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Worse than Pol Pot?
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gcle2003 View Drop Down
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Posts: 7035 		  Quote gcle2003 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Worse than Pol Pot?
    Posted: 22-Jun-2005 at 13:34

Can anybody put forward a candidate for a more evil tyrant than Pol Pot was? Or, in general, worse in some moral sense?

 
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Posts: 1458 		  Quote Kalevipoeg Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 22-Jun-2005 at 13:59

Well, the ususal ones, like Hitler and Stalin: Hitler had little morality, when having Western cultural views. Hiler had no problems when it came to killing of local populations or certain ethnical groups, which he specifically targeted. He also created death camps, not concentration camps, where noone came out alive.

Stalin could be said, that he is worse then Hitler, because Stalin killed you specifically because of who you were, but not only due to your social or ethnical status - basically anyone within the borders of Soviet Russia from the real criminal to Molotov himself was a potential victim.

Then there are the runalongs of the two mentioned above, like Dzerzhinski, Himmler, Kaganovitsh, Mengel, Blohhin, who can be worse too, really hard to decide, as little is known about them to me.

  
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Posts: 4361 		  Quote Komnenos Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 22-Jun-2005 at 17:47
I have an unusual and unsung candidate: King Leopold of Belgium (1835-1905)   who run what is now the Democratic Republic Of Congo, as one giant slave plantation, as a private company,solely in his possession.
It has been estimated that during his time as the CEO of the Kongo, 5-15 Million Congolese died on his rubber plantations, either as a direct result of human rights abuses or through exhaustion or starvation.


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Posts: 153 		  Quote Berosus Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 29-Jun-2005 at 10:31
King Leopold did a good job of covering up.  What he did in the Congo had been largely forgotten until a book about it, "King Leopold's Ghost," was published in 1998.

I was going to nominate Idi Amin, because he didn't just kill a lot of people; he claimed he ate some of them, too.  However, even he didn't murder 20-25 percent of his country's population, as Pol Pot did.  That would be a hard record for anyone to beat.
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Posts: 6003 		  Quote Cywr Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 29-Jun-2005 at 10:39
King Leopold did a good job of covering up.


I'd say that he personaly did a lousy job of covering it up, as people found out what he was doing and the Belgium Parliment forced him to give up control of the Congo.
That other people didn't take an intrest years later is a whole different matter.
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Posts: 4310 		  Quote Tobodai Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 29-Jun-2005 at 13:05
I have always thought that Pol Pot was the worst human being to ever exist based not only on the killing and enslavement of an entire nation, but his voluntary destruction of his own countries industry for nothing but ideological reasons.  One thing I can say about Hitler and Stalin is that they at least built industry for thir countries if nothing else, Pol Pot tore everything down for no good reason.
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Posts: 1458 		  Quote Kalevipoeg Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 29-Jun-2005 at 17:03
I don't know about that, Stalins war industry was pathetic before 1941. Just weeks before the German invasion, the politbureau still discussed if tanks should be in usage as widely as cavalry, even after the successful blietzkrieg by Hitler. Due to Stalins and his cronies unactivity in that part of industry, Finland was not defeated, and Hitler was feared more than anything.
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Posts: 0 		  Quote charles brough Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 29-Jun-2005 at 17:21

I guess the standard we go by is the "worst" is the one who killed the largest precentage of his own people.  Yes, Pol Pot stands about as high as we can go.  There are ones who killed more of their people---such as Stalin and Mao---but not percentage wise.

Then there are those who killed other peoples.  Most rules who do that set out to take over territory, but some set out to deliberately tear everything down.  Even Hitler and Tojo did not do that.  Tamurlane and Genjis Khan did. 

Then there are those who were really very cruel and liked to see people die horrible deaths.  Vlad the Impailer of Transelvania tops the list there, I guess.  Do you know that in the 15th century, the practice of quartering criminals was still common in Europe---including the Papal empire.  They tied a person's limbs to four different horses and then had them run away, effectively tearing the person apart.

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Kalevipoeg View Drop Down
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Posts: 1458 		  Quote Kalevipoeg Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 29-Jun-2005 at 17:50
Well, i just thought, that Lavrenti himself could be brought into this discussion. Beria, who reached to the top of the NKVD in the september of 1938., was more cunning than his predesessor, Nikolai Jezhov, although not as perverse. Beria personally observed tortures and killings at Lubjanka. His NKVD officers beat people for weeks, in some occasions, the prisoners were beaten literally until their eyes came out of their sockets. Once, during a torture, a false confession, as thousands before, were being beaten out of a high communist official. The beating helped little, and no confession came off from his lips. To hasten the process, the torturers pulled an eye out of the mans socket. Even after that, no confession came from the man, probably because the victim of the interigation was yet another truly loyal official, a true communist of that time, but that made him no less of a "criminal". Then Beria just told the man to be shot. After such acts, he often went to work on paperwork, or to play with his children.
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  Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 29-Jun-2005 at 18:14
Originally posted by charles brough

I guess the standard we go by is the "worst" is the one who killed the largest precentage of his own people.  Yes, Pol Pot stands about as high as we can go.

He's not. Pol Pot killed approx. 25% of his countrymen.
King Leopold of Belgium killed about 50% of his Congolese subjects, and Francisco Solano Lpez' wars caused the death of 80% of the population of Paraguay.

I do believe that Pol Pot is the most evil man in history though.
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Posts: 5711 		  Quote Constantine XI Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 29-Jun-2005 at 18:49

In Storm from the East there is a quote which tells of a census done in Northern China before and after the Mongol invasions. The population for those provinces was 50 million before the invasion, yet only 10 million after. Even leaving aside the discrepencies which would have resulted from a weaker bureaucracy after the Mongol invasions, that is still a massive difference in terms of before and after.\

One thing this book also points out is the fierce nomad ideology of the Mongols. Although they could respect some urban dwellers of skill such as government officials, artists, artisans, some religious figures etc they absolutely refused to see peasants as anything more than trash. For the proud nomads, anyone who scratched an existence from the dirt was contemptuous and deserved to he put to the sword during an invasion. Sadly this "contemptuous" class of people made up the vast bulk of human being at the time. A systematic policy of megacide against by far the largest section of society in the Middle Ages is something that must be ranked as "up there". Oh, and I suppose person-wise you would be thinking of Genghis Khan.
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Posts: 5221 		  Quote Temujin Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 30-Jun-2005 at 15:01
Originally posted by Constantine XI

In Storm from the East there is a quote which tells of a census done in Northern China before and after the Mongol invasions. The population for those provinces was 50 million before the invasion, yet only 10 million after. Even leaving aside the discrepencies which would have resulted from a weaker bureaucracy after the Mongol invasions, that is still a massive difference in terms of before and after.\

 

no it was not 50 million, it was 50 million taxpaying householdes before, and 10 million taxpaying householdes after the invasion...just because there are fewer taxpayers doesn't mean there are automatically less people, we have just recently discussed that in the Steppe forum.
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