A controversy has erupted over a Top 5 List of Worst People in History, published in an Arkansas middle school yearbook. Here's the list:
1. Adolph Hitler
2. Osama Bin Laden
3. Charles Manson
4. George W. Bush
5. Dick Cheney
If you're a Far Left zealot then this list undoubtedly makes a great deal of sense. But if you're a mentally balanced person who has the ability to look at things objectively then who is missing from this list? Pop Quiz: What historical figures in the 20th Century might a Left leaning public sector teacher be reticent to teach their students about, let alone condemn?
Stalin and Mao come to mind.
Woodrow Wilson?
That list is all wrong, everyone knows Cheney should come before Bush.
Seriously, Charles Manson killed a few people, Mao killed maybe a hundred million and Stalin about seventy million. Dick Cheney shot a lawyer in the head, can't see even the shadow of evil in that.
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pol pot?
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Rachel Carson,Mao,Stalin,Lenin,Tojo/Hirohito,Pol Pot
My rating would be:
1. Hitler worst (killed millions)
2. Cheney (killed hundreds of thousands)
3. Bush (killed hundreds of thousands)
4. Osama Bin Laden (killed about 3000)
5. Charles Manson (killed a fews)
I rate Cheney as worst than Bush cause Cheney was the brain behind the killing. Bush was just a dump spokesperson.
Ah yes, Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge should at least get a dishonorable mention
Mohammed?
1. Mao 70 million
2. Stalin 50 million (arguable less)
3. Genghis Khan 41 million
4. Aldolf Hitler 21 million (arguable less)
5. Timburlane 19 million
These are the top 5
6. Chiang Kai Shek 10 million (arguable more)
7. Leopold II 10 million (arguable less)
"quebecois NDPiste",
Thanks for showing up and proving the point about far left zealots.
Mao Ze-Dong (China, 1958-61 and 1966-69, Tibet 1949-50) 49-78,000,000
Jozef Stalin (USSR, 1932-39) 23,000,000 (the purges plus Ukraine's famine)
Adolf Hitler (Germany, 1939-1945) 12,000,000 (concentration camps and civilians WWII)
Leopold II of Belgium (Congo, 1886-1908) 8,000,000
Hideki Tojo (Japan, 1941-44) 5,000,000 (civilians in WWII)
Ismail Enver (Turkey, 1915-20) 1,200,000 Armenians (1915) + 350,000 Greek Pontians and 480,000 Anatolian Greeks (1916-22) + 500,000 Assyrians (1915-20)
Pol Pot (Cambodia, 1975-79) 1,700,000
Kim Il Sung (North Korea, 1948-94) 1.6 million (purges and concentration camps)
Menghistu (Ethiopia, 1975-78) 1,500,000
Yakubu Gowon (Biafra, 1967-1970) 1,000,000
Leonid Brezhnev (Afghanistan, 1979-1982) 900,000
Jean Kambanda (Rwanda, 1994) 800,000
Suharto (East Timor, West Papua, Communists, 1966-98) 800,000
Saddam Hussein (Iran 1980-1990 and Kurdistan 1987-88) 600,000
Tito (Yugoslavia, 1945-1987) 570,000
Fumimaro Konoe (Japan, 1937-39) 500,000? (Chinese civilians)
Jonas Savimbi (Angola, 1975-2002) 400,000
Mullah Omar - Taliban (Afghanistan, 1986-2001) 400,000
Idi Amin (Uganda, 1969-1979) 300,000
Yahya Khan (Pakistan, 1970-71) 300,000 (Bangladesh)
Benito Mussolini (Ethiopia, 1936; Libya, 1934-45; Yugoslavia, WWII) 300,000
Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire, 1965-97) ?
Charles Taylor (Liberia, 1989-1996) 220,000
Foday Sankoh (Sierra Leone, 1991-2000) 200,000
Michel Micombero (Burundi, 1972) 150,000
Slobodan Milosevic (Yugoslavia, 1992-99) 100,000
Hassan Turabi (Sudan, 1989-1999) 100,000
Jean-Bedel Bokassa (Centrafrica, 1966-79) ?
Richard Nixon (Vietnam, 1969-1974) 70,000 (Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians)
Efrain Rios Montt (Guatemala, 1982-83) 70,000
Papa Doc Duvalier (Haiti, 1957-71) 60,000
Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic, 1930-61) 50,000
Hissene Habre (Chad, 1982-1990) 40,000
Chiang Kai-shek (Taiwan, 1947) 30,000 (popular uprising)
Vladimir Ilich Lenin (USSR, 1917-20) 30,000 (dissidents executed)
Francisco Franco (Spain) 30,000 (dissidents executed after the civil war)
Fidel Castro (Cuba, 1959-1999) 30,000
Lyndon Johnson (Vietnam, 1963-1968) 30,000
Hafez Al-Assad (Syria, 1980-2000) 25,000
Khomeini (Iran, 1979-89) 20,000
Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe, 1982-87, Ndebele minority) 20,000
Rafael Videla (Argentina, 1976-83) 13,000
Guy Mollet (France, 1956-1957) 10,000 (war in Algeria)
Harold McMillans (Britain, 1952-56, Kenya's Mau-Mau rebellion) 10,000
Paul Koroma (Sierra Leone, 1997) 6,000
Osama Bin Laden (worldwide, 1993-2001) 3,500
Augusto Pinochet (Chile, 1973) 3,000
Al Zarqawi (Iraq, 2004-06) 2,000
Quebecois AND NDPiste?...Poor you!
That's quite the list. What are the criteria for putting someone on the list? quebecois ndpiste doesn't seem to have any criteria other than assumed numbers 'killed'. Notice - assumed. There's no evidence that Bush or Cheney killed 'hundreds of thousands'.
And furthermore, notice that the list somehow links the individual to the 'killings'..but without a direct link.
But if one uses only that criteria, then, mr quebecois, you have to include Stalin, Mao, Ghengis Khan (40 million),..I don't know; the list could be long. Include Saddam Hussein and his mass slaughters of his people.
But that's a ridiculous criterion to use for the definition of 'Worst People in History'. That's because the relation between 'those killed during his era' and 'him' is not direct or causal but in many cases, purely rhetorical.
I think the criterion has to focus on the individual's direct violation of the right-to-freedom among the people. Therefore, I'd include Mohamed, for his rejection of reason, individualism, freedom. I'd include all totalitarian rulers for the same attributes.
So what nutter group does the paid teacher supervisor belong to?
Code Pink whackjob?
ACORN Crooks?
Should be h/t Matt Drudge, for fairness sake.
1. Mohammed
2. Karl Marx
The rest are nickel and dimers
Margaret Sanger
Henry Morgentaler
Snort.
Charles Manson? Horrible little man to be sure, but a small potato.
Adolph number 1? Worst In History? I'll grant you he should make the list, but dear gods the competition is pretty stiff.
In fact I'm not entirely sure that you take all of recorded history and deaths caused as % of population affected as the metric, Adolph would even rank top 10. The Holocaust, as horrible as it was, was really shockingly INefficient at killing a population. Seriously, that many years to kill people in an industrial civilization? I'm not even mildly interested inthe subject but I'm pretty sure I could come up faster methods if I got my hate on and was supreme poobah of Evil.
As to Bush and Cheney, that's just dumb.
Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao se Tung,
Mugabe, Idi Amin, Ayatollah Khomeini , Saddam Husein. Just all off the top on my head.
Rat's nice little list is only the last half of the 20th century, it's not like the previous 1000 years was nicer.
And if the numbers are less impressive back then there were fewer people too, and the killing more personal, as you actually walk up to people and stab 'em dead. Tiring work.
I'm not arguing about the characterization of, say, Genghis Khan as an evil man. The question, however, was "What historical figures in the 20th Century might a Left leaning public sector teacher be reticent to teach their students about, let alone condemn?" Genghis Khan is definitely not a twentieth century historical figure.
Where I grew up, Trudeau would have been well before Charles Manson.
Is there room to include Winnie Mandela, also if were including US Presidents, Jimmy Carter is still tops my list. How about drug lord Pablo Escobar, or FARC leader Pedro Marín.
Also Canada's greatest monster Tommy Douglas.
Using Rat's criteria:
Abe Lincoln (United States, 620,000 killed)
Rachael Carson?
Barack Hussein Obamba! aka – Barry Soetoro,
Contrary to his “Nobel Peace Prize” given in advance of any earned deeds, in advance this man albeit a puppet will bring about the destruction of the USA, which will cause multimillions to suffer. This economic and social collapse in time will spin off to all western countries, bringing the end to 1000 years of western development as we knew it, via soft kill corporate/ government looting, illegal immigration (third world & Islam) and the destruction of the constitution. Every day your “rights” are going into the toilet, IMO.
"quebecois NDPiste",
Thanks for showing up and proving the point about far left zealots.
Posted by: Che is dead
You mean that they can't spell "dumb"?
On the other hand, if the last two names make any sense to anybody other the teachers in Arkansas middle school.
That anybody and those teachers are in serious conflict with reality.
How is it that they actually teach real people?
How can, anybody in the USA, be so corrupt as to come up with something like this list.
Is it that the USA is in a tailspin into a dictatorship? Abandoning freedom? Abandoning everything that made USA the superpower of freedom and liberty?
One shrugs.
I'd put Stephen Lewis and David Suzuski on the list, but them I'm a "middle right" zealot.
What about the Cuban homie "Che G"?
Not Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, the Kim dynasty?
Thank you for erasing the suffering and deaths of millions of people at the hands of atheist communists, leftists.
See you in hell.
As it is though, since being found out, the school is junking the list and is revising it.
However it does leave a greasy spot on the school that will be difficult to remove.
I'm not fond of Maurice Strong.
He exudes an evil malice for me.
No surprise, as most teacher are lefties or marxists.
Roman Catholic church and nelson mandela
The inclusion of Bush and Cheney was tediously predictable and speaks to the essential mediocrity of educational standards at that school.
The absence of Stalin on the list merely confirms it.
My goodness! Bush and Cheney on the list but Che is not!?!
Says alot about the intelligence of the writer and the education system.
To answer Robert's original question "What historical figures in the 20th Century might a Left leaning public sector teacher be reticent to teach their students about, let alone condemn?"
My list is composed of leftists as per the question:
1. Mao
2. Stalin
3. Hitler
4. Lenin
5. Pol Pot
Rachel Carson. Got DDT banned.
100 million dead from malaria.
Biggest mass murderer of all time.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/9917408/Rachel_Carson_environmentalisms_answer_to_Pol_Pot/
Arkansas middle school rankings compared to nationwide testing.
Total Gr 7
Math
Adv Gr 7
Lit
Adv Gr 8
Math
Adv Gr 8
Lit
Adv
And it goes down hill from here:
No mind is too valuable not to waste.
The last four names don't belong on that list.
The people who voted must have learned their history from watching "Entertainment Tonight".
Nice list,"the rat"!
Josef Who?
Where is Pol Pot? Keynes? Marx? Mao Zedong? People's whose thoughts and actions are responsible for massive human suffering and death tolls in the hundreds of millions.
Next lefty I meet who calls for civility gets kicked in the nads.
Ken(Kulak)....agree with most of your list,except Hitler was a far-right nut case.
Suggesting that a person like Keynes or Tommy Douglas should be at the top of this list is just as idiotic as the original creators putting Bush/Cheney.
The fact that anyone can even think about comparing them to people like Hitler/Stalin/Pol Pot/Mao is not only uninformed, but insulting to those who suffered and died under their regimes.
Justthinkin
The leader of the National Socialist Party in 1938 Germany was a "far-right" nut case?
Does no one study history any longer?
Justthinkin, whoa, take a deep breath, the National Socialist Workers Party (NSDAP)was a socialist party with fancy uniforms. I know that you are not a lefty, but the left always call Hitler a right winger because he was opposed to socialist communists or Sparticists.
Alienated:
Perhaps you should crack the books open again yourself. The Nazis were far from socialist. Hitler and the Nazis hated communism more than anything else. In fact, Hitler was railing against communism long before his hatred of Jews developed. The Nazis were fascists, which is more or less the definition of "far-right."
The only way in which the couldn't be regarded as extremely far-right is their micromanagement in war-related industries.
Justthinkin@8:23
Exactly which part of "National Socialist German Workers' Party" do you not understand?
The Nazis were leftists, and they were recognized as such up until the time they abrogated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and marched into the Soviet Union. The Soviet Russians and the Comintern recognized them as leftists, as did "progressives" in Europe and North America. They were rivals to the Communists (often bitterly-hated rivals) for the left-leaning vote,but they were recognized as essentially a "progressive" party of the Left.
The meme of the Nazis as "right" was dreamed up by Stalin, and promulgated by his stooge, Walter Duranty of the New York Times, and served the propaganda purpose of painting Communism as "left = good" and Nazism as "right = bad". It was also useful as a means of smearing people and parties of the moderate Right, and continues to be so used today.
Recommended reading: "Liberal Fascism" by Jonah Goldberg. There are numerous quotes from contemporary sources which make the above point abundantly clear.
Sigh...
Yeah, guys, I damn well know the Nazis were socialists, extreme leftists to rival the Russkis, because I happened to have lived through that hell, so I can speak with some authority on the subject.
Thanks to other SDA commenters who aren't just sheeple following media line.