[META] Could the moderators please expand on what is meant by "soapboxing and moralizing"?

by nednobbins

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/mxp007/why_are_the_atrocities_of_hitlers_germany_so_much/ was removed with this explanation and I'm trying to figure out how it qualified as such.

The rules give the example:

  • Good Question: "People say that Nixon is the worst President of all time. Why is this so?"
  • Bad Question: "Nixon was the worst President of all time. Why isn't Obama considered the worst?"

The question seems much closer to the former than the latter.

I don't remember the exact wording of the rest of the question but OP seemed to have been very explicit that they were not trying to excuse the Nazis. They even asked if the Nazis had potentially committed worse atrocities than they were already aware of.

It also seems pretty obvious that their basic premise was correct. Nazis are so broadly recognized as evil that they show up all over our comic books, video games and movies as stereotypical bad guys. I'm not aware of a single work of fiction that references Unit 731 (although there must be at least one out there). Goodwin's Law is tongue in cheek recognition of how Nazis are used as a synonym for evil but I'm not aware of any such concepts about the Imperial Japanese Army.

Georgy_K_Zhukov

The TLDR here is that if OP had replied to the removal notice, we would have helped them reword the question or otherwise pointed out the issue. A META thread is kind of overkill.

In any case, the critical factor is "To me, these deserve more publicity than they get by a long shot". The question of why some parts of history get more attention than others are basically fine (sometimes, depending, they can end up as poll-type questions and be removed for that, but it is a different issue). We aren't really here to debate whether it is right that some things get more attention than others, and again, if OP had replied, they would have been told how to go about reposting.