The Fourth Worst Person in History

Wouldn't Mengele be considered worse than those other Nazis?

I might put Muhammed above all your top three though.

If you rank Hitler as first, then you are not only considering their ideas and personality, but also their power/influence and thereby their impact

I would argue there have been worse persons than your top 3 But they lacked power, so they have been doing their utterly despicable things at a very small scale.

Please define worst people - as in evil? Then you could at a Jeffrey Dahmer or serial killers such as Columbine killers or Newhook (Adam Lanza).

There are so many in history - look at someone like Ghenghis Khan, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il (I know these guys are from the East) or some of the African dictators like Robert Mugabe.

History is filled with powerful and charismatic people that are twisted.

Steve Bartman

This is an abuse of history

Caligula must be somewhere in the top 10

History is written by the winners.

Caligula is in Hell hanging out at the Bar with Hitler and pol pot.

The bar tender is Stalin.

strong disagree with your top 3 being a consensus

Has anyone here played '2nd best holdem'? The 2nd best hand at showdown wins. Multiway pots are a mindf***. Makes more sense than this thread though

Jesus, your knowledge base is severely packing context.

Are you using “Jesus” as an exclamation, or is that your nomination for the fourth worst person in history? 😁

This is quite an extreme recency bias.

German centric too

Leopold II of Belgium is a candidate.

Most Russian Tsars were terrible also: Ivan the Terrible, etc.

how'd i miss this gem 😀

I think history is going to put Trump and Obama in the top two slots as a result of their woefully inadequate leadership on climate change.

I personally think the French and English negotiators who insisted on the draconian terms at Versailles are more responsible for the Holocaust than Hitler. They created the demand for Hitler.

In the same way, it is the neoliberal shift of the Democrats (as exemplified by Obama) that created the demand for Trump.

Trump and Hitler are symptoms of indifference. They are brutal organisms that nature designs for situations when an indifferent economic system leads to the death of the herd. Trump and Hitler didn't design the situation which led to the demand for their attributes.

Hitler and the Nazis were the pathway from Versailles to the Marshall Plan. Germans were starving. There was no other way to get there.

I think you’re letting Hitler off the hook way too easily here. Yes, Versailles was an attempt to keep Germany down economically and militarily and it was inevitable that such an attempt would fail. Germany simply had too much population and too much economic potential to remain in such a weakened state. It was certainly inevitable that a German leader would arise with the ambition to overturn the Versailles treaty and return Germany to its rightful place among the great powers of Europe.

What was not inevitable was the crazed ideology that Hitler actually espoused. It’s one thing to invade neighboring countries to secure power for your own. Such has been the behavior of powerful nations right up to the present day. It’s quite another to preach an ideology that treats entire groups of people (Jews, Slavs, Romani, homosexuals, etc.) as literally subhuman, and it’s even more egregious to actually attempt to implement that ideology in practice as Hitler did. Germany could have rejected the Versailles treaty, rebuilt its economy and re-militarized WITHOUT the holocaust.

A war might not even have been necessary. France and Britain both were very reluctant to go to war, only doing so after the invasion of Poland made it clear that Hitler was doing more than just abrogating Versailles and rebuilding Germany. Rebuilding the German economy and military and a de facto repeal of Versailles occurred well before the invasion of Poland. Had Hitler stopped and been satisfied after the Munich conference and the annexation of the Sudetenland, Germany would have been in perfectly fine shape economically and militarily.

Really? They couldn't get there without the holocaust?

I already suspected you were nuts based on your responses in the ''The Impending Death of Modern Capitalism'' thread. But you're just batshit crazy. Clearly.

A fella that was responsible for wiping out 10% of the global population should probably get a bit more mention in here. It would akin to Stalin or Hitler killing about 225 million people.

Various ways to measure. I use number of lives taken for bad reasons. Victims were for Hitler, Mao, and Stalin each in the tens of millions. No evidence suggests any other kings, emperors, or dictators came close, Gengis Kahn was millions, probably 100,000s

those are rookie numbers

A person that no one considers, partly because he was an honorable person, is Confederate President Jefferson Davis. If he would have successful, slavery would have continued not only in the South but other places in the world. There also probably would have been continued clashes between the North and South for many years, and the United States probably would have been weaker when future conflicts occurred - The Confederacy could have been an ally of Nazi Germany.

What were their alternatives ?