Cite.
I had never heard of him before today. I wish I had never heard of him at all.
Worse than Josef Mengele? No.
The OP’s guy seems to have carried out his job in a dispassionate, machine-like way. It’s fucked up that someone would do that, but it’s way more fucked up when guys do the same thing but appear to love every minute of it, and revel in every kind of twisted, sadistic thing they can come up with.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
He reportedly sank into alcoholism, went insane, and died in February 1955 with the official cause of death listed as “suicide.”
[/QUOTE]
Looks like he added one to his total at the end.
O-HO-HO-HO-HO-!
How cute!:rolleyes:
Sailboat, when somebody like that is listed as a suicide, & the word is in quotes…let’s just say, it was likely an assisted suicide.
As in
“25 stabwounds to the back, worst case of suicide I have ever seen”?
roflmao
I do not see him as evil, per se - pitiable, but not evil. Political monomaniacs can do things under the logic of their beliefs that to them are logical actions. Those 7000 people were seen as enemies of the state, and sentenced to execution. I view him in the same light as the state executioner for whatever states still have legal executions. It is their job to execute people. Please note that he did not torture them. They were identified, taken into a room and shot in the back of the head. We will leave aside the victims psychological state - imagine instead some of the more recent death squads active in South America, using machetes to chop people into pieces. Would you rather a clean shot to the back of the head or to get chopped into pieces?
Quite the high body count, but all he had to do was put pressure on a trigger (that he probably had modified to a four-pound pull or less). When he shot the Polish officer corps, he did have to put in a couple of long, smoke-filled days, but no more hard work than convention-center bartender. (movie with English subtitles is on Youtube, BTW)
I’ll offer in competiton Petar Brzica who slit thousands of Serb’s throats in the Croats’ low-tech concentration camps in WWII.
The two Japanese officers who held a head-chopping contest at Nanking don’t fare worse in my esteem, since they’d been brainwashed by Bushido, and decapitation is a pretty quick death (albeit standing in line waiting for it is no small torment). But Brzica was trained to be a priest, and not a cold-blooded Jesuit, but as a Francisican, for Christ’s sake.
Slitting someone throat without mercifully severing his spinal cord, or opeing his carotid & jugular which allows the blood to flush from the brain in a short time, is a terrible way to kill someone. The victim desperately tries to suck air though his opened windpipe, making a sickening noise like a high-pitch whale song or a sleeping bag zipper being ripped open and closed. This prick went about this for hours at a time, at the lip of a pit he filled with men, women and children dying this way.
I don’t know about that. If it’s true that he didn’t enjoy the job (ie, that he wasn’t a sadist) then I can see where a guilty conscience might have eventually driven him to suicide. At some point, it must have occurred to him that all those people didn’t deserve to die. Especially after he was purged following Stalin’s death, and he had time to think about what all that killing had accomplished. Or not accomplished.
Note the text in red.:dubious:
I would be inclined to believe that if he had become an alcoholic, as indicated, and he had that much knowledge of “black” operations, his drunken ramblings had all potential to spill a few nasty secrets. Hence an arranged suicide.
He really did know where the dead were buried.
(Yeah, a lot of the above is speculation).
Well, another member of this particular club made the news this week: “Chemical Ali.”
He was forced out of his job and stripped of his rank. If that doesn’t qualify as being purged, it’s darn close.
Even if he did realize the error of his ways at some point, he would probably have had a hard time getting out of the job. This guy probably knew better than most people what happened to you if you displeased someone in the Stalin regime. AIUI, you didn’t just up and quit a job like this in the Stalinist USSR, the way an executioner in the US who got tired of killing people could if s/he wanted to.
Didn’t Beria take a firearm from a guard and shoot one or more rivals when Stalin died?
Personally, I think that makes them more evil; not less. That makes it a matter of choice; not some type of psychopathy that makes them uncaring. They could recognize the immorality of what they are doing, choose not to kill for their beliefs, but they do it anyway; and choice is a major part of what makes something evil and not just an accident or disease. My personal hierarchy of evil for something like this would be, from least to most evil, the psychopath* who doesn’t care about others at all; the person who “just follows orders”; and the person who actively enjoys his cruelty and is not simply a psychopath.
- Note that I am referring to “most evil”, not most dangerous here. Psychopaths are human predators and can be very dangerous, but I consider them too broken psychologically to be evil as such. You can’t be evil if you can’t choose to be good, and a full blown psychopath can’t care about other people as I understand it.
Yes, IMO, there is more evil in a cold, calculating killer, than there is in someone who murders in a psychopathic rage.
I think this might be one candidate for the OP,
Tomás de Torquemada
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/mass/torquemada/3.html
In many ways you can consider him far worse, since his intention was much more than just to kill, but also to maim and torture to a fanatical religious purpose - he and his kind are responsible for the terrible reputation of Catholicism throughout much of Protestant Europe.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A620083
He was a main part in the Spanish Inquisition, and was rsponsible for it’s worst excessess - some people consider him among the most evil people who ever lived.
Later on in his career, Blokhin might not have had the option of quitting without himself being killed or sent to Siberia. Did he become less evil then than he was when he was doing what he did out of his own free will?
What about an executioner who wants to quit, but knows he can’t find another job paying as much if he does? How evil is he, if he keeps killing people so he can maintain his standard of living?
I would say in both cases that they’re less evil than someone who kills because they enjoy killing. I’d have a bit more sympathy for someone who knows they might very well be killed for quitting their executioner’s job than I would for an executioner who simply doesn’t want to take a pay cut, but I’d have some sympathy for both of them.
Of course, we don’t know how Blokhin felt about his job. It’s possible that he wanted to stop killing people but wasn’t brave enough to face what the Stalinist regime would do to him if he did. It’s also possible that he loved what he did up until he got forced out of his job. He’s much more disgusting in the latter case than in the former, IMO, but we can’t know which one was true. Probably no one but Blokhin ever did know that, and he’s dead and can’t tell us.
I’d rather be remembered as the soldier who took out x amount of his commanding officers, than the one remembered for killing 1,000’s of people I’d know were “innocents” if I gave it a moments thought.
Hopefully I’d behave that way if the moral dilemma arose, too.
That isn’t what “purged” means, in the Soviet system.