Okay, here’s my revised list. In this one, I’m trying to limit hindsight as much as possible.
1. Slavery without restrictions or basic rights for slaves. If you’re going to exploit the crap out of people, don’t do it in the most painful and deadly ways imaginable. Really.
2. Scramble for Africa. Lukewarm benefits (sometimes net drains) in exchange for... death, disorder, ethnic strife, and the worst border drawing I’ve ever seen? I mean, I could do better than that.
3. Atahualpa putting himself into a position to get captured, then failing at ransoming himself. At a critical time in the Inca empire, getting yourself captured, becoming a puppet, and giving away literal tons of precious metals for naught is not something you should be doing.
4. Lenin letting Stalin into power. It’s hard to get worse than Stalin. Then I’m also going to include all of Stalin’s brutal, wasteful, ineffectual, paranoid policies.
5. The allied treatment of Germany post WWI, and the general policy of appeasement. A lot of Hitler’s decisions weren’t the greatest either...
6. The Great Leap Forward. Also the five year plans that could apparently fit into four years. If the world had mods, they would’ve banned Mao and Stalin for being such idiotic, harebrained, paranoid, destructive nincompoops.
7. The last Sui Emperor invading Goguryeo. Thanks
@profxyz.
8. Timur being a wrecking ball.
9. Japan’s kamikaze Strategy (and fighting the us in the first place). I mean, game strategy can be hard to understand sometimes, but most people naturally avoid lose lose situations...
10. Constantine tightly linking Christianity to the State apparatus.
Honorable mentions:
Nuclear bombs. Are you MAD?
Nader Shah going a bit whack.
Decisions leading up to the Byzantine-Sassanid war of 602-28. I’m not gonna blame Maurice, but almost everyone before and after him was being dumb. First, his predecessor throwing money into the water, forcing Maurice to be parsimonious. Then, Phocas revolting, beginning the war in the first place. Heraclius revolting collapsed the situation further, and Khosrau’s refusal to accept any peace deal dragged the war longer. Any semblance of order and peace wouldn’t be restored in the region until well after the beginning of the Caliphate. Even then, that ended up fragmenting, turning two superpowers with relative unity and stability into a huge mess.
Destroying the Ottomans, then using the area for your own interests and not resolving the many internal tensions. Sigh. Every part of the former Ottoman Empire struggles with some huge issue or another after its dissolution (and some parts to this day).
Same for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Being more careful with its dissolution would be helpful.
The Decolonization process. It could’ve been done so much better. I kinda already touched on that in the “Scramble for Africa” part of things, but just to emphasize. This, more than anything, might have relatively easily prevented the conflicts, genocides, instability, and exploitation that much of Africa suffered (and still suffers)
Khwarezm not being more careful with the mongols. If you play with fire, you’ll get burnt. If you play with mongols, you’ll get killed. Even the caliph gets a special death by horse trampling.
Justinian and the gothic war.
Buchanan being an ineffectual president who contributed to the Civil War being as long and bloody as it was.
Using race as a justification for slavery (and later for colonization and nationalism). This is the sort of behavior that’s get you kicked if the real world had mods.
Sexism/genderism. So half the people will be treated inferior to the other because of private parts, or gender orientation? Really? Especially after women became vital in the workplace, kicking them out and being sexist to them was just dumb. Plain dumb.
