Worst leader in the world ever (homes, military, estimated)

[Fleet]

Originally Posted by francej16

We must not forget the evil little troll Dick Cheney ..though he is not leader per se (yeah right) we know he is behind most of what is going on.

Right, "evil." Because he happens to be a businessman as well as a vice president. Real "evil" there!
Did you know that "Mr. Evil" donated $6,869,655 to charity in 2005?

[Fleet]

Originally Posted by northsider

Mr George Bush. President of the USA.

Responsible for 79,869 Iraqi civilian deaths to August 2007.

Well, at least you didn't claim "650,000" deaths, like Rosie the liberal does.

BTW, how many civilian deaths was FDR responsible for?

[Art1979]

I tried to think of a few that weren't mentioned thus far:

• Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, otherwise known as Caligula.
• Vlad Tepes, or more commonly Vlad the Impaler
• Ivan IV, the terrible
• Temüjin, aka Genghis Khan. Filling an opponent's face in with silver seems a bit overboard to me.
• Tomás de Torquemada. While not ruling a country, I leave his status as "religious leader."

[Timothylogan3]

BLOODY MARY does it for, followed by henry tudor.

[UNT_Eagle]

Mao Zedung, Pol Pot, Mousellini, Hitler, Stalin, Caeser, to name a few.

Why are people posting Pres. Bush? Really now, come on..
He is the leader of the free world, not some communist country as some of you want to so desprately wish.. Clearly, some of y'all have lost the sense of good and evil, and just because there are people dying in Iraq, you automatically say that Bush is one of the "worst leaders".

Sorry to rant

[bale002]

Look, certainly President Bush has not committed, or unleashed the committing of, mass murder of civilians on anywhere near a scale as most of the others being mentioned on this thread, the bulk of which from the mid-20th Century (1920s-1970s approximately), and some of his policies have even been good: I happen to be in favor of free trade and low taxes, for example.

Nevertheless, his Iraq policy, the purposes of which are dubious, has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians, and this is very serious business regardless of whether this has not been his intention (and I don't believe it has).

It is at best amusing to see some Caesars included on this list. There is no solid documentary or archaeological evidence that they deliberately committed mass homicide of civilians. It is highly likely that most of the horror stories about them are hearsay or exaggerations or on a relatively small scale. That is not to say that brutality was not a commonplace instrument of government, but mass homicide on the 20th Century scale, not.

[Art1979]

Originally Posted by bale002

It is at best amusing to see some Caesars included on this list. There is no solid documentary or archaeological evidence that they deliberately committed mass homicide of civilians. It is highly likely that most of the horror stories about them are hearsay or exaggerations or on a relatively small scale. That is not to say that brutality was not a commonplace instrument of government, but mass homicide on the 20th Century scale, not.

Mass homicide of civilians was neither my intent nor my assertion when I mentioned a Caesar. Other people have posted the perennial 20th century favorites such as Hitler and Stalin (as their reason would be genocide). My intent was to shed light on the lesser talked about tyrants.

Little is rosy about Caligula (even his predecessor, Tiberius, was shady). From driving family members to suicide (by accusations of treason) to having a man put to death only after he could smell the gangrene on his brain, this man should not have been Caesar. While a lot of information has faded into obscurity, what we do have left is quite frightening. Alleged mental illness or not, documentation points to him as a very poor, cruel, and perverse leader. Do you understand my motives better?

[bale002]

A quote from

Gorbachev warns of history whitewash - Yahoo! News (broken link)

"More than 1.7 million people were arrested in 1937-38 by the Soviet security services alone, and at least 818,000 of them were shot, Roginsky said."

While some Roman Emperors molested senatorial families, even to the point of death in relatively rare instances (and remember it was mostly members of senatorial families who wrote the history, a little shady, no?), not one, even in the most exotic exaggerations of vengeful writers, is ever reported to have committed crimes against humanity on this scale.

No human being lives fully in the light, all are shady, at best, including every politician that ever lived.

The bulk of the answers in this thread is, rightfully, concentrated on some of the most well-documented (less well so, apparently, in the case of Uncle Joe) and horrific instances of crimes against humanity involving hundreds of thousands of innocent people within relatively few years, using industrialized means in the not-so-distant past.

[Dolfan]

Originally Posted by francej16

Hitler
Bush
Stalin

Putting Bush alongside someone like Hitler and Stalin is ludicrous. Whether or not you agree with his policies and decisions in office is not the point. Hitler was a madman whose intent was to annihilate the Jewish people. Millions were tortured and killed because of him. Stalin was another mass murderer of his own people. I'm not defending Bush but I find it repugnant to put him in the same class with someone as evil as those two.

[GAN]

chief of CNN