I’m with you on Lenin. Lenin set the thing in motion and acquired the cult of personality, leaving it to others to do the scut work and take the blame when things went south. Pure Belial.
In Michael Farquhar’s book A Treasury of Royal Scandals, he mentions a rumor that Boniface installed a speaking tube in his predecessor Celestine V’s bedroom, and whispered into it at night, encouraging Celestine to step down from the papacy. Then, after Celestine did step down, Boniface imprisoned him, and he died in prison.
I nominate Pope Paul IV as demonic, mainly for his bull Cum nimis absurdum that caused so much grief for Jews.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned Tomas de Torquemada yet, for reasons that should be obvious.
No argument there. As I said, I stopped posting Demonic Popes after I got bored of it, not because I ran out of them. sigh
I’m sure I can find others, if I decide to look for them, but so far you’re the only one who seems interested in the list.
I’m interested in that as well as the list of Demonic Popes.
As someone who is Welsh, Scottish, and Jewish (among other things), I have to nominate Edward I. There are a couple of stories that lend support to that:
Supposedly, St. Bernard of Clairvaux said of all the Plantagenets: “From the Devil they came, and to the Devil they will return”. There was a legend that an ancestor of the Plantagenets, a woman named Melusine, was a demon. Supposedly she always left church before Mass, and when she was once forced to stay for Mass, she screamed and flew out the window.
There’s also a story about Edward I. While he was on Crusade, he was attacked by an assassin with a poisoned dagger. The story goes that his wife, Eleanor, saved him by sucking the poison from the wound.
Leopold II, King of the Belgians, Sovereign of the Congo Free State. He plundered the Congo in a way that would be unimaginable in this age of CNN and did it just for money. He already had more golf than he could eat, but directed the chopping off of the hands of Africans who did not turn in the required amount of rubber.
May he burn in Peace.
Muhammad bin Saud, founder of Saudi Arabia and the one responsible for the connection between the Saudi Arabian government and Wahhabism. That connection has caused a fair amount of grief in the modern world…
Actually, I might nominate just about any political leader interested in bringing their religion, whatever that might be, “back to its purest form.” That so often leads to serious nastiness, especially for non-practitioners of that religion or people who don’t subscribe to the leader’s version of that religion.
The cult around Lenin was largely Stalin’s fault, as I understand it.
How about Nikolai Ceauşescu - for oppressing Romania for 30+ years and being really hard to spell.
Or Mobutu, for being the textbook face of a “kleptocracy.” Partly responsible for the Rwandan genocide, multibillionaire (none of it rightfully his, I’m sure, except that his face was on it), lover of diamonds and not much else.
But no one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Lenin isn’t remembered as being so bad because he was an invalid through most of his time in power. Keep in mind, he suffered a stroke a few years after the revolution which kept him out of touch. But he was almost nearly as brutal as Stalin, he just didn’t have the same opportunities. About the only thing Stalin did that Lenin didn’t was to go after fellow Bolsheviks.
How about Otto Von Bismarck? He manipulated how many wars in Europe for his own aims, created an atmosphere in Prussia that was hostile to the future Frederick III and was largely responsible for the conditions that would lead to World War I?
And of course, Ante Pavelic, the Croatian fascist of WWII?
As if you could eat golf. (Or even gold, which is what I presume you meant.)
A special place in Hell must now be occupied by Pol Pot.
Noticing that Pol Pot was already well-buried in someone else’s laundry list of dirty rats, I give you baby-eating, tin-pot Central African Emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa.
That’s the one.