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
I may be missing something, but why are Bulgaria, Austria, Portugal, Holy Roman Empire(a bit vague, I'd say) and Germany(only existed for 30 years by 1900) being compared with the likes of the Mongol and British Empire?
 
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.

Would also include the Ghaznavids and Ghurids along with the Almohads.
 
The evil of the Mongolian Empire is not as clear cut as say the Khmer Rouge or the Nazi Regime (or for pre 1900 examples, the desolations of Timur). The Mongolian Empire was not the first nomadic empire of it's kind, nor was it the first Empire to force many promient and sturdy regions under it's Dominion.

However, I will argue that it was the first Empire to simutaneously organize it's conquered territories without major population shifts (except for some places in Afghanistan and China), insititute universal religious tolerance and greatly expand the connection between the east and the west. It's brutal death and destruction were not the cold, evil calculations of genocide or hate, but rather a logistical move as how else would an army of 100,000 horsemen which consistently beat forces twice as large and maintain garrisons. In fact cities that were accommodating to the Mongols were spared and treated as loyal servants. When a people or nation were conquered, the Mongols would sit the leaders down with some Airag (horse beer) and tell them "you are a Mongolian now". These factors suggest an empire which was focused less on the evil task of oppressing the populace, but more of a combination of practical but ruthless measures and a Mongolian cultural view (started by Genghis) in which we invite the conquered to join us as Mongols. They even brought rapid horseback communication to distant lands and had a massive lost and found system in which the security of the empire would allow people to find or return lost items. Finally, you steal from a merchant and the Mongols catch you, you're punished 9 times the amount you stole (9 nine is a holy number)

However, some Mongolian rulers were monsters and under their reign Mongolia could be seen as the Evil Empire. The sack of Bagdahd, the mass rape of rival Mongolian tribeswomen and the intentional spreading of the Black Plauge into Europe are all deep sins that all Mongols carry with them. I had a cousin who served in the peacekeeping missions during the 03' Iraq war. When his small Mongolian contingent were in Baghdad, a few people who recognized the Mongolian flag on their uniform would curse and shout and decry them. Later as more people in Bagdahd harrassed them, they had to be transferred.

So is the Mongolian Empire evil? Yes and even today the Mongols bear the sins of their ancestors

But was it the most evil? I don't believe so based on the tolerant and merchantile nature of the Mongol rule.
 
As other posters have mentioned, states (especially pre 20th century) are rarely evil. They’re a product of their times and their context.

However, one notable exception would be the appalling house of horror that was Leopold’s Congo Free State.
 
First of all, relax. You're coming across very aggressively in a way that I don't appreciate.

Um... If that's so, it just means you're reading into things too much, because there's nothing aggressive in my wording.

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.

Yes, I'm aware that there's plenty of indigenous DNA in modern Caribbean populations, and also that modern Caribbean cultures maintain Taino influences. By your own words, the indigenous Tasmanians also left behind extent mixed race descendents, so it's a similar situation.

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.

The Susquehannock are part of the Iroquoian language family, but they aren't Iroquois. There are plenty of ethnic groups that are distinguishable despite similar languages - Russian and Ukrainian are practically mutually intelligible, as are Uzbek and Uyghur, or Swedish and Norwegian, or Kazakh and Kyrgyz. Conversely, ethnic groups like the Han Chinese or Mongolians might have multiple mutually unintelligible languages within a single erhnic group - Demonstrating that what constitutes an ethnic group isn't even very clear-cut in the first place.

As the Susquehannocks existed as a distinct cultural group, I would argue that the murder of the Conestogas by the Paxton Boys is a genocide.

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'.

Well, you did say that there is a living mixed-race population with Palawa ancestry, so my criteria isn't much different from your's.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Why is the Netherlands in the list, asking a somebody who lives there.

As somebody who also lives there, I vaguely suspect that the answer is going to have something to do with Jan Pieterszoon Coen, and possibly with his actions on the Banda Islands specifically.

(As I mentioned before, I personally do not think that such things can make an entire country 'evil'.)
 
However, I will argue that it was the first Empire to simutaneously organize it's conquered territories without major population shifts (except for some places in Afghanistan and China), insititute universal religious tolerance and greatly expand the connection between the east and the west. It's brutal death and destruction were not the cold, evil calculations of genocide or hate, but rather a logistical move as how else would an army of 100,000 horsemen which consistently beat forces twice as large and maintain garrisons. In fact cities that were accommodating to the Mongols were spared and treated as loyal servants. When a people or nation were conquered, the Mongols would sit the leaders down with some Airag (horse beer) and tell them "you are a Mongolian now".


I've heard the Mongols compared to the early Romans - depopulating areas that resisted, but giving generous treatment to those who were willing to play ball.
 
As somebody who also lives there, I vaguely suspect that the answer is going to have something to do with Jan Pieterszoon Coen, and possibly with his actions on the Banda Islands specifically.

(As I mentioned before, I personally do not think that such things can make an entire country 'evil'.)
I second that, every country did something stupid, but to brand it as a evil state i find to go to far.
 
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.
You're right the Incas and Spartans should be on there as well. As I mentioned that list was just off the top of my head.
 
Evil according to whose standards? By the standards of the listed empires, it was day by day business. You mess up and rebel against your king in 1300 England, you get drawn and quartered. Today you get maybe a jail sentence, maybe a slap on the wrist if the media loves you.

We can't judge them according to the standards of 2018.

But I did vote for the Spanish......

:cool:
 
For a lot of Empires, we really need to separate between the States and the Chartered Companies.
The Dutch were not an evil state, the VOC is more discutable.
Belgium was not evil but Congo was hell on earth.
The British East India Company, well, not choir boys either.
They were that way cause they had very little incentives to care about people and yet came to administer whole countries.
 
I can kind of (well, kind of) understand the reasoning for putting all these countries into the poll...except one. What evil was the Holy Roman Empire associated with?
Border gore.
Write-in for the Daxi Dynasty in China. Their leader carried out the massacre of large swathes of Sichuan's population and erected the infamous "Seven Kills" stele.
Well that is crazy.
Why is Safavid Persia on the list, but not Timurid Persia?
The Timurids have arguably done a lot worse than the Safavids.
 
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?
Certainly their propaganda emphasizes their savagery A LOT. They really made a point of how much they killed, raped, burned and enslaved. The Romans, or the Chaldaeans, also recurred to this type of propaganda heavily, but it wasn't the whole point in the same way it was for the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
However, this is more a discursive strategy than anything else. Assyria wanted to spread the message that resistance to it was futile and its consequences horrible (and indeed, they made the consequences of opposing them horrible whenever they had a chance to) but was not that much more murderous than other Ancient Near Eastern powers (we sort of know that, because we have the voice of the vainquished in the Bible - whose authors do not seem to have regarded Chaldaean or Egyptian imperialist strategies as significantly better).
However, the Assyrians certainly stood out for the extent their ideology projected deliberate savagery.
 
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I feel you need to be more specific with the poll choices, would I call Russia the mostest evilest country ever? Stalinist Soviet union? Maybe.
The Nazi Germany? Maybe any other version of Germany? Nope.
 

Isaac Beach

Banned
Um... If that's so, it just means you're reading into things too much, because there's nothing aggressive in my wording.

Yes, I'm aware that there's plenty of indigenous DNA in modern Caribbean populations, and also that modern Caribbean cultures maintain Taino influences. By your own words, the indigenous Tasmanians also left behind extent mixed race descendents, so it's a similar situation.

Agree to disagree.

You’re misrepresenting my statement. The Taino are extant in that I’m implying they never went extinct as an ethnic group as a result of genocide, hence their large genetic footprint in modern Puerto Rico, whereas the Palawa very much did go extinct and those 23,000 people only have a trivial genetic footprint for that reason.

The Susquehannock are part of the Iroquoian language family, but they aren't Iroquois. There are plenty of ethnic groups that are distinguishable despite similar languages - Russian and Ukrainian are practically mutually intelligible, as are Uzbek and Uyghur, or Swedish and Norwegian, or Kazakh and Kyrgyz. Conversely, ethnic groups like the Han Chinese or Mongolians might have multiple mutually unintelligible languages within a single erhnic group - Demonstrating that what constitutes an ethnic group isn't even very clear-cut in the first place.

As the Susquehannocks existed as a distinct cultural group, I would argue that the murder of the Conestogas by the Paxton Boys is a genocide.

They are ethnolinguistically Iroquois, that is a fact. They are not a separate ethnic, religious, racial or national group from the wider Iroquois. Language plays an important role in identifying distinctions between ethnic groups but it’s not the only qualification. The Conestogas are not simply distinct because they had a slightly different language with slightly different cultural practices, just as it’s largely accepted that all the Han Chinese are one ethnic group despite linguistic and cultural differences between someone in Shanghai and someone in Inner Mongolia. Two guys with roots in Ireland are still the same ethnic Irish American despite one identifying as a New Yorker and the other a Houstonian and having different accents and day to day lives.

You could argue it, but it would be a severe misrepresentation of the definition of genocide.

Well, you did say that there is a living mixed-race population with Palawa ancestry, so my criteria isn't much different from your's.

And you’re again missing my point. The ethnic group itself is extinct as a dominant, genetically independent group. The groups you outlined that fit the bill of an ethnic group are not. Millions of people are descended directly from the Taino; only 23,000 Tasmanians have some Palawa ancestry. As such, they are completely wiped out. You will never be able to completely wipe out a genetic footprint past a certain point of population, but you can destroy the source, the original ethnic group, and all of their culture, language, society and lifestyle, which is a total extinction.
 
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?

Well I think we need to take a cost-benefit analysis of the empires, how brutal was their spread, how brutal was their rule and how positive was the long term effects of their empire. I choose the mongolians, because I can't really see any long term positive effect of their empire and at the same time they was unusual vicious and brutal in their conquests.
 
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