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
On the other hand, all of these groups of people were quite familiar with Steppe nomads and all agreed that the Mongols were by far the worst of that group.
Thats super anachronistic. Generally, cultures tend to see their current existential threat as the most threatening.
It also just doesn't understand the relationship between steppes bordering cultures and Nomads.
 
I wouldnt blame Spain for the deaths caused by the epidemics to the natives. Even if the Europeans - and its unimportant which group of them - only traded with the Aztecs, the result would have been the same.

Also I consider the Aztec state with its practice of human sacrifice evil. Not the most evil but thats only because of the scale. I wont mourn that the spanish ended that nonsense. Im not necesserily happy with the way they did it and especially with what they replaced it with but I still consider the result morally more acceptable than the Aztec system (I have to stress again that I dont blame the Spanish for the epidemics).

This is not to say that they werent an evil Empire as I agree with the rest of their sins mentioned in this thread.
 

Deleted member 97083

It also just doesn't understand the relationship between steppes bordering cultures and Nomads.
How so? It was a routine occurrence for steppe confederations to launch raids on their agricultural neighbors, but that doesn't really make the Mongol conquests any less brutal.
 
Now I can already here some protesting that the British also gave us some nice things too. I’m sure it brought warmth to a Bengali’s heart that although his children were starving because he’d been put out of work by Lancashire textile imports, the wealth the British were sucking out of India was helping to create modern democracy (in which he could not participate because [insert racial expletive]).

I always find this a bit of a stupid argument - to choose the suffering of the person wronged to say the positives do not matter. You can entirely flip it around to say that it doesn't matter to the African slave saved by the West African Squadron that someone in Bengal was starving, nor did it matter much to the Jewish rescued from a death camp that Kenyans were having their land stolen. A good act does not rub out the bad, nor does a bad act rub out the good. We can accept the British both did awful things and that they did some very good things that made the world a much better place.

This is the state that literally invented the term ‘jingoism’.

Using this as a point makes about as much sense as saying Norway were greater traitors than anyone else because of the term 'Quisling'.

Part of my decision for picking the British is that there is still a great deal of defense for it. This forum has a serious problem with fanboyism and apologism for the British Empire. There are lots of claims that the British Empire wasn’t a giant extortion racket, that the British built lots of good things so that somehow justifies it. In this respect the Mongols were better. At least they were honest. “I want your stuff, so I’m going to kill you and take it.” Brutal, but there isn’t the gag-inducing self-righteous hypocrisy that one gets reading about the 19th century British empire.

Hypocrisy is the price vice pays to virtue. I know human psychology is particularly repelled by hypocrisy, but on a logical level, I think the depth of that repulsion is a mistake. In most cases, hypocritical regimes, organisations, people etc tend to be more limited in their abuse than those who justify the abuse as righteous, because they feel shame about it and it holds them back to some extent.

Now, I just want to point out that I have regularly argued against colonialism and if you were defending the British Empire I would have been critical from the other direction. But the idea the British, in aggregate, were worse than the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany is just ridiculous to me. By far and away their biggest crime was the slave trade and plantation slavery, but by that metric you would put the USA and Brazil in a worse position. Post-slavery, not only did the British persecute milder abuses than other regimes, day-to-day life wasn't as bad for most of their subjects as it was in plenty of other regimes where people lived in a near constant state of fear.
 
Definitely the United States. They supported the evil President Huadras, fought against the glorious First Mexican Empire, AND don't get me started on the League of Nations.
 
What about China. The Chinese have committed genocide against nearly every ethnic group they've encountered. The Miao, the Hmong, The Tibetans, The Uyghurs, Taiwanese aborigines, Yue, Qiang, Hui, Manchu, Dzungars, Mongols, and Zhuang.
The Dzungar genocide was committed by the Manchu Qing dynasty.
 
But the idea the British, in aggregate, were worse than the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany is just ridiculous to me.

Eh, we're not arguing about post-1900 states here. Between what they did to the Boers, the native peoples of Africa, the Indians, the Chinese, and the Irish... well, that you have to use the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as comparative 'evil' states is telling. :p
 
I wouldnt blame Spain for the deaths caused by the epidemics to the natives. Even if the Europeans - and its unimportant which group of them - only traded with the Aztecs, the result would have been the same.

Also I consider the Aztec state with its practice of human sacrifice evil. Not the most evil but thats only because of the scale. I wont mourn that the spanish ended that nonsense. Im not necesserily happy with the way they did it and especially with what they replaced it with but I still consider the result morally more acceptable than the Aztec system (I have to stress again that I dont blame the Spanish for the epidemics).

This is not to say that they werent an evil Empire as I agree with the rest of their sins mentioned in this thread.
One can blame them for the hundreds of thousands that died as a result of slave labor, however. Spanish mistreatment of the native population did nothing to alleviate the massive die-offs after they had already conquered Mexico, either.

As for the "virgin soil" theory, apparently the 1545 cocolitzli outbreak, which killed up to 80% of Mexico's population, was a hemorrhagic fever native to the Americas. So, no, it would not appear that "Old World diseases would have killed them anyways" is a good enough explanation/excuse.
 
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Eh, we're not arguing about post-1900 states here. Between what they did to the Boers, the native peoples of Africa, the Indians, the Chinese, and the Irish... well, that you have to use the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as comparative 'evil' states is telling. :p

Ah, fair criticism on the 1900 point that I entirely overlooked. Still, the Congo Free State is surely worse than all of those.
 
How so? It was a routine occurrence for steppe confederations to launch raids on their agricultural neighbors, but that doesn't really make the Mongol conquests any less brutal.
So first of all, the relationship between the steppes nomads and more traditional civilizations wasn't one sided. Steppes Nomads did raid, but just as often were sponsored by Empires such as those of the Iranian, Chinese and Roman civilizations to war against each other and their enemies. Likewise, they were often tributaries and vassals of those civilizations. Genocides done on the steppes nomads and by the steppes nomads at the behest of Agricultural states was very normal. The mongols were not exceptional in this regard (at first anyway, after Temujin's death things got a bit chaotic).

But indeed under him, the nomadic conquering was a hell of a lot milder than normal in its brutality as I will get to in a second, but first I shall quickly address the issues with determining how many people did actually die due to Genghis Khan.

So Genghis Khan is known in his death toll for his conquest of northern China and Persia.

China: with his conquest of the Jurchen, its important to consider that China was in the middle of a horrific drought. A large death toll was naturally expected, along with the usual (or as I will get to, not so usual) fatalities of war.
Genghis Khan however had an interesting policy regarding peasants. Wanting them for his empire, he did some rather brilliant psychological warfare by scaring them off, burning their villages and essentially herding them towards the cities with the hopes of demoralising the enemy. Why this is so unusual is that it was the usual steppe routine to execute the males and take the women and children as slaves. This was a continuation of Genghis Khan's unusual policy of absorbing tribes into the mongol identity by killing the leaders but otherwise accepting them in (yet another way he was far less bloodthirsty than usual steppe fare).

So now you have a drought, cities taking on larger populations and more importantly literal resource drains when needed most. Millions died.
When we quantify those deaths, how do we accurately consider which deaths were due to Genghis Khan, and which deaths were a part of the existing wars going on at the time/drought. Undoubtedly Genghis Khan added to the situation, but the end number of deaths given in most text books usually puts all related drought deaths on him. In short, we dont actually have an accurate account of how many died in northern China due to him, and unfortunately can't get an accurate number either.

Persia: as I'm running out of time, he is most well known for the massacre at Urgench. The primary source we have for this however is a persian historian who Genghis Khan hired to make him sound more fearsome and generally recorded more deaths in the conquest of a given city than there were actually people living in it (as we would see with Hulagu and Baghdad). When we go outside of the mongol propaganda machine, we see historians such as Ibn Batuta (apologies if the name is spelt incorrectly) in the early 14th century commenting about how populous the city was. All the more remarkable this is when you factor in the eventual Timurid genocide of the city with which it did not recover.
In short, our source for how many died in Persia is a guy who literally had the job to exacerbate numbers. Like in China, the death toll is hard to quantity.

Finally there is just bad history that sells well. Despite the academic concencus being now about how difficult it is to calculate how many died, it really sells well on the history channel and in history books to make the mongols as vicious as possible by going with the higher estimates. Shockingly, this practice is made worse by often including deaths attributed to his progeny after his death onto the kill count.
 
Oh dear. Pretty hard to choose, especially as many abhorrent states aren't mentioned, while a lot of the ones here are anachronistic.
 
One can blame them for the hundreds of thousands that died as a result of slave labor, however. Spanish mistreatment of the native population did nothing to alleviate the massive die-offs after they had already conquered Mexico, either.

As for the "virgin soil" theory, apparently the 1545 cocolitzli outbreak, which killed up to 80% of Mexico's population, was a hemorrhagic fever native to the Americas. So, no, it would not appear that "Old World diseases would have killed them anyways" is a good enough explanation/excuse.

Ok. Than it appears that old and new world diseases would have killed tham anyway. I know its not a nice thing to state but you brought no evidence that without the spanish conquest the epidemics could have been avoided. The death toll might have been initially lower however the absence of a more resistant population (spanish settlers) would make the collapse and the ensuing chaos even more complete and the end result might be similar or even worse than OTL. I dont dispute that the mistreatment of the natives didnt play a role or made matters worse in this regard but saying that the millions who died in epidemics can simply be added to the long list of spanish victims is wrong.

And please note that I acknowledged, though not in the most direct way, that the spanish replaced a horrible system (the aztec) with another horrible system. Its my personal opinion that the aztec was worse. I also never disputed the other sins of the Spanish Empire like the encomienda system, slavery etc.
 
Here's an argument for the Romans: Plenty of empires killed more, but no one turned the killing of hundreds of thousands of people into a massive entertainment industry quite like the Romans did with their Colosseum and other arenas.
 
Here's an argument for the Romans: Plenty of empires killed more, but no one turned the killing of hundreds of thousands of people into a massive entertainment industry quite like the Romans did with their Colosseum and other arenas.
Alternatively, their infrastructure and domination meant that territories they controlled were significantly less violent (tribal conflicts made genocide commonplace) whilst harbouring the potential for more life.
 
Alternatively, their infrastructure and domination meant that territories they controlled were significantly less violent (tribal conflicts made genocide commonplace) whilst harbouring the potential for more life.

The fact that nobody could genocide each other because the Romans had already gone ahead and committed all the genocide doesn't make them less evil IMO. That goes for the mongols too. I'm not that impressed by those who "make a desert and it call it peace."
 
The fact that nobody could genocide each other because the Romans had already gone ahead and committed all the genocide doesn't make them less evil IMO. That goes for the mongols too. I'm not that impressed by those who "make a desert and it call it peace."
I'm not saying they weren't evil (nor do I think its necessarily a fair term to apply) or that the ends justify the means, but that organized civilizations massively cut down violence on the common scale (making it harder to get away with murder, not having to worry about the village next door etc).

Whilst there is no objective evil, I think it is fair to judge the actions of individuals and states by the standards of their times. Rome was cruel, but tribal life could be far crueler. The Patron of my ancestral clan for instance was sacrificed to (at least in his Gallic incarnation) by the " threefold death" which is super dark, contemporary to the romans and NSFW.
 
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