On a related question I’ve been waiting to ask, who was the go to guy for evil comparisons before Hitler? Or in other words how did people Godwinize before Hitler. I would guess that Judas would be in the running, but was curious if there was anyone else.
That would be the Captain of Köpenick case in 1906.
The Devil?
The Nazis really raised the bar for evil empires. Like the Prussians on steroids.
It wasn’t just the uniforms, pagentry and scary accents. The Nazis also brought mechanized warfare to a new level with the Blitzkrieg and industrialized genocide. No one ever did that before.
Interesting cjpson. Though it sounds from that quote like pre-war Germans weren’t so much oppressed as willing to take orders.
The OED gives these examples of using the word “Tsar” as a person of tyrannical authority that seem close to what we want:
Which makes sense, the Tsars were arguably the most oppressive pre-WWI rulers in Europe, with their own famous secret police, and half the Russian population working basically as slave as serfs on farms.
Before the Prussians it was the Turks. Calling someone “a regular Turk” indicated they were cruel and authoritarian.
From the Wiki article:
The Ottomans weren’t Arabs; they were Turks.
While in many ways they are the opposite of Nazis, I would think that anarchists would have been a touchstone of evil behavior through the century before Hitler’s rise. But I don’t know if the term would be used to paint an opponent the same way.
This. Czar is the best analogue to the “Soup Nazi” usage the OP is looking for. Ivan the Terrible being the exemplar.
don’t forget the Inquisition and the evil Vatican, especially in British popular culture. The evil Papists were not quite as openly out to get them at the turn of the century as in late 16th century, but suspicion dies hard. And the Protestants back then were no less prone to exaggerating Inquisition impact than the atheists today.
Certainly, the seat of the empire was Turkish, but they covered a great deal of ‘Arab’ land.
Sure, but one doesn’t consider the emperor’s subjects the “tyrannical” ones.
Centurions? Or Spartans!
In pre WWI UK, Russian anarchists would fit the bill:
I think, technically, Turks are from Turkmenistan. Most of the “Turks” in Turkey were not really Turks, at least before the Ottoman Empire was broken up. At one point, their domain even included Egypt. At least according to David Fromkin’s book.
Back to the OP: Until the Nazis went global with it, evil was pretty much a regional thing. One person’s Pilate was another’s Attila.
It’s oddly appropriate that in Hebrew, tzar means distress, enemy, or confinement.
Hijack: Arable land is land that is only actually tilled by Arabs.
Sorry. But it’s one of my all-time favorites.
Hey, Jesus willingly gave himself up to death, so He has as much to do with the killing as Pontius did. In fact, you could say that God is my Co-Pilate.
Yes and no. While the Third Reich was the first to truly industrialize mass murder (and this as official policy only relatively late during the regime, dating to the Wannsee Conference of January 1942) the elements of modern fascism date back to the era of Napoleon Bonaparte with the French Consulate and the succeeding First French Empire. Among the nations of Western Europe and the various Cossack groups “Bonapartist” had roughly the same connotation as “Nazi” does today, evoking the image of brutal, autocratic organized repression and arbitrary application of terroristic violence to strengthen the position of a centralized government beholden to a cult of personality.
And while very little in the way of weapon technology changed during the Napoleonic reign, he implemented mobile artillery and what we could now call combined arms into campaigns in a manner which was not done so widely previously, which allowed attacks with his Grande Armée to be more coordinated than previous mass army campaigns, which was itself a predecessor to the Blitzkrieg campaigns of the German Third Reich. And while these campaigns, like the Blitzkrieg, were very effective against enemies with a poorly concentrated or logistically supported force, they were ultimately self-defeating when applied to extended campaigns (and hence, the reason for the old saw “never fight a land war in Asia,”).
Stranger
Well, when (British) commentators were discussing Nazis in the early 1930s for a (British) audience, a common comparison was the Black and Tans, i.e. living in Germany in 1934 was like living in a country governed by Black and Tans. But I doubt that the reference would work very well outside Britain and Ireland.