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

samcster94

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 the Confederacy works well as an evil pre 1900 state. It was founded explicitly on slavery and racial inequality while citing "Almighty God" as an argument for its existence. The slavery element is chilling as even in 1861, slavery was widely seen as a bad thing.
 
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.



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



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.
 

Attachments

  • Stannis the Mannis.png
    Stannis the Mannis.png
    434.7 KB · Views: 127

Teejay

Gone Fishin'
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.

The execution of criminals in many parts of the world was and still is public entertainment, the Gladiators were the Roman version of professional wrestlers and being killed in the arena for them wasn't a common thing.
 
As tempted as I was to pick the Ottomans (though they're definitely in the top five), the Mongols win hands down. No other state (pre-1900) has caused so much evil to so many people within such a short time, without doing anything even close in compensation.

PS: And what the hell is Bulgaria doing here? I assume the OP is a fan of the Ottoman Empire, so the inclusion of Bulgaria is certainly flattering, but still wrong.
 
I’m curious which nations were picked by the people who voted “Other.”

I’m also curious as to why France and the Netherlands lag so much behind Britain and Spain—they were colonizers on a smaller scale, true, but still did a lot of the same stuff as the bigger players.
 
My other was for the Dehli Sultanate, because well...
etJGMha.png


edit:
I’m also curious as to why France and the Netherlands lag so much behind Britain and Spain—they were colonizers on a smaller scale, true, but still did a lot of the same stuff as the bigger players.
Britian is ahead because of memes, and Spain is ahead because anti-Papist propaganda from the early 1600s is still accepted as true in popular history.
 
Last edited:
As tempted as I was to pick the Ottomans (though they're definitely in the top five), the Mongols win hands down. No other state (pre-1900) has caused so much evil to so many people within such a short time, without doing anything even close in compensation.

PS: And what the hell is Bulgaria doing here? I assume the OP is a fan of the Ottoman Empire, so the inclusion of Bulgaria is certainly flattering, but still wrong.
My other was for the Dehli Sultanate, because well...
etJGMha.png


edit:

Britian is ahead because of memes, and Spain is ahead because anti-Papist propaganda from the early 1600s is still accepted as true in popular history.
Well Spain did have quite some draconic policies, it is true that people exaggerate some aspect of their domestic policies(inquisition, witch burning) but on the other side they went too far with Jews and partially also with the Moriscos(I say partially because I'm not so sure about the religious and political allegiance of those populations, I don't buy Spanish paranoia but I don't think they were 100% genuinely Christian either, not all anyway), also the extent with which the early rulers of the colonies treated those is also not to scoff at, even if it wasn't exactly unique.
 
Last edited:
Well Spain did have quite some draconic policies, it is true that people exaggerate some aspect of their domestic policies(inquisition, witch burning) but on the other side they went too far with Jews and partially also with the Moriscos(I say partially because I'm not so sure about the religious and political allegiance of those populations, I don't buy Spanish paranoia but I don't think they were 100% genuinely Christian either, not all anyone), also the extent with which the early rulers of the colonies treated those is also not to scoff at, even if it wasn't exactly unique.
Spain was not the only country to expel its religious minorities. I certainly agree that Spain had awfully draconian policies, but nearly identical policies were present in countries that almost never come up in these discussions.
 
While I won't quite say it is the most evil country, I think special consideration has to go to Portugal, who went a step and above and beyond Spain in the American Colonial game where the Portuguese state actively encouraged the hunting and murdering of the Indigenous population (as opposed to Spain, who simply really didn't care what happened) and perhaps the largest contributor to the Atlantic Slave Trade pre-1822.
 
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:

Well, if you actually take up arms against your government today, you are still pretty likely to get killed...
 

Deleted member 92121

?

How does executing 0.1% of accused heretics count as everyone deemed a heretic? The vast majority of convictions required good works to be done in repentence.
Dude, there has been a long discussion about spain arleady, if you dont want to read it, I've edited my original post clarifying everything.
If you also doesn't want to read that, long story short, you're right, they only burned about one thousand humans, sorry inquisition for slandering your name. I used hyperbole in a foolish way.
I’m curious which nations were picked by the people who voted “Other.”
I imagine Nazi Germany for the most part.

I’m also curious as to why France and the Netherlands lag so much behind Britain and Spain—they were colonizers on a smaller scale, true, but still did a lot of the same stuff as the bigger players.
As you said, colonizers on a much smaller scale, therefore, less votes. I don't think it's a question of thinking France and the Netherlands are innocent of everything, just that Spain and the U.K. are on another level.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I’m curious which nations were picked by the people who voted “Other.”

I chose the Delhi Sultanate, because they committed a truly horrifying number of massacres, occasionally reaching over 100,000 deaths in a single campaign, on a regular basis for a long, long time -- and they were proud of this!
 
Last edited:

Teejay

Gone Fishin'
The Roman Empire (in the Republic and Early Empire period) has to have a special mention. You look at Trajan's column and they celebrated what would be considered war crimes today.

One of their historians coined the term "making a desert and calling it peace", which was true of what they did to Carthage. Not to mention they invented a word for killing every tenth man among other things.
 
Last edited:
Top