Frank and Jesse James, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and Philippe Petain could be bad guys of the Progressive generation. The Gilded have Nathan Bedford Forrest, William Quantrill, Champ Ferguson, and Leopold II of Belgium (for what he did to the Congo). Military incompetence can get multitudes killed, so does George Armstrong Custer qualify?
I was looking to see whether Indian-killer John Chivington fit the list of Gilded rogues for the Sand Creek massacre that he commanded. It turns out that this nineteenth-century analogue to My Lai (William Calley belongs on the rogue list for that) was born in 1821, so he is Transcendental.
Should Donald Trump be convicted of any crime, he goes here. He is a prime example of someone who should never have an opportunity to lead anything.
This list has plenty of Nazis and Stalinists... OK, at one point I was in a knock-down, drag-out flame war with a Nazi fan-boy who denied the Holocaust and accused me of being a vindictive, deceitful Jew who sought unjustifiable revenge against "innocent" Nazis. The more that I saw him smear Jews and that I checked out Jewish reality against what he said of Jews, the more attractive Judaism became to me. In one retort to him I made an allusion to Dante's Inferno and recognized that had Dante come back to life to write a sequel he would need a very nasty bolgia just to hold some of the most egregious sinners of all time: Nazis and Stalinists. There were no equivalents of their evil in Dante's time -- not even Genghis Khan or Timur Lenk. In more recent times I would have to add Ba'athists, ISIS, and perpetrators of the Rwanda genocide
Please add Jean Kabanda (1955-), President of Rwanda at the time, and Froduald Karamira (1947-1998), organizer of genocidal militias and disseminator of hateful anti-Tutsi propaganda during the genocide to the list of really-bad guys. Slobodan Milosevic inexplicably missed the cut, and so did Željko Ražnatović, (1952-2000) better known as "General Arkan", a gangster who eventually became the head of a paramilitary unit known as Arkan's Tigers that served Bosnian Serb interests against Bosnian Muslims.
I have suggested two major Japanese war criminals, but I was looking for someone who did great horror through his crimes. General Masaharu Homma (1887-1946) gets culpability for the unforgivable Bataan Death March and being the first Governor-General of the Japanese-occupied Philippines and establishing the brutal rule of a colony. Crimes such as his made it far easier for the United States to use the atom bomb upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To be sure, the Japanese wartime leadership could have surrendered earlier (like soon after the Nazi surrender) and spared themselves such a horror, but Homma did much to demonize the Japanese people in the American mind.
Surprisingly missing are the gangsters of the Italian Mafia and its American offshoot. It's hard to figure who the worst was. One multi-ethnic gang was "Murder, Incorporated", whose leader was Lepke Buchalter (1898-1944), executed for his murder of an informant. Travesties of justice, whether those of "hanging judges" like Andrei Vishinsky or Roland Freisler, law enforcement who betray innocent people to killers (Cecil Price), a killer of a judge known for rigid enforcement of laws (Charles Harrelson), or of gangsters killing informants (for which Buchalter and some of his associates were justly electrocuted) are extreme offenders in my "book of evildoers". There is not and has never been a real leader of any whole Sicilian-American or Jewish-American Mafia, and it is generally difficult to distinguish one "crime boss" from another. I did have Semion Mogilevich, who apparently is a real leader of the Russian Mafia and as such he goes onto my "extreme rogue" list. This said, Salvatore Riina (1930-2017), a Sicilian crime boss, was responsible for multiple murders under his command of judges and informants, rival crime bosses, and other "collateral damage" through shootings and bombings.
I was looking to see whether Indian-killer John Chivington fit the list of Gilded rogues for the Sand Creek massacre that he commanded. It turns out that this nineteenth-century analogue to My Lai (William Calley belongs on the rogue list for that) was born in 1821, so he is Transcendental.
Should Donald Trump be convicted of any crime, he goes here. He is a prime example of someone who should never have an opportunity to lead anything.
This list has plenty of Nazis and Stalinists... OK, at one point I was in a knock-down, drag-out flame war with a Nazi fan-boy who denied the Holocaust and accused me of being a vindictive, deceitful Jew who sought unjustifiable revenge against "innocent" Nazis. The more that I saw him smear Jews and that I checked out Jewish reality against what he said of Jews, the more attractive Judaism became to me. In one retort to him I made an allusion to Dante's Inferno and recognized that had Dante come back to life to write a sequel he would need a very nasty bolgia just to hold some of the most egregious sinners of all time: Nazis and Stalinists. There were no equivalents of their evil in Dante's time -- not even Genghis Khan or Timur Lenk. In more recent times I would have to add Ba'athists, ISIS, and perpetrators of the Rwanda genocide
Please add Jean Kabanda (1955-), President of Rwanda at the time, and Froduald Karamira (1947-1998), organizer of genocidal militias and disseminator of hateful anti-Tutsi propaganda during the genocide to the list of really-bad guys. Slobodan Milosevic inexplicably missed the cut, and so did Željko Ražnatović, (1952-2000) better known as "General Arkan", a gangster who eventually became the head of a paramilitary unit known as Arkan's Tigers that served Bosnian Serb interests against Bosnian Muslims.
I have suggested two major Japanese war criminals, but I was looking for someone who did great horror through his crimes. General Masaharu Homma (1887-1946) gets culpability for the unforgivable Bataan Death March and being the first Governor-General of the Japanese-occupied Philippines and establishing the brutal rule of a colony. Crimes such as his made it far easier for the United States to use the atom bomb upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To be sure, the Japanese wartime leadership could have surrendered earlier (like soon after the Nazi surrender) and spared themselves such a horror, but Homma did much to demonize the Japanese people in the American mind.
Surprisingly missing are the gangsters of the Italian Mafia and its American offshoot. It's hard to figure who the worst was. One multi-ethnic gang was "Murder, Incorporated", whose leader was Lepke Buchalter (1898-1944), executed for his murder of an informant. Travesties of justice, whether those of "hanging judges" like Andrei Vishinsky or Roland Freisler, law enforcement who betray innocent people to killers (Cecil Price), a killer of a judge known for rigid enforcement of laws (Charles Harrelson), or of gangsters killing informants (for which Buchalter and some of his associates were justly electrocuted) are extreme offenders in my "book of evildoers". There is not and has never been a real leader of any whole Sicilian-American or Jewish-American Mafia, and it is generally difficult to distinguish one "crime boss" from another. I did have Semion Mogilevich, who apparently is a real leader of the Russian Mafia and as such he goes onto my "extreme rogue" list. This said, Salvatore Riina (1930-2017), a Sicilian crime boss, was responsible for multiple murders under his command of judges and informants, rival crime bosses, and other "collateral damage" through shootings and bombings.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.