowhere. I won't waste time reposting every five minutes.

>because we both know i'm right and you are wrong
No, we don't both know any such thing.
These people died because they were worked to death, for economic gain.
When the retreat from the east was sounded, the remainder were to be killed to hide the evidence of slave labor being used, so a better peace deal can be struck.
Murdering your wife's lover can be reasoned. It has a purpose and rationale. Murdering the neighbor who saw you to escape jail can also be reasoned. It also has a purpose and rationale.
This is comparable. Undesirables were used for economic gain, and later killed off so that nobody learns of the slave labor program.
The fact that they were not all killed off, and some germans retreated without mass murdering their prisoners, only shows you that this epidemic of sadism that you assume wasn't a reality.

>A man who was elected by being capable of riling people through nationalism after a horrible catastrophe, who was not an economist or career politician but a painter and wrote a book detailing his nationalist ideology, is going to follow a simple and clean checklist once he enters the office.