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0 sats \ 6 replies \ @stack_harder OP 31 Jan \ parent \ on: Who do you think was the worst dictator in history? AskSN
winners writing the history is a long theme, but let's be honest, Stalin was an absolute cunt and everything he achieved (IMO) could have been achieved without the use of gulags, secret police etc . I can and will say the same thing about all the top 5 dictators.
it;'s not about fake news, it's about who was a sociopath. Russia, not the West, denounced stalin for years afterward, it was a given that 'we must never repeat the cult of personality' and yet they;re doing it again.
now, i don't want to diminish the US or UK role in atrocities, it's just that there was rarely a personality cult there to call the shots, perhaps a cabal, but not one person.
still, who would you personally consider the worst dictator or tyrant, given whichever facts of sides you consider to be most true?
I'm using the closest thing we have to an objective metric, Stalin clearly lives rent free in policy more than any other dictator throughout history.
How do we know who was the most sociopathic and committed the worst atrocities? I wasn't there, neither were you, we can only go based on narratives crafted by others over decades.
How else do we define worst? Body counts? Personal virtue signal against specific anecdotes? You might find that if you define the words carefully some unexpected names pop up, how many deaths is Churchill responsible for?
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it's really not that hard, historically, and from a humanistic perspective, body count is a good metric.
Stalin lives rent-free for a very, very good reason, and I'm speaking as someone who has lived in Russia for a decade and worked with source materials. I've heard all the pros and cons, ad nausea, shit, one of my ex's granddads was a KGB general.
simply saying, hey maybe Hitler was a great guy, but I wasn't there so I can't judge, IMO is fundamentally wrong, we have tons of sources and they can be studied. because actually, I can judge, i can read about the death camps, I can read the memoirs.
saying, oh but maybe Churchill was responsible for deaths is also valid, he was a colonialist 100%
and if you say Churchill was the worst, I would say ok, what's his body count and by what measure was he worse than Leppold the 2nd, or Hitler for example?
Bashing Western leaders is fine, but I would like to hear your arguments, in your view, as to who is the worst and by what metric.
I've listed mine, Pol Pot, I have also listed why I believe this to be so.
so who is yours and why (I don't mind if it's Kenndy or anyone, it's your personal option)
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It's not hard if you don't want to think, sure.
We can skip thinking and ask AI to use body counts of record as a percentage of population, nothing to discuss then... Nguema and Timur are up there with the ones you mentioned.
But if you want to think for a little bit, you ponder things like America's use of nukes on Japan just to keep Stalin from looking toward Asia or Europe's century long suicide after Churchill.
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ok, so who was , in your opinion the worst dictator? you keep using whatabotism, without sharing your personal opinion.
so was it the first one to drop a nuke? so Harry S. Truman.?
shall we also ignore all Japan's atrocities as well?
would you then be happy to make an argument as to why Harry S. Truman. was worse than Adolf?
and saying 'think a bit; isn't an argument, I've spend thousands of hours 'thinking a bit'
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Nukes would be a checkbox in the Stalin camp, if we form opinions based on the adverse impacts on people that they had.
Considering that Churchill created Stalin, I guess Churchill gets the nod.
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i mean props for going with Churchill , because i don't know if i would agree he created Stalin - Stain, IMO, became stalin because he was a wiley, ruthless POS. even Lenin renounced him. even Churchill called him uncle Joe, totally underestimated him.
that being said , SN is a place of all different options, so I welcome all perspectives on dictators, even if i might not agree with them.
100 sats to you, despite our differing opinions ⚡