Who was the most evil man in history?

[luiz]

I'm sure that was a very satisfying thought to all those in Tre Blinka.

Nobody is saying that Hitler was good, it's just that it was far easier to stay alive under Hitler's rule then Stalin's(provided that you were not a Jew).

What KoC said is true, most of the people who met Hitler actually liked him alot, while most of the people who met Stalin were terrified all the time, and in fact most were executed.

Of the 1,225 members of the Politburo in 1934, 1,108 were executed by 1938. That's 90.5%. Hitler never killed anything close of that percentage in the Nazi rankings.

 

[budweiser]

I saw a History channel show about Stalin one time. It showed a session from inside the politburrough on Stalin's birthday. They gave him a massive standing ovation that literally went on for hours. Man, I would not have wanted to be the first man to sit down during that ovation...

 

[nonconformist]

I saw a History channel show about Stalin one time. It showed a session from inside the politburrough on Stalin's birthday. They gave him a massive standing ovation that literally went on for hours. Man, I would not have wanted to be the first man to sit down during that ovation...

It went on for hours, cos noone wantedf to be seen to be the first to stop. In fact, Stalin would have to calm the cround himself. When he was absent, and his speeches were read out, people would quirte literally faint, as there was no Stalin to tell them to stop!
Apparently, dutring one speech, one person did dare to stop clapping after a while....apparently he disappeared the next day.

 

[Zardnaar]

I would pick Stalin as the worse.

 

[Adler17]

Stalin indeed.
There is a joke my history teacher once told me:
Stalin is holding a speech somewhere in a small town in Siberia. He is just at the height of his speech someone sneezes. He stops and asks: Who has sneezed? All are silent and terrified. Stalin says: Okay first row out of the building and is executed at once.
The first row is lead outside and you can hear shots.
Stalin continues and just when he came to his best form, someone seezes again. Again Stalin stops. He says: Who has just sneezed. Again all are silent. Then Stalin orders to shoot the 2nd row.
Again shots are heart.
Stalin continues again. And guess what? Right. Someone sneezes again. Stalin asks for the third time who was that. This time in the last row an old man arises and says he is sorry but he has the flu. Stalin goes to him, shakes his hand and says: Bless you, towarischtsch!

This says everything about this erratic man.

Adler

P.S.: I hope the translation didn´t kill the humor. But if you think the whole joke is bad, remember I am a German .

 

[storealex]

I voted them all because I like to click stufff.

 

[Kweli]

i want to have 2 vots, one for hitler and one for stalin.
but today i would vote george w bush

 

[Kweli]

Karl Marx. If not for him, half the people would not be on the list--Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Kim Il Jong, Fidel Castro...

all deluded by a person who is to economics what Ptolemy is to astronomy.

what karl marx?

why do you have probs with marx. he and engels were great men.

 

[Adler17]

Marx and Engels were day dreamer. They had good ideas but Utopian ones only. They are not bad but what was made out of them is a catastrophy. Although I am against to see them as big men they are no so bad. Just some day dreamer which had good ideas but both did not live in reality. Although IIRC Marx was starting to question some of his theories when he was old...
Also you can´t blame Marx for what Lenin did in Russia or even Stalin. Marx wanted first a revolution of the civilians, I mean not a proletarian one. Lenin made a proletarian one, although he was warned by Rosa Luxemburg not to do so. Well, we know what hppened in 1991 to the USSR...

Adler

 

[TrailblazingScot]

Stalin indeed.
There is a joke my history teacher once told me:
Stalin is holding a speech somewhere in a small town in Siberia. He is just at the height of his speech someone sneezes. He stops and asks: Who has sneezed? All are silent and terrified. Stalin says: Okay first row out of the building and is executed at once.
The first row is lead outside and you can hear shots.
Stalin continues and just when he came to his best form, someone seezes again. Again Stalin stops. He says: Who has just sneezed. Again all are silent. Then Stalin orders to shoot the 2nd row.
Again shots are heart.
Stalin continues again. And guess what? Right. Someone sneezes again. Stalin asks for the third time who was that. This time in the last row an old man arises and says he is sorry but he has the flu. Stalin goes to him, shakes his hand and says: Bless you, towarischtsch!

This says everything about this erratic man.

Adler

P.S.: I hope the translation didn´t kill the humor. But if you think the whole joke is bad, remember I am a German .

Stalin would have made an excellent supply teacher however

 

[Provolution]

What about Queen Victoria, 100s of wars and enslaving 25 % of the world in an aristocratic system ? The Concentration Camps was invented by the end of her life.

 

[Gelion]

The poll is seriously byased to include "american enemies". I simpply cannot put Khruschev on the same bench with Hitler and Stalin. Neverthless I voted. And no I was not stupid

 

[Ancient Grudge]

The Concentration Camps was invented by the end of her life.

The concentration camps of the Boer war can't be compared at all to the EXTERMINATION camps of the Nazis. The concentration camps where set up because the British Army was having difficulty surpressing the Boers and wanted to take away their sources of food and shelter, the extermination camps were set up to kill millions of people.

My vote goes to Stalin.

 

[Gelion]

You people are way out of line. How can you compare the evils of Hitler and Stalin? Hitler is by far the most evil thing history has ever seen. I mean as evil as it gets. Stalin killed his political opponents, which is something many governments would gladly do (most did and some still do; secret service and the like); Hitler killed for mare nationality, for the act of existance itself. Stalin on the other hand provided free housing, food and basic goods for the common folk, and Soviet Union witnessed a rapid economic growth during his reign. What luiz said about killing friends isnt a criterion by which I would judge evil. If Hitler had found political opponenets among close friends (i'm not sure if he hadnt), he would've killed them too. This is not to say I evaluate Stalin positively, but comparing him with Hitler is stupid. A result of the American myths about communism being as bad as Nazism.

Good point man. Something I've been trying to prove all along, but people are scared of the word "communism" and are owfully clever in labeling all they don't like with it.
As a Slav I had a chance of survival under Stalin if I was loyal. Under Hitler - no way.

 

[Gelion]

Nobody is saying that Hitler was good, it's just that it was far easier to stay alive under Hitler's rule then Stalin's(provided that you were not a Jew).

Of the 1,225 members of the Politburo in 1934, 1,108 were executed by 1938. That's 90.5%. Hitler never killed anything close of that percentage in the Nazi rankings.

First point:
List of nationailites that were to be no more under Hitler:
Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Czechs, Slovakians, Slovenians, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Ukranians, Russians, Byelorussians, any Blacks and race-mixed people.
List of inferior beings: homosectuals, communists, handicaps, atheists, regime-enemies.

It was easy to live under Hilter if you were a German or a Nazi sympathiser. Under Stalin you had to be loyal to Stalin - much easier than changing your nationality. I read a lot on Stalin and he never killed anyone "just for kicks". Any totalitarian leader can be argued to be "paranoid". I could try and be loyal as that at least gives me a chance. I cannot support a system that will not accpet me however hard I tried.

Second Point: look at the SA killings. Same story fear of unloyalty and "power challenge".

Oh and someone mentioned killing Soviet liberated soldiers. Do you have any idea who send them back to the Soviet Union?

 

[luiz]

First point:
List of nationailites that were to be no more under Hitler:
Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Czechs, Slovakians, Slovenians, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Ukranians, Russians, Byelorussians, any Blacks and race-mixed people.
List of inferior beings: homosectuals, communists, handicaps, atheists, regime-enemies.

True enough, but how many blacks were there in Germany in 1940? Not many I guess.
Jews represented more then 50% of the victims of the Holocaust, that's why I mentioned them.

It was easy to live under Hilter if you were a German or a Nazi sympathiser.

And the overwhelming majority of Germany's population fell under that category.

Under Stalin you had to be loyal to Stalin - much easier than changing your nationality.

HA!
Stalin killed many loyal bolsheviks for no reason. The ONLY senior bolshevik that Stalin did not kill was Molotov - do you think all others were traitors?

I read a lot on Stalin and he never killed anyone "just for kicks". Any totalitarian leader can be argued to be "paranoid". I could try and be loyal as that at least gives me a chance. I cannot support a system that will not accpet me however hard I tried.

Apparently you read Stalin's authorised biography, then.

Anyone who actually read about Stalin knows that he instituted "killing quotas" in certain regions(specially the Ukraine and the Volga region) - this means random killings.

Second Point: look at the SA killings. Same story fear of unloyalty and "power challenge".

Hitler killed one group of the Nazi Party, Stalin killed ALL factions of the Communist Party. As I mentioned earlier he killed 90.5% of the Politburo members.

 

[Smellincoffee]

I'm glad to see "Uncle Joe" Stalin is leading...

 

[Adler17]

Hitler killed the Jews because of their "race". He also killed Gypsies, gays, commies,... Short all of them who were in strong oppostion to his ideas. 6 million in total. Slavs should be slaves (Poles) or living in sattelite states (Slovaks). Negroes were only few in Germany and were not so persecuted like Jews. Many Nazis didn´t know how to handle with them. There is an autobiography of Hans Jürgen Massaquoi, a German negroe living in that time, who immigrated to the US after the war and was founder of the magazine Ebony IIRC. Hitler was evil, clearly.
Stalin on the other side was a tyrann who persecuted not only whole populations, Caucasians like Chechens, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, but also all people who were in opposition or might become a danger. If you wasn´t aware what the newspapers said as propaganda you could "disappear" by using the propaganda of yesterday. All in all it is estimated Stalin has 25 million people as victims.
So all in all Stalin has earned the crown well. Then Hitler or Mao or Ghengis Khan, Pol Pot,...

Adler

 

[Richard Cribb]

First of all, as pointed out already, finding the most evil person in history is a bit futile. The list is also something that one could argue about. Ho Chi Minh?? Why? Because USA in a sense lost the Vietnamese War? Does anybody think he was worse than say Franco, Salazar, Trujillo, Batista, Stroessner, Amin, Pinochet, Mobutu, Ceasescu or for that matter Reagan (a really evil and despicable person in my opinion.).
Why is there not any Assyrian kings, Roman emperors, medieval tyrants on the list. Or some conquistadors. Or slavetraders. Or 19th century imperialists? Or people like Robert Knox.Just to name a few who could rival Kerry and Kruschev...
I can't really say that I can pick a "winner", even if I tend to tilt towards USA's and China's little lapdog Pol Pot or Hitler(see below).Ante Pavelic also comes to mind.
To the Stalin/Hitler debate. While I think that anyone who says anything nice about Stalin deserves a knuckle sandwich, I even have personal reasons to hate him as my wife's family got to feel the love of Uncle Joe, I think Hitler played in another league. It seems to me that there is one thing some people in this thread tend to overlook.
Hitler lost the war.
He only got started with his wicked work.
Try to imagine what would have happened if The Third Reich had won WW2. What would Russia, Ukrania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, all those countries with "inferior" races been transformed into? Also consider euthanasia-programs targeted to "useless eaters".The treatment of homosexuals. Imagine really huge scale medical experiments with human beings.
Stalin's tyranny was at least in some ways rational, Hitler's was an irrational savagery, a rejection of principles of Enlightenment.
Of course it could have been that personally Hitler was a bit nicer, I for my sake consider them both as just psychopaths and I don't see any huge difference neither do I see that as a very relevant discussion. But if we stick to their politics, Hitler is the worst - by far.
So some words about Marx. No, I am not a Marxist but I admire a lot about Marx, and he was a great thinker and polyhistor and certainly no daydreamer.I also think that it is an admirable thing that somebody born into a safe position in society sacrifices his own welfare for the sake of those less fortunate.
I recommend everybody who hasn't done so already to read what Popper wrote about him. While Popper justly rejected some very dangerous and false aspects of Marxism, he also had a very high opinion of Marx as a person and a keen understanding of the importance of Marx as a historical figure.
One can also reflect over the fact that many people who can't be accused of being Marxists still sees his relevance,like that famous article "The return of Karl Marx" by John Cassidy.

 

[Adler17]

Yes Hitler lost the war. Yes, Hitler would have done more bad things if he could. But so also Stalin. IIRC a huge new terror wave was planned when he died. Many lives were saved. Also you can´t know what happened if Hitler won the war as there were many soldiers in the Wehrmacht who thought to win the war first and then deal with the Brown Scum in Berlin. However it is as well likely he would have made a terror regime in his occupied areas.
But luceafarul, you do make a mistake: Just as Hitler Stalin was a totalitarian who was not a man which had an ideology, at least in the way of Marx. Stalin wanted the power côute que côute. He wanted to keep the power, if neccessary he would have proclaimed himself as the new Czar of Russia. He is there similar to his brother in spirits, Hitler. Stalin was more evil. But since Einstein we know everything is relative: Both are playing in the same league and both are burning in the worst level of hell and both would have been hung for his crimes in a fair trial after the war.
So all in all you have to see what they really DID. Only the real deeds are the basic of a judgement. Hitler was a danger of Jews, gays and others. Most other Germans were relative free. Stalin was a danger for Chechens, Germans and others. ALL others had to fear his erratic mood. So it is clear for me that Uncle Joe is the leader. But we can of course debate on the distance to Hitler.

Adler