I think reducing our moral discrimination between killers to a quantitative comparison of kill lists is a caricature of ethics. It is also kind of a pointless exercise since sparing lives is generally morally correct either way. But let’s set aside how silly this is for the sake of argument.
First, only using a quantitative comparison of kills to assess which killer was more morally vicious assumes that human lives are fungible. But, I will not focus on this assumption, as it seems reasonable in effect for cases of people being killed rather than merely being left to die. Effectively we can treat any human life adversely, intentionally affected in some way ζ in relation to the aggregate affected in that same adverse, intentional way ζ as fungible with any other human life in that aggregate, once the aggregate amount reaches a threshold, due to reduced marginal effects of those lives. And I think killings in the millions is certainly already at, if not past, that threshold. This all may sound cold, but you’re the one that decided to make this about morally comparing measures of kills. Anyway, its clear we can treat such lives as practically fungible as a result of the sheer amount of deaths by killing under consideration. So I’m fine with the assumption of fungible lives, or the commensurability of the different deaths by killing.
But the other assumption behind reducing our comparative moral assessment to a simple quantitative comparison of kills is that the way in which those human lives were killed or died fails to make a moral difference. I think questioning this assumption is crucial, particularly when we talk about deaths or killings that have resulted from a government or political administration.
The Nazi State in Germany created an institutional structure, a system, for “useful” managing of bodies whose moral worth they assessed based on bodily stigmata and eugenics. Not only that, but camp policies were crafted for specific kinds of humiliation and dehumanization meant to reinforce the sense of inferiority for those in the camps, or to reinforce the impression of ths inferiority of those at the camps for Germans working in them. There is also the cruelty of human experimentation. The German labor camps were thought of as a free source of bodies to supply production and research needs, and to eliminate what were seen as genetically pathological elements of society.
While Stalin had gulags, they selected camp prisoners based on petty crime (or alleged petty crime, as adjudication was probably neither fair nor well-done) and political affiliations. And while people died in those gulags or were killed, most of it was not part of an officially sanctioned program of death. There was no generalized eliminationist goal made explicit, let alone made part of camp policy. Killings were many times a matter of decree against particular individuals, especially if they were political prisoners. In fact, this is exactly how Stalinist purges (which are separate or independent of the camp system) occurred–through Stalin flexing his autocratic power in order to quell paranoia regarding plots against him or quell paranoia regarding plots meant to ideologically undermine the USSR. In addition, treatment of gulag prisoners was not rationalized based on a pathologized and objectified view of their bodies, even if they may indeed have been objectified and there was a quasi-medicalized psychological approach to political disagreement. This is because the USSR was primarily trying to indoctrinate prisoners, police political thought, and use the prison population as a source of slave labor. The slave labor part and, quite likely present, the power abuses of guards, is where the gulags overlap with the Nazi concentration camps, but the rest of the differences remain.
These differences are also what lead to differences in death rates for gulags v. camps: 11% of gulag prisoners died in or from the gulags, while 61% of Nazi camp prisoners died in or from the Nazi camps.1,2,3 Of course this ignores total absolute death counts within the USSR and Nazi Germany as a whole, consequent of each of those governments or regimes. I already mentioned Stalin’s purges. But, my point is that regardless of the numbers, the intent behind and form of the killings are also a basis by which they can be compared in order to assess which was worse (which, again, is still a silly discussion when we know sparing lives is the right thing to do in either case). And focusing on the camps or gulags shows also how intent or form of death can influence death rates, which gives us a better sense of which, camps run by Soviet Russia or camps run by Nazi Germany, was deadlier. Now, we could compare fascist camps to other States like the USSR, but it would get complex quickly, as we can see the devil is in the (qualitative) details, and those States still differ qualitatively among themselves. Even if we focused exclusively on the numbers, it also would have to be percentage-wise or per-capita, anyway. Not the absolute amount of deaths or killings. This is because the number of explicitly fascist governments, and Nazi ones in particular, have been less in number than explicitly communist ones, and States vary in their domestic population numbers.
This approach of measuring the number of deaths or kills in communist States in order to evaluate communism is also reliant on a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Communism, the idea, as such is simply not the USSR, regardless of how much it (among other things) influenced the USSR. For the actions of States that self-identify as communist to discredit communism, you would need to make a more specific claim than “States that self-identify as communist are worse than ones that don’t” that ties the worseness of those States that self-identify as communist, logically, to the idea of communism, or to particular practical difficulties that by rational necessity arise when implementing the idea of communism which make immorality such as killings or deaths from mismanagement/neglect inevitable.
- https://www.britannica.com/place/Gulag
- https://www.history.com/topics/russia/gulag
- Wagner, Jens-Christian (2009). “Work and extermination in the concentration camps”. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories. Routledge. pp. 127–148. ISBN 978-1-135-26322-5.
Ultimately I think it depends on how much one values free self-expression v. hiding distinctions in socioeconomic status background (henceforth SES background) to prevent stereotype threat. I think the latter has value for kids in facilitating a growing sense of self not connected to class background and with less stress from managing stereotypes. On the other hand, the latter also restricts everybody’s ability to express themselves.
Considering though that either way, students of lower SES background have less means of and opportunities for self-expression through commodities, it may instead be better to find a compromise. The lesser ability to self express from students with lower SES background shouldn’t be corrected for by restricting self-expression for others, but this lesser ability should be compensated for by the school. The school could specify a minimal set of dress code standards, and enforce a requirement that clothing for school for each student be bought with the fairly distributed funds that have been allocated to each student by that school.
Btw, I both have attended schools that have a dress code that is followed by provision of uniforms, and schools that have no or minimal dress code and do not use uniforms, so I am intimately aware of both advantages and disadvantages of either kind of school for students.