Since last November's election, I've noticed more people calling Bush the "Worst. President. Ever." (One-word sentences for emphasis in original).
I can't imagine what took them so long. As far as I'm concerned, he was W.P.E. at least from the moment the troops entered Iraq, if not from when the budget surplus disappeared. These days, he's in the running for Worst Head of State in Recorded History.
So, I'm compiling a Top Ten List, and I'd like to ask all of you reading this to contribute. Who do you thing were the worst ever?
A lot of people would include leaders like Porfirio Diaz or James Buchanan who lost a great deal, maybe everything, but I'm trying to be fair about it. The song claims Louis XVI was "the worst since Louis the First", but it's hard to see how any executive could have done much to salvage the Ancien Regime. Louis XIV, on the other hand, too a prosperous country with a strong army and left it bankrupt and defeated in a series of wars that need not have been fought.
So, here's my first draft of a list:
1) Adolf Hitler. Any good he accomplished (the autobahnen, for instance) was swamped many times over by the harm he did to the world, and most especially to Germany. Millions dead, infrastructure destroyed, the country occupied by its ancient enemies, it's hard to see how he could have done worse by his people.
2) Caligula. If the Roman Empire had been any further past its peak when he came to power, he might have brought about the Fall of Rome all by himself.
3)Pol Pot. He killed 'em like nobody but Hitler and Stalin, and with so very little to show for it.
4) Artabaxas. Dude, the oracle said "If you invade Greece, a great empire will fall." Yes, it's ambiguous, but the threat is obvious, and you didn't have to take such a big chance.
5) Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Eventually, even the U.S. government was unwilling to stand by the worst-ever dictator of first and worst of the classic banana republics.
6) Idi Amin Dada. When it comes to destroying your own country's infrastructure, expelling your entire professional class can't be beat.
7) Louis XIV. Besides losing all those wars, he also invented inflation. What a chump.
8) Josef Stalin. This was a hard call. His crimes were nearly as great as Hitler's, but on the other hand he accomplished a lot more that was positive, especially from the perspective of his own constituents. He defeated Hitler (let's face it, everyone else played a secondary role in that war), thereby saving civilization. He took the remnants of the Russian Empire and created a state that was capable of defeating Hitler, which was sort of like making Mexico capable of taking back California. Still, the price for his accomplishments was so terribly high. And most of what he built disintegrated in less than a generation after his death. So, he goes in the Top Ten.
9) Ivan the Terrible. Terrifying, but also just plain terrible.
10) George W. Bush. This is a tentative ranking, but I figure he belongs somewhere on the Top Ten. No, he's not "worse than Hitler".
//The magic Eight-Ball says, "Not yet, anyway."\\
2 comments:
Excellent post, and excellent and thoughtful list. I found it pleasantly refreshing to see that there are others worse than W. (Especially TODAY; Raw Story has a headline that Dear Leader might just start nuking Iran at any moment, and W swears he will veto the Medicare bill. BTW, am I insane? Is it not total POLITICAL SUICIDE to deny seniors a reduction in prescription costs?)
I'd have to nominate the "Great Helmsman", Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse-tung if you prefer Wade-Giles romanisation), to whom so far history has been very kind. I leave aside his leadership before 1949 as "bad stuff that happens in countries that have been invaded by Japan and then fall into civil war after the foreign enemy has been defeated", but after the People's Republic was established, his record is pretty grim.
1949-1953 The "Land Reform" and "Anti Rightist" campaigns. Mao himself claimed that at least 700,000 "landlords" and "counter-revolutionaries" were executed. This figure does not include those informally murdered, or starved and worked to death in the laogai. Estimates of the total toll vary from two to five million.
1956-1957 The "Hundred Flowers Campaign". It's difficult to separate from the Anti Rightist Campaign, the imprisonments, murders and executions that occurred after Mao decided that the Hundred Flowers Movement was a threat and turned against it, so let's leave it as "a lot" and move on.
1958-1962 "The Great Leap Forward". Mao launched catastrophic programs of agricultural collectivisation and industrial "reform" leading to mass starvation in China. The PRC government's official figure is twenty million deaths. Some demographic analyses of census figures suggest thirty to forty million. Some estimates go over seventy million. Nobody really knows, and probably they never will.
1966-1976 "The Cultural Revolution". Launched by Mao to re-establish his authority over the Party after the disasters of the Great Leap Forward had weakened his position. Once again, nobody really knows how many lives were lost in this decade of ruinous violence and vandalism. Estimates vary widely, but once again the toll was certainly many millions. Besides the loss of life and human misery, the Cultural Revolution undoubtedly set China's economic development by decades.
Mao's responsibility for these appalling events remains highly controversial, especially in China where the PRC government still essentially draws it's legitimacy from his revolution. In my opinion however, there is ample evidence to put Mao on the list.
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