Dreiko said:
And any ideology can be twisted into killing people. You had the gas chambers and you had the gulags and all those people sent to Siberia and so on. The thing in common those ideologies all have is their authoritarian nature. The more you approach it the likelier you are to become corrupted by the power you're messing with and commit atrocities.
This comparison doesn't work.
The gulags (as we call them in English) were concentration camps. They were, essentially, prisons. They were unusually harsh prisons with a very high rate of inmate mortality, but they were still prisons. Their motivation was not "ideological" except in the sense that some prisoners held in the gulags had been detained for political reasons. There was never any organised political intent to kill the imprisoned population. They were (with some possible exceptions, and we'll get to that) not victims of deliberate genocide, they were not victims of "ideology", they were victims of a prison system which sought to extract maximum benefit from them at the lowest possible cost, even if it meant people died.
The vast majority of "liberal" societies have used concentration camps. Some still do. Many US prisons, for example, are essentially concentration camps. They are designed to house a large, controlled population in a small space at low cost. Many also use forced labour. The actual concept of a concentration camp was invented by European colonial administrators as a means of controlling potentially rebellious populations in the colonies. All concentration camps have casualties. People die in prison. People die in detention centres. This is not ideology, it's pragmatism.
The Nazis had concentration camps. All kinds of prisoners, political and otherwise, went to concentration camps for all kinds of reasons. The concentration camps did not have gas chambers. People died in them (a lot of people, in fact) but those people dying was not the objective. The gas chambers were housed in extermination camps. These camps were not designed to house or contain people, but to kill them within hours of arriving and in as fast and efficient a way as possible. That was the only purpose of those camps.
There was genocide in the Soviet Union. Specific minorities were targeted for persecution and pogroms (although unlike the Nazi genocides, the goal was never to wholly eliminate those groups). For example, it's quite likely that Soviet agricultural policy specifically targeted Ukrainians for deliberate starvation as a means of consolidating power within the Russian Soviet, but note that even here I had to add that, because even there the goal was not the ideological elimination of "subhuman" Ukrainians but the maintenance of political control.
This idea that "authoritarianism" is the problem is only true in the sense that state killing is
always authoritarian, whether it's in a democratic society or not. A prison is always an authoritarian institution, it's a place where people are detained against their will by the state. Border controls are authoritarian. Militarized police are authoritarian. Corporate hierarchies are authoritarian. Authoritarianism can exist quite comfortably within "liberal" societies. The problem with Nazism wasn't that it was authoritarianism and that the Nazi leaders got corrupted by power and thus were compelled to kill all Jews, it's that their entire ideology was based on a chauvinistic sense of superiority and a desire to exterminate others. It still is. That is something quite profoundly different to a simple abuse of power, or instrumental pursuit of "order" or "efficiency".
If you want to indulge in some kind of horseshoe theory, an appropriate horseshoe would be to compare the deliberate starvation of Indians under the Raj as a result of cruel and negligent agricultural policy with the deliberate starvation of Ukranians under Stalin as a result of cruel and negligent agricultural policy. Or to compare the use deliberate use and promotion of torture in both US and USSR-backed puppet regimes as a means of maintaining ideological control. These are horrific, horrific crimes against humanity, but they were ultimately the product of instrumental political goals. For the Nazis, killing millions of people was the goal. It was not the means, it was the end, and that is fundamentally different.
