4 votes for McCarthy
1 vote for Dahmer
Emphasis added :). Just in case you wanted to add some names. If y’all were just trying to make a point via overemphasis, feel free ignore me.
Two for McCarthy, two for Pizarro, and one for Strossner.
Thanks! :smack:
**2 for McCarthy
2 for Dahmer
1 for Manson
**
Round 1: Seems to be a consensus.
Joseph McCarthy: Destroyed the careers of many by falsely accusing them of being Communists. Lied like a Persian rug. - 15
Rasputin: Helped bring down the Russian Empire by continually tellling a dimbulb he was the only legitimate authority in Russia - 6
Trofim Lysenko - Scientific crackpot used Stalin to strongarm opponents - 6
The above 3 are eliminated. Guess you all wouldn’t mind inviting them over for burgers and brats.
Other votes cast:
Pizarro - 3
Genghis Khan - 3
Charles Mansen - 2
Dahmer - 2
Attila - 1
Tojo - 1
Erich Ludendorrf - 1
Alfredo Stroessner - 1
This leaves:
Adolf Hitler - Started WWII which resulted in much death and misery. Also had a thing about Jews.
Adolf Eichmann – ‘Banality of evil’ remains evil
Alfredo Stroessner – Paraguayan dictator, enslaved a tribe (in 1959)
Amon Goeth - Concentration camp guard featured in Schindler’s List. Had to tone down his character in the movie
Arnaud-Amalric of Citeaux - Papal legate/inquisitor during the Albigensian crusade, egged on the massacre of Beziers.
Attila the Hun - Led rapacious, murderous hordes
Caligula – Psychotic Roman emperor
Carl Panzram - murderer and all-around brutal guy. Others have killed more, or more gruesomely, but Panzram was something else…
Cevdet Bey - Governor in Turkey of Van, carried out some massacres and attempted some more.
Charles Manson: Evil occultist led a group that killed at least eight people, maybe more. Most notorious serial killer in American history.
Hernan Cortes - Spanish, New World. What more is there to say.
Delphine LaLaurie - sadistic slave-owning socialite fond of torture and mutilation
Elizabeth Báthory - Vlad, not the only player in town
Empress Wu - the single cruellest ruler China ever had, no loyalty whatsoever, and coldly using everyone and everything
Erich Ludendorrf: German general who started the rumor of “Stabbed in the Back,” helping prepare the way for Nazism
Francisco Solano Lopez: Almost destroyed his “beloved” Paraguay
François Duvalier – Haitian dictator and “voodoo despot”
Genghis Khan – Possibly tops in numbers killed (40 million)
Gilles de Rais - Child murdering satanist
Heinrich Himmler: Ran Hitler’s death camps
H.H. Holmes – Sadist who built a Hotel of death traps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._H._Holmes
Ibn Taymiyyah - intellectual founder of radical Islam.
Idi Amin - killed 100,000-500,000 countrymen in 8 years
Ilse Koch, Bitch of Buchenwald - wife of commandant at concentration camps; took money from inmates; made lampshades etc. from their tattooed skin
Irma Grese, Bitch of Belsen - Sr Supervisor at Auschwitz; tortured women prisoners with attack dogs, whippings
Isabella of Castile - helped create and oversee the Spanish Inquisition
Ivan the Terrible - had thousands tortured and killed in The Massacre of Novgorod; beat his pregnant DIL, causing a miscarriage
Jean-Bedel Bokassa – Cannibalistic African dictator
Jeffrey Dahmer: Odious, cannibalistic serial killer
John Chrysostom - influential early exponent of Christian antisemitism
Josef Mengele - for the win, good luck topping him
Joseph Stalin - Killed millions of his own people and terrorized the rest
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - has that rare combination of long distance mass murderer and up close and personal, hands-on slaughterer.
Kim Il Sung (1912-1994) North Korean dictator
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria - Stalin’s butcher
Leopold the second of Belgium - cut out the heart of africa and left a 150 years of civil war and genocide
Luigi Cadorna – Worst Military Leader (dis)honoree who literally decimated his forces when they lost
Mao Zedong- capricious, heartless megalomaniac
Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) Led Reign of Terror following French Revolution
Mehmed Talat – Initiated the Armenian genocide
Nikolai Yezhov-Soviet NKVD head
Pizarro - Inca, were mean mofos and happily killed tens of thousands
Pol Pot - killed 21% of his people
Oskar Dirlewanger, who murdered tens of thousands of civilians commanding an SS unit and horrified his fellow SS officers
Rafael Trujillo – bloody Dominican strongman and personality cult center
Robert of Belleme - Anglo-Norman nobleman, notorious for his genuine enjoyment in torturing his opponents to death.
Robert Berdella-Carrot Fucker
Sargon of Akkade - The first imperial conqueror; established the state as an aggressor.
Shiro Ishii - WWII Japanese that was really into ‘experimentation’ on people.
Tamerlane - Truly pointless butcher; made ruins of cities and towers of skulls
Tani Hisao - commander of the division most involved in the Rape of Nanking.
Tojo: Helped bring Japan into World War 2.
Torquemada – greatly expanded the Inquisition; his name became a byword for torture and fanaticism
Vasili Blokhin: Personally killed thousands for Stalin
Vlad the Impaler - Estimates are he killed 30 percent of his own people. He was a nasty.
Zhang Xianzhong-Warlord of Sichuan in the 1640s. Reduced the province’s population by ninety-nine percent
Round 2 will be due End of day Thursday.
Going to go first this time 
Tojo - 2
Charles Manson - 2
Elizabeth Báthory - 1
Guess I have a ‘soft spot’ for people what were most likely, truely batshit insane.
Tojo was bad as Hitler or Stalin, considering the crimes of the Imperial Army in China.
Anyways…
John Chrysosotam-2 (His writings seems to have been criticism of Jewish practices by Christians rather than “Let’s kill all the Jews!”)
Cortez-2 (Overthrew a genocidal, maniacal empire hellbent on mass human sacrifice. Sort of like a Stalin to a Hitler)
Pizarro-1
Since I helped form the consensus, I’m going with three new names:
John Chrysostom – 2 (didn’t apparently advocate killing, much less murder anyone himself, and at this point that’s enough to eliminate him)
Ibn Taymiyyah – 2 (like Chrysostom, a man of ideas, action not so much)
Robert Berdella – 1 (now we’re getting into the murderers, but somebody’s got to lose the “play-in”, and he seems like the best choice)
I don’t know much of anything about Tojo. I’ve been under the impression that the Japanese Imperial Army was just as evil as the Nazis, but that Tojo was more of a cog in that machine, rather than the driving force behind it like Hitler or Stalin. Like the Imperial Army would have been just as evil with any other leader. Am I mistaken?
That was my impression. A bad man…but relatively weak in this company. I might be wrong though.
I think that’s fair to say. Tojo was not an unchallenged tyrant, setting policy, the way that Hitler and Stalin were at the heads of their respective evil empires.
I wouldn’t say the Aztecs were either genocidal or maniacal. Yes, they practiced human sacrifice, and some (but not all) of the ceremonies were indeed massive, but many fewer died in those ceremonies and in their regional warfare (which was comparitively bloodless, since capturing prisoners was the goal) than did in European wars and religious persecution of the day. The Aztec culture also built massive cities, had advanced art and literature, expansive commerce, etc.
But this is tough. Any vote would seem to downplay the pain and suffering of all of these people’s victims.
2 for Genghis Khan again - ruthlessly efficient, but I actually kind of admire that. He also did some good things.
2 for Vlad the Impaler - see Khan, Genghis. His methods, though harsh and cruel (and probably exaggerated), were to consolidate his power and defend Wallachia from the Ottoman Empire’s aggression, not for their own sake.
1 for Charles Manson - just a madman with a silver tongue and a lot of LSD in the right place at the right time.
Eh, he started his political career as an Ottoman puppet and was succeeded by his brother who was another. I’ve never really bought into the popular Romanian nationalist mythology ( and I think the current wiki of him is a bit suspect in this regard ) of him as a freedom fighter against the Ottomans. Ottoman policy at the time was to maintain Wallachia as a buffer vassal, rather than a fully assimilated conquered province. Wallachia was never in serious danger of being absorbed.
IMHO Vlad was just one more scrabbling border dynast looking for a patron - Ottoman or Hungarian, whichever suited him at the moment. It just so happened he was also an unusually bellicose and bloody-handed fellow even by the standards of his time.
Meanwhile I’m also finding a decision here a little difficult. Odd at this early of a stage in the game.
Yea…this isn’t like the naval battles thread. Much tougher.
Oh, what the hell(ish):
Tojo, not nearly as bad as his contemporaries Hitler and Stalin - 2
John Chrysostom, not directly responsible for mass murder - 2
Adolf Eichmann, carried out the evil orders of other, far more culpable Nazis - 1
Okay…
Sargon of Akkad - 2. The ‘first imperialist’, but at such a tremendous remove little stands out as being particularly over the top as aggressive warmongers go ;). One could conceivably give him credit for starting the conquer-all-your-neighbors craze and the excesses that engendered and I suppose that is why he is on the list. But somebody would have lit that fire. And as he verges on the semi-mythical and was inspiration mainly for Near Eastern, pre-Achaemenid conquerors, I’m inclined to give him an early pass. Alexander the Great was probably both historically more influential AND a nastier customer.
Attila the Great - 1. Perhaps seemingly an odd choice, but I’d be inclined to rate him as least nasty of the three filthy horse-archers on this list. For one thing his career was much shorter than the other two, with less scope for devastation. For another he gets played up quite a bit because his main target was a reeling, exposed Europe during the early death throes of the WRE. He doesn’t seem to have particularly more bloodthirsty or sack-happy than any other random group of mobile barbarian hordes.
By contrast Genghis was a cold-blooded advocate of terror tactics. He promulgated sack and slaughter only of those who offered resistance as a highly effective weapon for breaking the same. By the same token however he was extremely systematic and discouraged any retribution if you did submit, to the point of demoting officers that disobeyed his dicta. He may have fought and conquered for the joy of it, but he didn’t seem to massacre for any reason other than strategy.
My namesake on the other hand, despite his many charming characteristics ;), took Genghis a step farther in that respect. He does seem to have gratuitously cruel at times and while some of his worst excesses may have not been by strict orders ( much of the sack of Delhi for example seems more a matter of him losing control of his army ), many of them were. So I’d tend to rank those three in roughly the order above.
Ibn Taymiyyah - 1. Undoubtedly a well-spring of much evil in the world today, particularly through his religious justification for declaring jihad against the ostensibly Muslim Mongol Il-Khanate ( against whom he had some proto-nationalistic grudges ). But he didn’t create Hanbali jurisprudence and as much of a religious bigot as he was, I’d rate him a half-step below Chrysostum’s influence on anti-semitism. Personally he doesn’t seem to have done all that much bad in his lifetime, other than promulgate his very minority-view theology, not all of which was completely reactionary from a philosophical standpoint.
Tojo - 1. Went back and forth between him and Chrysostum, but I guess I’ll stick with Tojo this round. Cog-in-the-wheel hardline asshole, but probably a partial scapegoat for the worst Japanese excesses. Thing like the “Three All” campaign or the Rape of Nanking probably can’t be laid directly at his feet, even if he has to accept some blame for being at the center of the Imperial government.
Interesting - I’d never heard of it described that way before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Alls_Policy
2 for Dahmer
2 for Manson
1 for Mao
2 - Francois Duvalier - ruthless dictator, secret police/death squads, for sure. At worst he might have held Haiti back, but I’m not sure it can all be pinned on him. Also, he spent at least some part of his life saving lives. If he’d stayed “Papa Doc” he wouldn’t be here, and his turn to the dark side isn’t enough to keep him on it.
1 - Irma Grese - There’s plenty of horrible Nazis on the list; I think she’s least deserving to be on it.
1 - Robert Berdella - voted for being a serial killer I’ve never heard of and doesn’t sound worse than any of the ones I have (unlike Holmes, for example).
1 - Attila - As a leader not very far out on the evil scale. Led a rapacious bunch, but not that evil by the standard of the times, and not awful compared to some others.