The other day I heard on the news… the most wanted man in history Osama bin Laden … It got me thinking…is he the most wanted in history? It would seem that there were some bad guys when back when… I don’t know about the definitions that one would use to define this but who would have been comparable to the situations that we find our self’s in looking for this virus.
Arguably plenty of people more evil than UBL but I don’t recall any that were fugitives. Everyone knew where Hitler, Stalin, Mao etc. were.
Now that I think about it Pol Pot comes to mind.
Pol Pot could easily have been found if the will was there in the international community. There are still lots of KR higher-ups just sort of hanging around in the Pailin area, slapping ‘beer girls’ on the butt and singing karaoke.
Bin Laden may well be it.
At least that much of your statement seems to apply to bin laden just the same.
Agent Cooper
Yes, it sounds more like a slogan than an assessment.
Pancho Villa or Blackbeard might fit the title better.
OK, people didn’t seem to like that one. Let me rephrase:
The KR openly held a section of western Cambodia for years. Pol Pot appears to have died a five minute walk from the Thai border, after he ended up on the losing side of a KR factional split that left him in a very easy position to be picked up if anyone wanted to. He had previously been to Bangkok and Beijing for medical treatment. He met with journalists at least twice in the year before he died. Whereas it can be assumed that if bin Laden is alive very few people know where he is, there were many people and at least 2 nations who knew A) that he was alive and B) more or less where he was (sometimes precisely where he was) and how to track him down.
It should be noted that some of the Thai military had corrupt business deals with the KR on their border and had no interest in ending their lucrative trade (including apparently illegal timber harvesting on the Khmer side of the border) with Pol Pot’s men. Cambodians themselves were in no position to wrest the KR from their border stronghold, Vietnam withdrew after otherthrowing the KR, and powers such as China and the US were in no hurry to have trials that would shed light on their respective diplomatic and other support for the KR regime.
There is largely an international will to find bin Laden, but a lot of people were happy to have PP remain “lost” until he died, which is precisely what happened.
Rome had quite a thing for hunting down Sparticus for awhile. On a percent of resources basis, they may have thrown more at him.
Wasn’t there something in the news about Pol Pot’s men and the UN?
I’d say Hitler was more wanted. OBL only has what, a few hundred (‘maybe’ a few thousand) soldiers after him? Weren’t divisions sent out to find Hitler?
But he was never on the run, which is a precondition for the title as given by the OP. Hitler was driven to ground, but he committed suicide in his bunker, and I presume we knew where his bunker was when we were making the final raids on Berlin.
How would the various Native Americans fare on this scale? Sitting Bull, for example, gave the US Army a run for its money for a while, even though he eventually had to give up.
This kind of question boils down to how one defines “the most wanted man in history”. Wanted man would probably mean some individual, perhaps an individual leading a group or organization, being actively chased by some state, political alliance, international law enforcement or another powerful entity like religious sect or organized crime. Under that definition we’ll find numerous people through history, some of them well-known. However, comparing which one was the most wanted isn’t too straightforward.
At one time, Spartacus and his troops were being chased by the entirety of what consisted the Roman army back then, but similar chases have taken place in various countries throughout history whenever a large peasant revolt with charismatic leader has taken place, and some of those may have needed more manpower to suppress. Century earlier, after 2nd Punic war, Roman assassins hunted Hannibal around Mediterranean, much like Stalin’s assassins were after Trotsky. This kind of pursuits where a state or ‘coalition’ wants to get a specific person are numerous and again it’s hard to say which one of these individuals was the most wanted.
A good example of international criminal/terrorist being on the run would be Carlos The Jackal who had great many of law enforcement agencies after him for years, but I don’t know how that could be compared to bin Laden’s situation. And let’s not forget people like Salman Rushdie who theoretically had tens of millions of people after him due to Iranian government’s decisions.
Speak of the devil:
Well, I don’t like to brag, but the ladies will talk…
Oh, “wanted” as in “wanted poster”.
[ EMILY LATELLA ] Never mind… [ /EMILY LATELLA ]