Lounge Thread Poll Question: Who was the most "evil" political figure of the 20th century?
My personal rankings, after some deliberation:
1. Joseph Stalin
2. Pol Pot
3. Adolf Hitler
4. Saddam Hussein
5. Benito Mussolini
6. Mao Zedong
7. Kim Jong-Il
8. Francisco Franco
9. Idi Amin
10. Augusto Pinochet
@Limbo Pete @InternetHero @TheGreatA
That's a pretty solid list, maybe I wouldn't rate Saddam as highly though. As big of a piece of shit as he was, his sons probably topped him in that regard, in the level of personal evil they were willing to commit. Mussolini, to me, was a bit of a puppy, certainly far from the man he portrayed himself to be, someone who got "stuck" in bad company with Hitler (Mussolini himself had entertained hopes of aligning his regime with other Western powers). Then again, his fascist ideology did spawn a dozen pretenders each of whom caused a large amount of chaos and violence.
Something that is said to be about almost all of these guys, is that they were often
not truly the most evil men in their regime, just the greatest enablers of evil, because of their power. Even Hitler. His level of personal malevolence pales compared to someone like a Himmler or a Mengele, who were more "hands on" with the process, while Hitler hid in his bunker, entertaining romantic fantasies of a brutal war. Impersonally though, he was, of course, capable of projecting an immense amount of hatred against his deemed "enemies", which was then put to practise by the brutes who had rallied around his banner.
The thing that puts Stalin at the top of my list is that he was undoubtedly the man who was pushing the regime towards brutality, who himself signed off the "death warrants", and rarely lost an opportunity to encourage others to adopt cruel methods in place of humane ones. He had many "Himmlers" of his own, and he executed several of them, once they were no longer of use, made scapegoats for the brutality that was ultimately done in Stalin's name. Pol Pot is said to have been of a similar ilk, although we know less about him. But we certainly know how deadly he was relative to the system he was in control of. He wiped out about as many people as he was capable of.
Pol Pot may well have been the worst of them, as far as just how much he was able to do relative to how much he had available, as even Stalin did avoid "unnecessary" levels of genocide. The complexity of his character shows in how he was able to completely switch his stance towards Germans post-WW2, denouncing WW2-era "hard-liners" (which he had gathered around him during war-time) and attempting to portray a more "humane", softer side to his regime, so that he could persuade Germans to adopt Communism, instead of seeking Western aid. A common response, from almost any human being, even a border-line saint, would have been to "avenge" the millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians that were lost, by adopting a hard-line stance against Germans, but Stalin was only interested in greater levels of power and control, and he saw Germans as malleable as anything else, no different from anyone else that fell under the spell of his propaganda.
