Most Evil Person In the Past 100 Years?

[Darren B]

Quite simply who is the most evil person in the past 100 years?

My opinion, There is only one option, Heinrich Himmler (highest ranked member of the SS), He was responsible for the most outrageous and evil crime in modern history (the holocaust). Many people are unaware of Himmler and the role he played, Infact Hitler is attributed to crimes that Himmler was responsible for. It is still debated to this day if Hitler was even aware of the attrocities that Himmler carried out?

Let the discussions begin.......

 

[Venom2053]

Totally Agree with the Himmler statement. He was the one who looked after the camps, Hitler never really set foot in them.

Though Joesph Stalin was nowhere nearly as bad as Vladmir Lenin, who killed way more people in his revolution and new government than Stalin did when he took over after him. Lenin should he on the list as well, but no one tops Himmler.

Pol Pot was also pretty messed in the head he thought he could recreate the country and bring everyone to the same level of knowledge, so he killed doctors, rich and middle class, and scholars just to try and bring the population down too his troops level.

Again my vote goes to Himmler.

 

[LiveForTheLaunch]

It's hard to put serial killers on the same level as people who killed on a mass scale such as Hitler, but there's a big thing about the level of personal interaction you get with your victim that one really has to consider, too. For those that were responsible for millions of deaths, to them the victims were just numbers. To people who sought their victims out on the street and targeted them personally, it's a lot more sadistic and twisted in a way. In one of my classes this semester, we focused a lot on discussing the level of interaction a person gets with another human being in comparison with their willingness to kill them. It turns out that a lot of people in the time of the Nazi regime denied killing a person even after they had already killed dozens of others simply because they struck up a conversation, had a child, or anything that really kind of made them a person instead of a number.

So yeah, you can't really put people like Gacy and Hitler together, then try to compare them side by side. It doesn't work because the nature of the killings are totally different, with some of them on the list being indirect murderers, never having to personally pull the trigger on their victims, and others being directly involved in ending the life of a specific individual that they sought out in advance.

I can't really choose. Hitler IS the epitome of evil in my opinion, and is always the first person that will come to mind when someone mentions the word evil. There's no question that he was, but if you go deeper into each person's mind and don't consider only numbers, I feel like Gacy and Bundy are up there among those who were responsible for killing millions simply for the premeditation factor, etc.

 

[Ben]

Though Joesph Stalin was nowhere nearly as bad as Vladmir Lenin, who killed way more people in his revolution and new government than Stalin did when he took over after him. Lenin should he on the list as well, but no one tops Himmler. .

Uh Stalin was a lot worse and every scholar on Russian history agrees...

Himmler was the worst but the theory that Hitler was unaware doesn't hold much weight.

 

[nadroJ]

Having never actually studied it at school at any point, I don't know much about the Russians, so can't really comment there.

I think I'll agree with the Himmler thing. Again, I don't know a TON about it, but from what it appears it is him who was responsible for the concentration camps and in my opinion that is the worst kind of evil.

I know through body count it doesn't even compare, but I think people like Charles Manson and Fred and Rose West are contenders too. Crimes against children/families sicken me and I think the 'personal' level of evil involved with serial killers is arguably more hard hitting than the mass 'impersonal' killings done by dictators.

 

[marc]

For me it's Hitler, I don't really need to say anymore being Jewish and losing members of family.

Yes he did not actually kill people himself but he gave the orders.

 

[STC]

Stalin, due to the number he killed.

But based on how screwed up their ideology was, not many beat ol' Pol Pot.

 

[LiveForTheLaunch]

Uh Stalin was a lot worse and every scholar on Russian history agrees...

Yah, this. Lenin died and Stalin took over what he was doing, resulting in the deaths of between 6-8 million people. Again, he wasn't personally responsible for pulling any sort of theoretical trigger, but his repression caused a LOT of deaths.

 

[Venom2053]

^Hmm well I was just stating what my History Prof. told us in a lecture but after doing some research Stalin's death toll is higher, but Lenin was the one who formed the select police (The Cheka) and began the killing. Stalin just took over.

I found it interesting though that Stalin was generally liked better than Lenin by the Russian population. Tons of people came to his massive public Funeral and he was sometimes called "Uncle Joe". Cities, roads and even a peace prize were named after him :S And it was strange how he met with many world leaders at the Yalta Conference on peaceful terms, he wasn't exactly portrayed as an evil person until you count the millions of people he killed in his rise to power and through his Collectivization.

 

[tomahawk]

I'll say all the top brass of the Nazi leadership can really be help accountable, Himmler and Hitler being the top, but none of it could have happened without a lot of support all the way down. I agree with Stalin, but I would like to learn more about him before I say anything concrete, especially since my school doesn't offer any Russian history courses, which is a shame.

 

[kimahri]

Controversially, Dispite a lot of deaths happening during the holocaust it did allow some people to be suitably insane to allow for equally insane medical experimentation. The kind of which that benefits greatly... I remeber an argument here that war pushed a lot of technology forward. Hell, WW2 birthed the concept of the internet, in a way... So maybe the nazi's weren't all that evil dispite it being a passive, accidental thing?

Stalin then?

 

[LiveForTheLaunch]

I found it interesting though that Stalin was generally liked better than Lenin by the Russian population. Tons of people came to his massive public Funeral and he was sometimes called "Uncle Joe".

At the time, a lot of people liked the rulers who are generally now considered evil. Hitler was well liked among the entire population because he was able to follow through with his promises, and was ruling at a time when unemployment was finally declining, and Stalin was well liked, too. I think Mussolini was one of the only dictators (between Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, and himself, because those are the only four I know a lot about) that was not very well liked because he made a lot of empty promises to his people.

 

[Pokemaniac]

Anders Behring Breivik has to come pretty damn high on that list. None of the above killed many people personally, face-to-face. Ordering somebody you can't see, which you in your delusions of grandeur whim off as just statistics, to be killed, isn't in my eyes as bad as targeting out fleeing unarmed civilians, tricking them into trusting you, and then gunning them down.

For that same reason, Josef Mengele might rank even higher, seeing as he kept doing his misdeeds for years. Either way, it's an "other" from me.

 

[LiveForTheLaunch]

^ Yah, that was my main point in my first post. You have to consider how personal the killings are, because being able to kill a person who becomes a number and killing a person you have some sort of interaction or connection with is a lot different.

 

[Venom2053]

As for Stalin...I don't buy for a second that he "simply carried on" what his predecessors started. To do that is to undermine every single purge he did due to his own paranoia, for example. He knew what he was doing, and he knew he was doing it to solidify his power.

Yea but most Stalin's victims were the farmers not his political enemies from the purge. The majority of the people killed camp from the collectivization of all the food and belongs. People starved in labor camps as he built his power the purge only had a death toll 681,692 according the NKVD, while over 2 million were killed because of the Famine.

 

[LiveForTheLaunch]

Anti-semitism had existed well before Hitler came around - he was more the poster child that rallied everyone to it than he was its creator. He, along with many in his government (Goebbels, most notably) slowly manufactured and built the mentality in to the evil it eventually became, taking one step at a time.

However, despite the anti-semitism, general sentiment was that while Jews were disliked, no one thought they should be exterminated. In fact, there was excellent support for deportation.

Yah, anti-semitism has roots way back in Christianity and the Crusades, etc so he definitely wasn't the creator. He just pushed it a lot further than I think it had ever really been pushed before. The general "solution" to the Jew "problem" at first was to deport to Madagascar, so Hitler's first motive was not really to kill. That doesn't make him less evil, because in the end he DID end up killing millions, but I don't think his mindset was that twisted in the beginning where he thought WOO let's kill all the Jewish people.

I don't think Stalin just carried on, I think that was worded wrong. He had similar ideologies to Lenin, but he definitely holds responsibility for all the deaths that occurred under his rule.

 

[Pokemaniac]

Should Mao be counted as well, then? Lot's of people died under his rule, but I don't think that came down to evil. It was all a massive case of "the emperor's new clothes", if you ask me.

First, great land reform. Everybody rallied to produce as much grain as possible to drive Mother China forward. Production numbers were exaggerated to the point past hilarious and into "tragic territory". Everybody wanted to prove that they were the best, producing about a ton of grain per ten square metres. And because everybody said that they could produce that much, the minimum quota was set so high that the farmers had to hand in their entire crop production, leaving nothing to eat. The official numbers said that a lot of grain had been collected. "That's cool", thought the people in charge. Lots of people starved to death.

Then, great steel reform. Now that there was plenty to eat and the grain silos were full (yeah, right), the people could focus on other things. Every little village set up small furnaces to produce home-grown steel. Ore was handed out, steel plates were given in return. On paper, steel production soared. In practise, the steel was of terrible quality (somebody forgot to mention that uneducated farmers with home-built clay furnaces don't have the best qualifications to make solid-strength steel), people melted down pots, pans and more importantly tools to meet the quota, and China was stripped of forests to fuel the furnaces. And there were fewer workers working on feeding people than ever. They had no tools to work with either. But steel production was tremendously high, on paper. "That's cool", thought the people in charge. Lots of people starved to death.

Some point down the line, I can't remember exactly when, it was determined that birds eating crops was the single reason behind low crop productions. The solution: Kill ALL the birds! It worked. Birds were killed. But the problem was, the birds didn't feed on China's growing crops. They fed on China's growing locust population. Locust swarms ensued, and even more crops were destroyed than ever. But the birds were gone. "That's cool", thought the people in charge. Lots of people starved to death.

Gah, history lesson. All this to say that Mao wasn't that evil, it was mostly delusions backed up by numbers on paper that led to the great famines other bad stuff. I don't know the Soviet history that well, but it seems like similiar things could have happened under Stalin. And it sure happened under the Kims of North Korea.

Better get back to rehearsing calculus now. Weird how inspirational exams can be.

 

[furie]

To join in with the mass "it depends how personal it is" thing, how many people did Hitler, Stalin, et al actually kill personally?

To give orders as part of a political/war campaign is very different to actually actively killing people. If you believe that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few", then you can justify what you're doing. I'm sure Hitler was sincere in his conviction that his work was for the benefit of not just the German people, but of Europe as a whole. Tens/hundreds of millions of Europeans benefiting from his new world order all for the sake of a a few dozen million Jews and other lower life forms (not that I think that, but that was Hitler's mentality).

It's not really too different to the Roman occupations, or the kind of thing that the crusades were designed to accomplish. Yet look at the benefits the Romans brought to all their territories and nobody thinks of Richard the Lionheart as a xenophobic, ethnic cleanser.

The only difference is your opinion when you look on it after the event and that really depends on what kind of effect it had. If Hitler had won and we lived now in a prosperous, stable Europe then people would think of Hitler as a great leader and ground breaking social reformist. History is written by the winners.

Obviously, I don't condone what happened (or agree with it in the slightest), I'm just making the point that "evil" when you're working on such a large scale is massively subjective. To take pleasure from the torture and death of others, that's really evil; to make others suffer for personal gratification. Did Hitler ever do that? I honestly don't know, but there's a world of difference between psychopathy in business and psychopathy for pleasure.

 

[kimahri]

I should have mentioned I don't follow the consept of good and evil. Too many RPGs...

So, uh yeah...

 

[LiveForTheLaunch]

^ I'm doing history in school, love . I actually read Hitler's Willing Executioners and got an amazing grade on a paper I did for it somehow, even though my teacher slated the book to pieces. It was an amazing book but I think Goldhagen's logic was "German's have been evil throughout history, but all of a sudden after WWII they weren't evil anymore." The way HE was saying all Germans are evil for being stereotypical and racist was a bit racist in itself, but as a whole the book is great. Ordinary Men is a really good one, too. Both of those books caused us to focus on the difference between personal killings and impersonal killings.

I've taken already a crapload of German history courses so I do know the main thing. I know the thing that set off the idea of gassing was "life unworthy of life" then it just kind of escalated from there. We did a lot about propaganda and Goebbels, and I have to say, it's VERY hard to blame the Germans back then for following Hitler to an extent because some of the propaganda that was pro-NS was very well done.

I know there was at some point an idea to ship them to Madagascar, but we never really talked about it too much. My prof just kind of mentioned it in passing so I wasn't sure if that was the initial solution or just something they thought of along the way.