About a week ago, Graeme McMillan was doing his reviews, and he brought up that the plot of Midnighter #1 involved the title character being told to kill Hitler. Graeme remarked that this was kind of taking the easy route, since Hitler is so evil, he's an easy target.
And that got me thinking - why don't we see more superheroes having to try and kill Stalin? Sure, there was that one awesome story, but really, I can't think of any off the top of my head. He's truly an underused dictator, given that the current estimates on people killed by his regime - between executions, the Gulag, deportations, POWs and German civilians, possible use of famines to dispatch kulaks - seem to all reach over 10 million.
Certainly, that would seem to make Stalin a reasonable object of superhero attacks, at least as much as Hitler. So what's the deal? Is it because we never directly went to war with the Soviet Union? Because the Siberian tundra hides its secrets better (based on Wikipedia, there's a lot of argument about the exact number of Stalin's victims)? Because Americans are stupid and don't know who Joseph Stalin is?
I'm not really advocating using real-life historical figures in superhero comics, since (if Civil War has taught us anything), they don't seem all that capable of handling the ethical and moral aspects with much tact or depth. At least, not as part of a massive event. If it's something that's more standalone (like Watchmen), where it isn't meant to have ramifications on a larger fictional universe, there's a better chance of that depth. But if you just want to go crazy with it, why not mix things up with old Joe?
I don't know, this is just something me and my old roomie used to kick around, why Stalin's atrocities never seemed to get as much pub as Hitler.
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8 comments:
Yeah, and even less than Stalin, Pol Pot gets no play. I was giving a presentation in Eastern Europe a number of years ago, discussing evil, ethics, and hope, and at one point ticked off a list of the usual suspects of the 20th century: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot...
My translator basically said, "Hitler, Stalin, and some other guy..."
I came home and was remarking on the humour of the translator not knowing about Pol Pot and my friends, to a man, had no idea who I was talking about. It was rad.
the dane: Huh, that is pretty wild. I actually considered throwing Pol Pot into the discussion as well, but I thought people might not know who I was talking about.
hale: Could be.
I think my best guess is that Stalin and Pol Pot most committed atrocities on their own soil. There wasn't, as far as I could see, a mass exodus from Russia or Cambodia like the Jews and Gypsies fleeing Europe.
Another thing is, I think, that Hitler, for lack of a better term, had more style that Pol Pot or Stalin. The cruelty of the Holocaust and the camps is mind-boggling. The camps were specifically designed to kill people. They came up with new and interesting ways of killing people. The other two had a more mundane way of committing genocide.
There was also that little detail, that Russia was actually our one of our Allies during World War II. Sure he was a monster, but at the time, he was OUR monster.
Sorry, that came out a little mixed up. It should be "one of our" allies. My brain works faster than my fingers...or something.
dan: I think those are both good points. Since neither one of them seemed to be moving outwards and taking people to be killed, we didn't notice as much. And unfortunately, the Nazis did set the bar pretty high when it came to death.
sallyp: That's true, but given that Communism became our new enemy almost as soon as WW2 was over, you'd think that might take some of that away. Maybe because Stalin died in '51, before the Cuban Missile Crisis and all that?
Huh, I think Dan's reasons are pretty good too. It's probably why we hear so little about the genocides that take place in places like Sudan (which didn't begin to get much press until twenty years after it began).
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