worst villain ever

Worst villains?

  • Assyrians

    Votes: 6 3.9%
  • Huns

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Mongols

    Votes: 12 7.9%
  • Turks

    Votes: 4 2.6%
  • Aztecs

    Votes: 4 2.6%
  • The Inquisition

    Votes: 8 5.3%
  • Nazi Germany

    Votes: 80 52.6%
  • Stalinist Soviet Union

    Votes: 27 17.8%
  • North Korea

    Votes: 6 3.9%
  • Muslim Integralism

    Votes: 5 3.3%

  • Total voters
    152
Vote for your "favourite" villain regime (i.e.: mass murder, tyranny, warmongering, etc.)

  • The Assyrians
  • The Huns
  • The Mongols
  • The Ottoman Turks
  • The Aztecs
  • The Inquisition
  • Nazi Germany
  • Stalinist Soviet Union
  • North Korea
  • Muslim Integralism
 
Cain. When he killed Abel he wiped out 25% of world's population, feat unparalled in history and not repeatable short of nuclear war. :D

Joking aside I'd say Nazis because they planned to wipe out entire groups solely because of belonging to said group. There would be no chances for survival and because they went after them in such industrialised manner. While I agree Khmer Rouge were as brutal you had a chance for getting out of camps. There was no such chances for Jews or other groups.
 

NapoleonXIV

Banned
Nazis, hands down from this list, Stalinists close second. The Mongols killed more but it took 50 years and was in China in the 1200's. The Nazis were a gang of thugs who hijacked the most advanced nation in the world and used it to industrialise death in the service of a madman.

Many of the others are, (very arguably) more a matter of bad press and of their times

Isn't the latest findings on the Inquisition actually that it probably saved some nations from the worst ravages of the Witchhunt mania?
 
NapoleonXIV said:
Nazis, hands down from this list, Stalinists close second. The Mongols killed more but it took 50 years and was in China in the 1200's. The Nazis were a gang of thugs who hijacked the most advanced nation in the world and used it to industrialise death in the service of a madman.

Many of the others are, (very arguably) more a matter of bad press and of their times

Isn't the latest findings on the Inquisition actually that it probably saved some nations from the worst ravages of the Witchhunt mania?

True, but countries like Italy, Spain and Portugal have never fully recovered from the scientific castration of minds it enforced.
 

Grey Wolf

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Mongols

Maybe the Mongols don't win other votes because people do not know what they did in detail ? Destroyed entire civilisations, butchered the entire populations of cities, and their longevity IMHO makes them WORSE for being a ravaging tide upon the Earth for so much longer

Grey Wolf
 
Grey Wolf said:
Maybe the Mongols don't win other votes because people do not know what they did in detail ? Destroyed entire civilisations, butchered the entire populations of cities, and their longevity IMHO makes them WORSE for being a ravaging tide upon the Earth for so much longer

Grey Wolf
Have you ever read the bold reconstructions of the Assyrian conquest of enemy cities reported in their literature?
In comparison, Genghis Khan seems a British gentleman.
 
I really don't see any difference between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The Soviets killed more people than the Nazis ever dreamed, and had the potential to kill many, many more.
 

Xen

Banned
Im not going to vote because there is no way to see how one is worse than another. The Spanish surprisingly didnt make the list, their treatment of the native americans were far worse than the way the United States, Britain, France, Mexico and Canada treated Native Americans. They destroyed three mighty empires in Central and South America. But as Grey Wolf said the Mongols arent much better, the Russians under Ivan the Terrible were particularly brutal, so were the Vikings. We cant forget the Crusaders or the Islamic Conquerors all were responsible for much travesty and destruction.
 

Ian the Admin

Administrator
Donor
The Soviets killed more people than the Nazis ever dreamed

Stalin's mass starvation and other nastiness killed 2-3 times as many people as the holocaust, though in a longer period. NOBODY has "killed more people than the Nazis ever dreamed" - some of their plans for what to do with a conquered Russia called for extending their mass extermination to an extent that would have exceeded the worst of Stalin and Mao. And then there's the death toll from fighting WW2 itself, started by the Nazis and exceeding the death toll of the Holocaust and Stalin's atrocities put together.

No, the Nazis were REALLY nasty. Stalin was a horrible brutal dictator and he murdered tens of millions of people, but his killing potential was limited compared to Hitler because he didn't try to conquer neighboring regions in order to exterminate much of their population and move his own people into the resulting "living space".

There are similarities to other historical civilizations. The Assyrians and the Mongolians, in particular, were horrible mass killers because they were both terribly brutal, and effective conquerors who spread that brutality to an every larger region. The early Mongol conquests were every bit as brutal as the Nazis, except that since they didn't have machineguns to exterminate lines of people, they just hacked them to death with axes.
 
Nazi Germany, hands down. I know this sounds ethnocentric, but 20th Century Germany was a center of modern western civilization, it claimed to be an heir to Christian love and humanistic enlightenment, and went in two generations from being one of the most liberal and tolerent European nations regarding its Jewish citizens to being the architect of the most horrible atrocities of modern times. Only Stalin's Russia comes close; Stalinism because it also stemmed from a 20th century western base in a culture which should have had more respect for human life. It's nowhere near as bad, however, because by all measures, early 20th century Russia was nowhere near as westernized and influenced by enlightenment values as Germany. My third worst would be the Inquisition because these mass murders were performed by people believing they were Christians perverting a religion which teaches tolerence and unconditional love. We need to realize, however, that Spanish society and culture of the 1400-1500's had been informed by years of religious war between Christians and Moslems, and was a pre-enlightment, much more brutish culture.

With the possible exception of North Korea and modern Islamic radicalism (if that's what "integralism" means), none of the other candidates represented cultures which would be expected to be aware of or practice respect for individual human lives, as further tempered by modern political notions of human equality and human dignity. Certainly, the acts these cultures and groups can be considered "evil" in an abstract sense, but this "evil" was being practiced by people who did not know what they were doing was "evil". The fact that the Nazis attemped to hide their holocaust and Germans tried to pretend it wasn't happening shows that they were fully aware of the import of their crimes.

Regarding those who didn't make the "10 most evil list", I wonder about the absence of Maoist China, the Cambodia of Pol Pot, and even Revolutionary France, which by many measures were far more "evil" than the Ottomon Turks, who over most of their history were fairly tolerant by the standards of the time (occasional mass murders of Armenians and others notwithstanding).
 
zoomar said:
Nazi Germany, hands down. I know this sounds ethnocentric, but 20th Century Germany was a center of modern western civilization, it claimed to be an heir to Christian love and humanistic enlightenment, and went in two generations from being one of the most liberal and tolerent European nations regarding its Jewish citizens to being the architect of the most horrible atrocities of modern times. Only Stalin's Russia comes close; Stalinism because it also stemmed from a 20th century western base in a culture which should have had more respect for human life. It's nowhere near as bad, however, because by all measures, early 20th century Russia was nowhere near as westernized and influenced by enlightenment values as Germany. My third worst would be the Inquisition because these mass murders were performed by people believing they were Christians perverting a religion which teaches tolerence and unconditional love. We need to realize, however, that Spanish society and culture of the 1400-1500's had been informed by years of religious war between Christians and Moslems, and was a pre-enlightment, much more brutish culture.

With the possible exception of North Korea and modern Islamic radicalism (if that's what "integralism" means), none of the other candidates represented cultures which would be expected to be aware of or practice respect for individual human lives, as further tempered by modern political notions of human equality and human dignity. Certainly, the acts these cultures and groups can be considered "evil" in an abstract sense, but this "evil" was being practiced by people who did not know what they were doing was "evil". The fact that the Nazis attemped to hide their holocaust and Germans tried to pretend it wasn't happening shows that they were fully aware of the import of their crimes.

Regarding those who didn't make the "10 most evil list", I wonder about the absence of Maoist China, the Cambodia of Pol Pot, and even Revolutionary France, which by many measures were far more "evil" than the Ottomon Turks, who over most of their history were fairly tolerant by the standards of the time (occasional mass murders of Armenians and others notwithstanding).

On China and Cambodia you're right, I'm ashamed at not having put them into but I should have reposted the poll.
On Revolutionary France, well, I don't consider it as a "villain" regime apart the worst xcesses of the Great Terror and the Vandéan insurrection (where atricities were committed by both sides). And as to the Napoleonic wars, they derived both by Nappy's oversize ego and the reactionary powers of Europe's obstinate refusal to recognize French power, and worst of all the new political ideas. In France revolution was necessary, and healthy in the long term, differently from England for example.
 
Stalin's mass starvation and other nastiness killed 2-3 times as many people as the holocaust, though in a longer period. NOBODY has "killed more people than the Nazis ever dreamed" - some of their plans for what to do with a conquered Russia called for extending their mass extermination to an extent that would have exceeded the worst of Stalin and Mao. And then there's the death toll from fighting WW2 itself, started by the Nazis and exceeding the death toll of the Holocaust and Stalin's atrocities put together.

No, the Nazis were REALLY nasty. Stalin was a horrible brutal dictator and he murdered tens of millions of people, but his killing potential was limited compared to Hitler because he didn't try to conquer neighboring regions in order to exterminate much of their population and move his own people into the resulting "living space".

I don't know. Check this out.

http://www.bcaplan.com/cgi/museum1.cgi
 
The worst villains are the British, no competition.

British imperialism and mercantilism is responsible for every single one of the world's ills, from bride-burning in India (almost nonexistant before British rule) to the plight of the Kurds (Churchill killed more Kurds than Saddam) to the ongoing Ibo genocide in Nigeria to Episcopalianism to the World Bank.
 
Although the British Empire may have been *indirectly* responsible for many of the ills in Africa (they pulled out too fast, leaving almost no governing structure behind), it was done with good intentions, unlike Nazi Germany.

I don't know how you can rationalize the British Empire being more villainous than Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia or Mao's Red China...
 
well they did actively try and create racial tensions in their conquered areas. Also their goal behind their imperalism was to profit themselfs. I mean their exploitions of africans in their daimond mines is disgusting. I mean in Isreal they were largely responsible for putting a wedge for the jewish and arab community as both tried to gain independence.
 
I'm saying they neither actively promoted nor commited intentional mass genocide or murder, unlike the three nations I mentioned below. You actually believe that the British were worse killers than Adolf Hitler?

By the way, if you want a better example of African exploitation try either Belgium or the Central and South American countries, or the Caribbean. Together, Central and South America plus the Caribbean imported 90%+ of African slaves....
 
The British are more villainous because they've hurt and enslaved more people than any of the others and have been doing it for 400 years. They are the most successful villains, therefore the worst.

The British are worse than the Nazis because they created the conditions for Nazism to rise.

They are worse than the ChiComms because they created the conditions that led to the Kuomintang taking power.

They are worse than Islamic Fanatics because they are the ones who installed all of the despotic pro-western Arab regimes, as well as the regimes of the Shah and Sukarno, where the only safe place to talk about the government was/is in the mosques.

They are worse than Stalin because they got the Tsar to use his people as cannon fodder in WWI, and instigated recalcitrantism among the Kulaks after the Revolution.
 
Walter_Kaufmann said:
I'm saying they neither actively promoted nor commited intentional mass genocide or murder....

Yes they did. After WWI. Kurds, Turks, Hungarians, Greeks, Albanians, various Arab clans were all ethnically-cleansed from their homes in order to fit better within British-drawn borders.
 
Okay, well, clearly there's no convincing you that the most evil nations in the history of the planet are worse than the British Empire so I'll leave you with a couple of statistics.

Empires and the deaths they are responsible for:

Mao Zedong's Regime (incl. Civil War): 54,000,000
Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany: 40,000,000
Joseph Stalin, Lenin, and Soviet Russia: 38,800,000


But, clearly, the 133 million deaths above are all the blame of the 'horrid' British Empire....
 
well they did have the power to create and mold the conditions of much of the world, and instead of doing it for good they did it to profit themselfs. But i don't think their evil, just another typical empire on a larger scale.
 
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