For many years, I have assumed that the worst dictators in (at least) modern history have been:
- Joseph Stalin (lived 1878-1953)
- Adolf Hitler (lived 1889-1945)
- Mao Zedong (lived 1893-1976)
- Pol Pot (lived 1925-1998)
- Saddam Hussein (lived 1937-2006)
The reason for this is that Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot were the largest killers from famines and/or genocides, whilst Hussein was both an extreme warmonger and also genocidally exterminated many Kurdish populations with poison gas in northern Iraq.
Most people around me have found this an absurd list, but after re-watching the Evolution of Evil series on YouTube tonight, I googled for a list of worst dictators and found ‘The Top 10 Worst Dictators in History’ by Larry Slawson — who received his Masters Degree at UNC Charlotte and specializes in Russian and Ukrainian history.
Slawsons’s list was:
- Mao Zedong
- Genghis Khan
- Joseph Stalin
- Adolf Hitler
- Leopold II
- Pol Pot
- Saddam Hussein
- Idi Amin
- Vlad the Impaler
- Ivan the Terrible
It surprised me a lot to see the familiar “big five” dictators (in bold) were in the top seven, separated from each other only by two older rulers. This does suggest to me that — perhaps not as usually as I would wish because of inability to be sceptical without clear refutation about extreme views — my judgment is reasonably accurate. The list could also be a reflection of potential bias, given that the death tolls attributed to Stalin and Mao by writers like Paul Kengor do not seem to be accepted by academic scholars away from the conservative “Christian madrassas” (as my brother calls them) like Kengor’s Grove City College or Benjamin Wiker’s former Franciscan University of Steubenville. Still, I was oddly surprised by what I read on such a brief glance.
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