Round 2: Due to the lack of a consensus I will only put the bastages that have more than 2 votes in order to save my fingers.
John Chrysostom - influential early exponent of Christian antisemitism - 6
Charles Manson: Evil occultist led a group that killed at least eight people, maybe more. Most notorious serial killer in American history. - 5
Tojo - Helped bring Japan into World War 2 - 5
The above 3 are eliminated. Other votes cast (>2):
Ibn Taymiyyah - 3
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.
Hernan Cortes - Overthrew a genocidal, maniacal empire hellbent on mass human sacrifice. Sort of like a Stalin to a Hitler.
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 H. H. Holmes - Wikipedia
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
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.
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
Eliminated:
Joseph McCarthy: Destroyed the careers of many by falsely accusing them of being Communists. Lied like a Persian rug.
Rasputin: Helped bring down the Russian Empire by continually tellling a dimbulb he was the only legitimate authority in Russia
Trofim Lysenko - Scientific crackpot used Stalin to strongarm opponents
John Chrysostom - influential early exponent of Christian antisemitism
Charles Manson: Evil occultist led a group that killed at least eight people, maybe more. Most notorious serial killer in American history.
Tojo - Helped bring Japan into World War 2
Cortez-2
Trujillo-2 (he was one of the few heads of states to offer his country as a refuge for the Jews during the Holocaust and unlike his Haitian conterpart managed to make his country reasonably ok by now)
Pizarro-1
Attila the Hun - 2. Typical rapacious marauder. No more, no less.
Sargon of Akkad - 2. Prototypical imperialist, but does not seem to have been unusually nasty as such go. Plus he is half-mythical in terms of the details of his character and reign.
Ibn Taymiyyah - 1. Bigoted, “conservative” theologian, inspiration to many a vicious jihadist. But probably not particularly nasty himself.
Round 3: Due to the lack of a consensus I will only put the bastages that have more than 2 votes in order to save my fingers. I added mine to the below but it didnt affect anythng.
Attila - 5
Isabella - 4
Ibn Taymiyyah - 4
The above 3 are eliminated. Other votes cast (>2):
François Duvalier - 3
Ilse Koch - 3
Robert Berdella - 3
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.
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.
Hernan Cortes - Overthrew a genocidal, maniacal empire hellbent on mass human sacrifice. Sort of like a Stalin to a Hitler.
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 H. H. Holmes - Wikipedia
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
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
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.
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
Eliminated:
Joseph McCarthy: Destroyed the careers of many by falsely accusing them of being Communists. Lied like a Persian rug.
Rasputin: Helped bring down the Russian Empire by continually tellling a dimbulb he was the only legitimate authority in Russia
Trofim Lysenko - Scientific crackpot used Stalin to strongarm opponents
John Chrysostom - influential early exponent of Christian antisemitism
Charles Manson: Evil occultist led a group that killed at least eight people, maybe more. Most notorious serial killer in American history.
Tojo - Helped bring Japan into World War 2
Attila the Hun - Led rapacious, murderous hordes
Isabella of Castile - helped create and oversee the Spanish Inquisition
Ibn Taymiyyah - intellectual founder of radical Islam.
After doing a bit more research, I’m backing off on Duvalier to go for another American national leader far more deserving.
2 - Francisco Solano Lopez. I can’t even see why he’s on the list. At worst he seems to have been incompetent, but even about that there’s debate. While incompetence + power over lives can be called evil, it’s pretty lacking compared to the others here. Apparently he’s still reasonably well-regarded in Paraguay.
1 - Robert Berdella
1 - Ilse Koch.
1 - Delphine LaLaurie. Seems about as sadistic as the Nazis. I’d rate her worse than those since the society she was in wasn’t as tolerant of her behavior, but alternatively her crimes seem slightly less severe.
Cortez-2
Trujillo-2 (he was one of the few heads of states to offer his country as a refuge for the Jews during the Holocaust and unlike his Haitian conterpart managed to make his country reasonably ok by now)
Pizarro-1
I’ll allow that with what Lopez did, he deserves a mention on the list. The thing is, he didn’t kill 90% of his own people. It was the war that he got into that led to that. And I think you only get that high of a figure if you include those killed by disease. FSL may well be the best example of “reckless disregard for human life, arrogance, and incompetence” resulting in mass devastation. A good point can be made that this result is evil, but if you’re looking at a particular person to name as evil, I don’t think Lopez should shoulder the entire burden.
I feel as though I’m breaking down the list into multiple smaller contests. There are the straight-up serial killers. There are the “female sadists” who tortured but did relatively little killing - Koch, LaLaurie, Grese. Then there’s the “American dictators” - Trujillo, Duvalier, and Lopez. Of those three, I call Lopez the least evil because of his intentions. I actually think Duvalier vs. Trujillo is a very tough decision, but I rank them in the order I just listed them.
And now I just noticed Alfredo Stroessner on the list. I don’t know much about him, but I think he belongs in my short-list discussion of dictators. And there’s probably no reason to stick to the Americas. I think “minor dictators of former colonial states” may be a classification for me to use.
But he was under orders to do so. Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich et al. told him to do it. Not that this excuses him in any way, but he wasn’t doing all that under his own initiative. A lot of the tinpot dictators and warlords did the evil they did because they wanted to, and could, and gave the orders which led to it.
Round 4: Due to the lack of a consensus I will only put the bastages that have more than 2 votes in order to save my fingers. I got bamboolzed at work and so missed my own deadline so I missed this round.
Francisco Solano Lopez - 4
Robert Berdella - 3
Ilse Koch - 3
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.
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.
Hernan Cortes - Overthrew a genocidal, maniacal empire hellbent on mass human sacrifice. Sort of like a Stalin to a Hitler.
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
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 H. H. Holmes - Wikipedia
Idi Amin - killed 100,000-500,000 countrymen in 8 years
Irma Grese, Bitch of Belsen - Sr Supervisor at Auschwitz; tortured women prisoners with attack dogs, whippings
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
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.
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.
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
Eliminated:
Joseph McCarthy: Destroyed the careers of many by falsely accusing them of being Communists. Lied like a Persian rug.
Rasputin: Helped bring down the Russian Empire by continually tellling a dimbulb he was the only legitimate authority in Russia
Trofim Lysenko - Scientific crackpot used Stalin to strongarm opponents
John Chrysostom - influential early exponent of Christian antisemitism
Charles Manson: Evil occultist led a group that killed at least eight people, maybe more. Most notorious serial killer in American history.
Tojo - Helped bring Japan into World War 2
Attila the Hun - Led rapacious, murderous hordes
Isabella of Castile - helped create and oversee the Spanish Inquisition
Ibn Taymiyyah - intellectual founder of radical Islam.
Francisco Solano Lopez: Almost destroyed his “beloved” Paraguay
Robert Berdella-Carrot Fucker
Ilse Koch, Bitch of Buchenwald - wife of commandant at concentration camps; took money from inmates; made lampshades etc. from their tattooed skin
I will only put the bastages that have more than 2 votes in order to save my fingers.