POLL: Most 'evil' states in history

What is to you the most evil state that existed before 1900?

  • Austria(-Hungary)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Bulgaria

    Votes: 2 0.5%
  • Byzantine Empire

    Votes: 4 1.0%
  • Crusader States

    Votes: 15 3.8%
  • Frankish Empire

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • France (post Frankish Empire)

    Votes: 4 1.0%
  • Germany

    Votes: 6 1.5%
  • Holy Roman Empire

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Macedonian Empire

    Votes: 1 0.3%
  • Ottoman Empire

    Votes: 37 9.3%
  • Portugal

    Votes: 3 0.8%
  • Roman Empire

    Votes: 5 1.3%
  • Russia

    Votes: 7 1.8%
  • Safavid persia

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Spain

    Votes: 50 12.6%
  • United Kingdom

    Votes: 44 11.1%
  • United States

    Votes: 17 4.3%
  • Others

    Votes: 50 12.6%
  • Netherlands

    Votes: 2 0.5%
  • Mongolian Empire

    Votes: 150 37.8%

  • Total voters
    397
This list needs more options.

Off the top of my head:
-Shang Dynasty (actually if you consider how much of China used to not be Han it's probably reasonable to say every Chinese dynasty should be on here)
-Delhi Sultanate
-Frankish Kingdom
-Assyria
-Carthage
-Aztecs and other participants in the Flower Wars (getting your teeth kicked in by Spain is not a get out of jail free card)


What did Carthage do? Iirc she wasn't particularly genocidal.

If you're thinking of human sacrifice, while not particularly nice it's little if any worse than exposing babies on hillsides, or killing people in the arena as public entertainment. And afaik the Carthaginians didn't go waging wars to get more sacrificial victims.
 
I do. The only truly successful genocide in history, in that there are literally no ‘real’ Tasmanian Aborigines left, just 29,000 mixed race individuals.

It's not the only successful genocide. What about the Taino? How about the Conestogas, the last of which were also murdered in cold blood? A lot of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Pacific, and Siberia were wiped out in modern times.
 

Isaac Beach

Banned
By that reasoning the Maori extermination of the Chatham Island Moriori counts too. In less than thirty years, the population fell from 2000 to 101, and the last full-blooded Moriori died in the 1930s.

That's fair. I should've expanded on that in a more comprehensive way. Uuuuh, genocided in such a way that their entire language, culture and ethnicity were wiped out. All 'Palawa' culture today is reconstructed from what few historical scraps were recovered. 'Only' was probably the wrong word; 'comprehensive' or 'total' would've been better. 'One of the only comprehensive or total ethnocultural genocides in history'.

It's not the only successful genocide. What about the Taino? How about the Conestogas, the last of which were also murdered in cold blood? A lot of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Pacific, and Siberia were wiped out in modern times.

First of all, relax. You're coming across very aggressively in a way that I don't appreciate.

Now, the Taino are arguably still extant in the descendants of Carib Mestizos, and there is some argument as to whether they were completely wiped out or persisted in the Antillean highlands for such a time that they became indistinguishable from the aforementioned Mestizos. Further, their genetic markers are in fact dominant among Puerto Rican citizens where 69.6% of the studied Puerto Ricans were found to have Taino genetic markers, according to a 2003 study by the University of Puerto Rico, meaning their contribution to the country's genetic makeup is substantial. This would not be the case were they completely genocided out of existence or into obscurity. (I don't know if you'll need an institutional proxy to view the PDF, sorry if you do)
The destruction of the Susquehannock/Conestoga does not constitute a genocide, unfortunately. They are a subcultural group of the Iroquois; the total destruction of the Iroquois would constitute a genocide, but not a subculture of the Iroquois. While it's not necessarily complaisant, under Article 6 of the Rome Statute you can only genocide national, ethnical, racial or religious groups. The Susquqhannock does not fall into any of these categories, unfortunately, and so their destruction is not genocide.
It was probably a misstatement to say that the Palawa were the only group to ever be completely wiped out, but I would question your parameters for what constitutes a genocide. Contrary to popular belief the definition of genocide is rather narrow. It has to be the active and continued suppression and destruction of any of the aforementioned groups, and is only considered complete and total when every single member of that group is dead. This is why I tend to paraphrase and say the Palawa are the only group to be completely wiped out because they are one of the few groups to fit the definition of 'complete genocide'. However I do rescind my statement that they are in fact the only group to be completely wiped out as that is beyond the scope of my knowledge.
 
If I had the choice, I would go with Congo Free State or the British East India Company.

Both of those are evil as in they actively did not care about human life and actively used violence in the only goal of maximizing profits.

Beyond that, all states did bad stuff. Let's be cynical for a moment: the states that refused violence do not exist anymore.
 
Contrary to popular belief the definition of genocide is rather narrow. It has to be the active and continued suppression and destruction of any of the aforementioned groups, and is only considered complete and total when every single member of that group is dead.

Genocide is an attempt to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Partial genocide is still genocide.

Also, one can commit genocide without actually killing anyone. Forced sterilisation, abduction of children, et cetera, all count. The aforementioned Maori/Moriori example not only involved physical massacre, but surviving Moriori were forbidden to marry each other.
 
Of the ones mentioned here, maybe the British Empire. She did far more intentional and industrial-scale damage to more societies than Spain's empire ever did. Spain (or Portugal, IDK) may have been the first global empire, with all the suffering that such a thing implies, but she certainly wasn't the most powerful or intentionally cruel.

Sure, the Mongolians were terrifying, but they lasted a couple generations before petering out into a bunch of squabbling khanates. The Brits, on the other hand, have so shaped the world that it is English that is our modern-day Latin, and even now we subconsciously suppress the idea that Britannia's reign over the world committed crimes.
 

Isaac Beach

Banned
Genocide is an attempt to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Partial genocide is still genocide.

Also, one can commit genocide without actually killing anyone. Forced sterilisation, abduction of children, et cetera, all count.

I know all this and I never denied any of the other genocides took place (except the Conestoga for reasons I outlined). I denied that they were complete or whole. Not all Jews were killed during the Holocaust, but that’s obviously still a genocide.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
To be honest, I don't think any of the states currently listed in this poll can be called "evil". Certain governments of many or ever all of them committed evil acts. Certain people in service of many or ever all of them committed evil acts. But even then, "evil" must be qualified in the context of its time. Was the Roman Empire "evil", or was it just...an empire? Empires do both good things and evil things, almost by definition.

The only kind of powers I'd call objectively evil are nightmare tyrannies like Nazi Germany (see: Holocaust), the USSR under Stalin (see: Holodomor), Cambodia under Pol Pot (see: killing fields), China under Mao (see: great leap forward), North Korea (see: batshit insane dictators and concentration camps) or the Islamic State (see: burning lots of people alive while attempting to set up a repressive theocracy). Warlord regimes and certain dictatorships in Africa tend to qualify for similar reasons. I think you can put something like the CSA on this list as well, being so disgustingly all about slavery.

But there we get to a crux, because I don't think the antebellum USA qualifies as evil. In part because, while it practiced slavery, it did so in a time when this was not widely considered a great evil. When a change in attitude came about, a new moral understanding was gradually embraced in the North. In the South, not so much. I'm trying to say that doing things we now recognise as evil when they were widely considered normal is less unforgivable than still doing those those things even when the world at large already understood that it was wrong.

Context matters. If you want a pre-1900 country that can actually be called evil, I'd say the CSA is your best bet. Ironically, that one's not on the list.
 
I think i'll finnaly go with the mongol empire, my reasonning being that they conquered, enslaved and killed like all the other ones present but, contrary to them, never built anything of their own, never discovered or brought any advancement be artistic or scientific.
They pillaged and relied on the accomplishment of others to survive, like some sort of giant, civilisation wide, leech.

EDIT: obviously I dont mean about the individuals that composed the empire but the empire as a whole

The same could be said for the Caliphates as well as others as the Ottomans and the Mughals with the previous lot appropriating a great deal from conquered peoples and somehow managing to lose their historical infamy in the present day, whereas the Mongols reinvigorated trade and increased communication throughout much of Eurasia amongst other "positive" things during their rule, along with being tolerant of other religions as well as producing the Pax Mongólica - a period so stable that "it was said a virgin carrying a gold urn filled with jewels could walk from one end of the empire to another without being molested."

With regard to the New World would say Spain runs the above very close and probably even displaces all of them as a contender for one of the most Evil states in history, though one could argue that the standard of Spain's historical Evilness is somewhat mitigated due to most of Iberia being occupied for centuries resulting in their brutality being influenced to some degree by their former occupiers as well as unintentionally bringing over Old World diseases to the New World.
 
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With regard to the New World would say Spain runs the above very close and probably even displaces all of them as a contender for one of the most Evil states in history

It might just be my own personal bias, but I think the United States shares an equal level of evil, if not more, and doesn't have the excuse of centuries of being occupied by the Moors.

Of course, it's wholesale displacement and starvation versus forced assimilation and disease. Not really sure what's worse. Either way, who now speaks the tongue of the Taino? Who now speaks the tongue of the Yurok, or the Powhatan, or the Wichita?
 
I voted for the Mongols, the reason is that I can find positive aspects in the rest of them, while the Mongols murdered vast amond of people only to collapse and their successor states to be rather unpleasant in their own right.
 
Agreed that all cases need to be judged by the standards of their time. But weren't the Assyrians pretty savage even for the 7th Century BC?
 
Wait why is Bulgaria included?

Yeah, that one makes me scratch my head too. I suppose you could say it was due to their multiple invasions of the Byzantine and Latin Empires... but unless I'm forgetting something, nothing they did was out of place for the standards of the time. If that's the reason Bulgaria is on the list (and it might not be, eastern Europe is not my area of study), then people like the Visigoths and the Vandals should also be on it.
 
An awfully Eurocentric list of states. What about Assyria? The Aztec state? Various Chinese states? The Sultanate of Delhi was absolutely brutal toward its non-Muslim subjects -- and quite proudly recorded its numerous massacres of them.

I chose "other", since there were numerous states that were worse than any of the ones listed.
 
The concept of evil is not too expanded and could be subjective frankly. Thus, could we receive a more concise criteria for which state I choose? Say, which state did this or that the worst?
 
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