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" "Next Tuesday is the 120th anniversary of the birth of Josef Stalin. His career is the subject of a vast and ever expanding literature. Read it all and, at the end, you are still left paying your money and taking your choice. A socialist system embracing a third of the world and the defeat of Nazi Germany on the one hand. On the other, all accompanied by harsh measures imposed by a one-party regime. Nevertheless, if you believe that the worst crimes visited on humanity this century, from colonialism to Hiroshima and from concentration camps to mass poverty and unemployment have been caused by imperialism, then [Stalin’s birthday] might at least be a moment to ponder why the authors of those crimes and their hack propagandists abominate the name of Stalin beyond all others. It was, after all, Stalin’s best-known critic, Nikita Khrushchev, who remarked in 1956 that "against imperialists, we are all Stalinists".
Andrew Philip Drummond-Murray (born 3 July 1958), commonly known as Andrew Murray, is a British trade union and former Labour Party official. Murray was seconded from Unite the Union to Labour headquarters for the 2017 United Kingdom general election, subsequently becoming an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn from 2018 to 2020. Born into an aristocratic Scottish family, Murray began his career as a journalist and later became a senior trade union official. Murray was chair of the Stop the War Coalition from its formation in 2001 until June 2011 and again from September 2015 to 2016. After many years in the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and then the Communist Party of Britain, he joined Labour towards the end of 2016. Since Corbyn ceased to be Labour leader (in 2020), Murray has rejoined the CPB.
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Hitler is uniquely excoriated because his victims were almost all white Europeans, while those of Britain (and other classic colonialisms — French, Belgian, Dutch, Italian and Wilhelmine German) were Asian, African and Arabs.
That Hitler's regime is seen as the most bestial of modern times is not of course objectionable. What needs to be confronted is the view that the crimes of other great powers of the last 150 years or so, being less lurid than those of the Nazis, can therefore be subject to a more nuanced judgment, in which the deaths of millions of people on the one hand can be offset against the construction of railways on the other.
The British Empire was almost certainly responsible for more human deaths, albeit over a considerably longer period of time, than Hitler was.