People you consider more evil than Hitler

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Donald Trump when you don't accept Eday results that destroys Democracy

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Shirō Ishii.

In general I notice a conspicuous lack of figures from that era of Japanese history in this thread.

I'd argue that Kishi Nobusuke, who became a postwar PM and whose immediate descendants are still politically relevant today, was, if not "more evil than Hitler", at least similarly evil in his public capacity to most similarly situated Nazi occupation functionaries, with his singularly unpleasant personal life larded on top of that. Obviously the primary responsibility for Japan's much more toxic attitude towards its past than Germany's lies with the Japanese people, but GHQ deciding not to insist on points like this certainly didn't help.

[Middle-aged Europe]

Trump and Obama.

That's some lame-ass trolling if I ever saw one. Try harder.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Shirō Ishii.

In general I notice a conspicuous lack of figures from that era of Japanese history in this thread.

I'd argue that Kishi Nobusuke, who became a postwar PM and whose immediate descendants are still politically relevant today, was, if not "more evil than Hitler", at least similarly evil in his public capacity to most similarly situated Nazi occupation functionaries, with his singularly unpleasant personal life larded on top of that. Obviously the primary responsibility for Japan's much more toxic attitude towards its past than Germany's lies with the Japanese people, but GHQ deciding not to insist on points like this certainly didn't help.

Kenji Doihara is honestly probably the most evil person in the Japanese military environment of the time period, though there is very tough competition.

[HisGrace]

Stalin/Mao/Pol Pot/Genghis Khan all deserve to be put on a similar tier. Not going to compare body counts and do a ranking, that's just morbid.

Dishonorable mentions for people not mentioned are Yahya Khan, President of Pakistan during the Bangladesh Genocide, and Talaat Pasha, an Ottoman bureaucrat generally cited as the architect of both the Armenian and Greek genocides.

Czar Alexander II is a weird one in that he carried out the Circassian genocide which killed around 2 million people but also abolished serfdom/slavery in Russia.

Shirō Ishii.

In general I notice a conspicuous lack of figures from that era of Japanese history in this thread.

Japan's WWII era society is more or less as bad as the Nazis but it's harder to find one person to name as primarily responsible since their government was more of an oligarchy. Different people were responsible for different crimes as opposed to the Nazis where everything they did can ultimately be pinned on Hitler.

[HisGrace]

Even if you weren't a class enemy in the People's Republic of China, you still ran the risk of having all your property stolen, being humiliated in the street and tortured into submission, and then turned into a slave for Mao's latest idiotic project while you watched your family starve to death, which Mao would simply mark as another number on a sheet of paper.

Even if you weren't an intellectual or ethnic minority in Democratic Kampuchea, you would still be forced at gunpoint to surrender all your possessions and march out to some swampland where you'd slowly be worked and starved to death while your children were abducted and taken to an indoctrination center to be turned into slaves for the state, if they were lucky enough to not be used for horrifying medical experiments or sexual slavery.

Some people would tell you that this is specifically not as bad because it was equally s****y for everyone. Or even better than the United States since here some people are billionaires even if the worst off are still better than in Cambodia or Maoist China. That's why equality is never going to be my no. 1 ideal.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Dishonorable mentions for people not mentioned are Yahya Khan, President of Pakistan during the Bangladesh Genocide, and Talaat Pasha, an Ottoman bureaucrat generally cited as the architect of both the Armenian and Greek genocides.

Oh yeah, those two are definitely undermentioned and underrated for their evil. Along with Leopold II of Belgium. Another utterly monstrous historical individual that's very unknown today is Queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar.

Abimael Guzmán is actually someone I'd mention in this vein as well, he didn't kill anywhere near as many people, but that's only because he failed to ever take power. What would've occurred if he ever did is a pretty horrifying scenario. Although granted not only was that near impossible it wouldn't have lasted long, all the neighboring countries and likely the US would've invaded and ousted a Shining Path regime almost immediately.

[Battista Minola 1616]

Dishonorable mentions for people not mentioned are Yahya Khan, President of Pakistan during the Bangladesh Genocide, and Talaat Pasha, an Ottoman bureaucrat generally cited as the architect of both the Armenian and Greek genocides.

Talaat Pasha is a good shout, especially since the Armenian genocide had a status as the apex of conceivable evil before the Holocaust took the spot, seemingly had an influence on Nazi tactics, and was a major reason for the coinage of the very word 'genocide'.

[TDAS04]

A case could be made for some, including Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin.  On the other hand, Stalin’s troops did liberate Auschwitz and were instrumental in defeating Hitler, thus ending a genocide (seems a bit odd, Stalin himself may not have actually cared).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Dishonorable mentions for people not mentioned are Yahya Khan, President of Pakistan during the Bangladesh Genocide, and Talaat Pasha, an Ottoman bureaucrat generally cited as the architect of both the Armenian and Greek genocides.

Oh yeah, those two are definitely undermentioned and underrated for their evil. Along with Leopold II of Belgium. Another utterly monstrous historical individual that's very unknown today is Queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar.

I've seen Ranavalona revisionism here and there in a way that I haven't for Yahya Khan, the Three Pashas, or Leopold, but only in the sense that people have argued she wasn't really that much worse than other similarly situated historical rulers, not in the sense that they've argued she was Good Actually.

[TheReckoning]

I don’t know if anyone here feels the same way, but I personally find Hitler-Stalin comparisons in these kind of questions to be rather historically naive in a sense- I think Hitler was, objectively, much worse than Stalin. That’s not because Stalin wasn’t an absolute monster, because he was. It’s moreso that I think even though Hitler/the Nazis are seen as being the “epitome” of evil, their awfulness can often be understated. Even on top of the Holocaust, the Nazis can be blamed for a vast majority of death and destruction over the course of WW2 in the European theater, which on top of leveling almost an entire content, also killed 30+ million people. Stalin, as bad as he was, never managed to reach that level of damage.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

A case could be made for some, including Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin.  On the other hand, Stalin’s troops did liberate Auschwitz and were instrumental in defeating Hitler, thus ending a genocide (seems a bit odd, Stalin himself may not have actually cared).

I think the best way to handle the moral historiography of the Eastern Front is that, while there's no moral comparison between the two combatants during those four years (with the arguable exception of the invasion of Germany itself, with the mass rapes and so forth), that was due to circumstance rather than due to core, lasting differences in the virtues or vices of the respective leaderships. I think both parts of this formulation should be insisted upon, although the second could be disputed based on the (very real, imo) moral difference between Nazism and Bolshevism as ideologies. I just don't think that really reflects on Stalin, Beria, etc. as people.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Here's another person who rarely gets mentioned and should and thus is notable for "underrated evil": José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, President of Paraguay from 1814 until his death in 1840. His actual death toll isn't particularly large in comparison to the other people being mentioned, but he basically pioneered the modern day totalitarian state, Paraguay's secret police force established is often considered to be the first one of such a thing by modern standards and set up concentration camps for dissidents after banning all opposition parties, a cult of personality (he was commonly known as something like "El Supremo") and also made Paraguay probably the first continental isolated hermit state in history ala North Korea and Hoxhaist Albania. Many believe that 20th century fascist and communist regimes directly studied and modeled themselves after his methods.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Shirō Ishii.

In general I notice a conspicuous lack of figures from that era of Japanese history in this thread.

I'd argue that Kishi Nobusuke, who became a postwar PM and whose immediate descendants are still politically relevant today, was, if not "more evil than Hitler", at least similarly evil in his public capacity to most similarly situated Nazi occupation functionaries, with his singularly unpleasant personal life larded on top of that. Obviously the primary responsibility for Japan's much more toxic attitude towards its past than Germany's lies with the Japanese people, but GHQ deciding not to insist on points like this certainly didn't help.

On a related note, the Imperial House in general, and Shōwa---who bears ultimate responsibility for Japan's actions in WWII, if perhaps not the most direct responsibility---specifically, gets way too much of a pass here (as they literally did from GHQ).

From my admittedly limited knowledge, before the end of WWII it was a criminal offense to criticize the Emperor or his family, and since then it's become a social taboo (with the very real threat of violence facing those Japanese who dare break it).

[CumbrianLefty]

Here's another person who rarely gets mentioned and should and thus is notable for "underrated evil": José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, President of Paraguay from 1814 until his death in 1840. His actual death toll isn't particularly large in comparison to the other people being mentioned, but he basically pioneered the modern day totalitarian state, Paraguay's secret police force established is often considered to be the first one of such a thing by modern standards and set up concentration camps for dissidents after banning all opposition parties, a cult of personality (he was commonly known as something like "El Supremo") and also made Paraguay probably the first continental isolated hermit state in history ala North Korea and Hoxhaist Albania. Many believe that 20th century fascist and communist regimes directly studied and modeled themselves after his methods.

And then there was, of course, Francisco Solano Lopez. Started what was quite literally one of *the* most insane wars in history which led to Paraguay being all but annihiliated from existence. And his final words? "I die *with* my country!". What more needs to be said??

[Since I'm the mad scientist proclaimed by myself]

This poster, people who use the "call the poster behind a link horrible but the link goes to the profile of whatever poster clicks it" trick, and people who intentionally say hypocritical things for humor value.

Edit: forgot an "of"

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

This poster, people who use the "call the poster behind a link horrible but the link goes to the profile whatever poster clicks it" trick, and people who intentionally say hypocritical things for humor value.

Also on the list: people who consider adopting red avatars.

[nicholas.slaydon]

The real answer is Vladimir Lenin. All of the great villains of modern history who perpetuated the greatest evils of the 20th century (Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot etc.) expect Hitler, all had their roots in the absolutely evil philosophy of Vladimir Lenin. I think it could easily be argued that Lenin was the most sinister and evil person to ever live.

[John Dule]

This poster, people who use the "call the poster behind a link horrible but the link goes to the profile of whatever poster clicks it" trick, and people who intentionally say hypocritical things for humor value.

Edit: forgot an "of"

I like it when people screw this joke up by linking to their own profiles.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

This poster, people who use the "call the poster behind a link horrible but the link goes to the profile of whatever poster clicks it" trick, and people who intentionally say hypocritical things for humor value.

Edit: forgot an "of"

I like it when people screw this joke up by linking to their own profiles.

That's now a feature, not a bug. Virginia redid the code to do that to make this stupid "joke" backfire.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

It's interesting this question is being understood as "worst world leaders". Not that I don't understand why - the likes of Albert Fish, Dahmer, Bundy, HH Holmes etc never could have death tolls in even the hundreds, even as they personally carried out their actions. The same goes for relatively anonymous people within these evil regimes who were remarkable even for the context of their regimes for their cruelty - Dirlewanger, Ilse Koch and so on.

[the artist formerly known as catmusic]

I can't really compare the evil of these types of people, but there are definitely people on par with Hitler. Pol Pot is the first person that comes to mind for me. Also Leopold II of Belgium - far too often overlooked in these discussions.

[RC]

Nobody is worse. Stalin can come close, but it's a pretty open-and-shut case for Hitler to be the worst human ever unless a nuclear holocaust happens at some time in our future.

[LAKISYLVANIA]

Nobody is worse. Stalin can come close, but it's a pretty open-and-shut case for Hitler to be the worst human ever unless a nuclear holocaust happens at some time in our future.

in that case Truman beats Hitler.

[Zinneke]

the mods