Use all of the facts and statistics you want to support your answer, or just go with your gut–that’s why I put this in IMHO.
Hitler, Mao Tse-Tung, Edi Amin, Pol Pot, and Stalin come to mind from the old regime, but let’s not forget about the new kids on the block like Hussein, Jong Il, and Omar Al Bashir.
A link for your viewing pleasure:
Hitler. No question. He makes everyone else look like a piker.
Better bust open yer history book, old boy. Stalin and Mao had no (contemporary) equals in racking up body counts.
If that’s the criteria, then you may be right. But neither of them precipitated a world war. The blood on Hitler’s hands is beyond compare.
Of the 20th century ones, my vote goes to Stalin. He killed so many of his “own” people (ok, he was Georgian, but let’s call them all Soviets), quite deliberately, while Mao just killed his rivals (real or imagined) deliberately - the remaining 50 million just died because he was proud and foolish. Further, Uncle Joe could charm the birds off the trees (including Churchill to some degree), and got around. At least Mao stayed in China.
Stalin also participated in the kind of thing that precipitated WW2 - don’t forget that his USSR also invaded neighbouring countries and slaughtered, enslaved and massively deported their inhabitants. Stalin’s USSR even invaded Poland at about the same time Hitler did.
That said, I think these kind of comparisons always lead to bad feeling - who are we to determine which is worse, the slaughter of millions of Jews, millions of Ukrainians or millions of Chinese? Someone’s inevitably going to be offended.
How about Gorbachev? He was probably the worst dictator. Couldn’t even qualify for strongman in my book.
It was definately William Walker. He was an American right before the Civil War, who had the idea “Why don’t I conquer Central America for the South”. So he starts by invading Mexico. Of course, the part he decides to conquer is Baja California, which is basically a desert…there’s nothing there. He, of course, fails (after first taking control of Baja’s major city and declaring himself president), is arrested and tried under the Neutrality Act, and gets off. Then he hears about a rebellion in Nicaragua, so he goes down there, wins, and manages to become President for Life. He rules for a few months, and manages to piss off all his neighbors and the US (who were all relatively friendly to him when he became President). So, he’s arrested again, under the Neutrality Act, and again gets off. He then, having not learned the first two times, goes to Honduras to try to take it over, is captured by the British, turned over to the Hondurans and shot.
This guy had nothing going for him other than an inflated sense of optimism. He was a terrible general, a terrible ruler, and my vote for worst dictator ever.
Yeah, but Hitler set out to deliberately kill off a bunch of people because they were of “inferior races” or whatever. Stalin just did it because he thought they were against him.
I’d say though Ivan the Terrible. The guy was pretty damned scary. He was also fucking insane. An insane sadist is probably the worst.
Speaking personally, I’ve become upset about other people on both those grounds, namely, that they were inferior to me (but thought they weren’t) - whether of my own “race” or of another - and that I thought they were against me. Heck! I even think some people here are against me, when that’s clearly errant nonsense.
Hitler, Stalin, tssk! I just don’t understand why they did what they did when they had the power to do it.
I know that I never would.
I don’t think that Ivan’s actions during his reign were neccesarily due to insanity or sadism. (Not to say that he wasn’t either. He enjoyed torturing cats, dogs and peasants, and would go into religious trances). If you look at his early reign, he was fairly reformist. It was only after he got engaged in an endless war with Livonia, and the boyars poisoned his wife, that he engaged in the worst of his activities. And his actions had consistant goals…breaking the power of the boyars and getting more men for the war. So, I’d say that even though Ivan was cruel, the cruelty was rational, and wasn’t a result of sadism or insanity.
I’ve been reading about the Gulags lately and the question came to my mind.
Is Hitler worse because, despite a lower body count, he was engaging in genocide(triyng to wipe out people with certain traits) or Stalin because he killed more, even though the victems had nothing in common other then either being suspected of being againest him, or just caught up in the paranoia or beaucractic tyranny(When the secret police have qoutas on arresting people, people who will not get a trial and who either be shot or sent to the gulags, for any number of reasons, that’s not a good sign). Though Stalin’s killing could be arguarbly be called “mass murder” because genocide(as I understand it) requires some kind of focus.
Though Stalin also have 20-30 years to do whatever the hell he pleased, and Hitler was stopped by losing WW2.
Just to be clear, are we meaning “worst” as “most evil and terrible” or “worst” as in “least competant”?
What’s really scary, though, is the fact that many more people seemed to Like Stalin then Hitler has had.
I heard somewhere that if Stalin was running for President of Russia in the next election, 25% of the Russian people would vote for him. Hell, a number of prominant people, including Arthur Miller(apparently) considered themselves “Stalinist”. Why the hell is/was he so liked while Hitler is so despised(instead of both being despised)?
His mustache was bushier and more trustworthy, and he had an avuncular air. He was exposed to foreign travel and knew how to work a crowd, whether Roosevelt and Churchill, and assorted aides, or lefties. He wasn’t called Uncle Joe for nothing. Can’t quite imagine Uncle Adie.
Are we running the old Hitler vs Stalin vs Mao horserace of the apocalypse again? These guys weren’t especially evil, they just were in the right places at the right time in humanity’s political and industrial history. There’s the old saying that Hollywood was “what God would have done if He’d had the money.” The Holocaust/Gulag/Great Leap Forward were what Satan would have done if he’d had the money.
Me, I’m going with Tamerlane, at least until the poster of the same name comes into this thread and proves otherwise.
At least Hitler had a dream, albeit a twisted one that could have been controlled with 100 daily milligrams of Symmetrel. Stalin was a creature of animal reation who inherited an already-established Bolshevick policy of “kill all possible enemies” and reached the inevitable conclusion of “if I don’t eventually kill everyone, anyone could eventually kill me.”
Tamerlane, though, was the stupid heir to the Mongol conquests. Legitimate criticisms of the Mongol conquests aside (such as; their legacy can be seen in the present day situation in both Russia and the Moslem world - no small criticism!), it was said of these empires that a 14-year old girl could walk unmolested from Europe to China with a bag of gold. Tamerlane, however, was the bastard child who crashed this party long after it had ended, and his career was spent bouncing back and forth from one end of his empire to the other, making pyramids of skulls for no reason other than to impress himself.
And Tamerlane is also responsible indirectly the single most inhuman acts that has ever been inflicted on me (and I had to eat cold porridge and tapioca at boarding school for 10 years). Four hours spent waiting for a play to end at the National Theatre in 1975. Sod you, Tamerlane, sod you, Marlowe, and sod you too, Albert Finney, for taking the part. And the fact that you were probably blind drunk when you accepted the part is no excuse.
I guess you have to look at the influence of the dictator outside his own domestic sphere and over the long run instead of just adding up his domestic body count. W/o Stalin I doubt we’d have a Kim Jong Il since Stalinist expansionism created the groundwork for Jong Il, and for several of the eastern european dictators including Tito and Milosevic (w/o 50 years of dictatorship started under Stalin I doubt the culture would have given birth of a Milosevic). Had Trotsky taken over Russia I am sure Russia still would have beaten the Nazis but with Trotsky in charge the Russians would’ve been more competent (Stalin was an inept military leader who killed off generals by the hundreds during his purges). Plus who knows what the war on communism would’ve been like w/o Stalin, there may have never been an annexation of eastern europe. Despite it all, like HPL said, Stalin is still considered a great leader even though he was inept and a mass murderer and would be put back in power by the Russians if he were running for office.
Hitlers legacy wasn’t nearly as long. His run didn’t result in the spreading of nazi fascism and he is reviled in Germany. So Stalin was the worst.
Good question. Let’s make it the least competent dictator, who just happened to be evil. So, you can’t say Bush or Clinton, or someone of that ilk. We need some serious attrocities mixed in with a dose of stupidity.
I think this will make it much tougher. Most of the guys mentioned in this thread so far were pretty intelligent folks.
Time to do some research. Sorry about the unclear OP.
Pol Pot takes all prizes for flat-out crazy, topping Stalin’s paranoia & Hitler’s Parkinson’s/drug addiction/perversion problems.