5/14/2013 12:15:27 AM

Looks like lil' Joe Stalin got himself the high score.

5/14/2013 2:13:29 AM

They must have woke up very early in the morning.

[Edited on May 14, 2013 at 7:34 AM. Reason : Most days I can barely manage to kill anyone at all.]

5/14/2013 7:13:44 AM

Big fan of those guys. Got an autographed Stalin rookie card. What exactly is your point here?

5/14/2013 7:47:07 AM

how is stalin's number so high?

5/14/2013 8:17:15 AM

Famine, same as Mao Zedong. These numbers always vary widely, of course(I had always read 40 megadeaths for Stalin). This is not to say he outright murdered very few people(in fact 20 megadeaths by some estimates). While Stalin got a head start, many of the deaths from Hitler and Stalin likely overlap geographically during the war(Joke: How many despots does it take to kill a Pole?)

5/14/2013 8:39:49 AM

Stalin's number also includes WW2 deaths while Hitler's does not, which I would attribute much more to Hitler than Stalin.

[Edited on May 14, 2013 at 8:57 AM. Reason : note, he was still a terrible tyrant and a murderer responsible for millions of deaths]

5/14/2013 8:55:55 AM

There were more than just 3 dictators in the 1900s.

What about...

the other Fascist leaders
Benito Mussolini, Italy (1922-1943)
Francisco Franco, Spain (1936-1975)

other Soviet leaders
Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964)
Leonid Brezhnev (1964-1982)

Soviet satellite leaders
Wladyslaw Gomulka, Poland (1945-1948,1956-1970)
Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania (1967-1989)

more Communist dictators
Kim Il-Sung, North Korea (1948-1994)
Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia (1953-1980)
Fidel Castro, Cuba (1959-2011)

Middle East and North Africa
Reza Pahlavi, Iran (1925-1941)
Reza Pahlavi the Younger, Iran (1941-1979)
Ruholla Khomeini, Iran (1979-1989)
Saddam Hussein, Iraq (1977-2003)
Mu'ammar al-Qaddafi, Libya (1969-2011)

Post-Colonial Africa
Idi Amin, Uganda (1971-1979)
Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire (1965-1997)

and more
Park Chung-Hee, South Korea (1963-1979)
Pol Pot, Cambodia (1975-1979)
Augusto Pinochet, Chile (1973-1990)

This is not exhaustive (also I didn't include many dictators who only spent a few years of their reign in the 20th century, like Kim Jong-Il), and it's also not to say that they were all equally malevolent (for example, Tito was said to be a "benevolent dictator" of Yugoslavia, and the revolution that overthrew the younger Pahlavi in Iran was led by religious hardliners who decried his permissive social policies).

[Edited on May 14, 2013 at 7:01 PM. Reason : oh also despite the name of that party, Hitler's government was deffo. not socialist

5/14/2013 7:00:57 PM

Everyone knows that you have to divide a guys number by 3

5/15/2013 10:56:08 AM

1, 3, 2

5/15/2013 11:12:30 AM

I don't think that all the other dictators listed combined could match the body count of the fabulous three listed in the OP. Not to say that those guys are saints, but the size of their countries and/or historical positions limited the scale of atrocities they could commit. Also, think you can probably shift around those dictators a bit: Park Chung-Hee has a messy legacy, but he's still held in high regard by a large portion of South Korea; this versus a Pol Pot that killed on a scale that would horrify other dictators on that list.

5/15/2013 1:21:37 PM

WOW, red guard! Don't you want to defend for Mao?

5/15/2013 1:36:13 PM

^^reading is fundamental:

Quote :

"it's also not to say that they were all equally malevolent (for example, Tito was said to be a "benevolent dictator" of Yugoslavia"

5/15/2013 1:59:28 PM

Quote :

"also despite the name of that party, Hitler's government was deffo. not socialist"

Bingo. Made me wonder who made that graphic.

5/15/2013 3:48:46 PM

Quote :

"Historian Conan Fischer argues that the Nazis were sincere in their use of the adjective socialist, which they saw as inseparable from the adjective national, and meant it as a socialism of the master race, rather than the socialism of the "underprivileged and oppressed seeking justice and equal rights.""

Conan Fischer, The Rise of the Nazis, Manchester University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-7190-6067-2. p. 53

5/15/2013 4:44:18 PM

I don't think you can really put ideologically Hitler in the same boat as Stalin and Mao. Nazism is extreme right wing and Stalinism represented the extreme left.

I have heard though that Stalin was responsible for more deaths during his "purges" than Hitler during the Holocaust. Although it could be argued that Stalin had more time to conduct his dirty work.

5/15/2013 4:58:47 PM

Dont you know, socialist is just a synonym for evil.

5/16/2013 5:33:06 AM

Honestly, with men like Stalin, Mao and Hitler, the tactics are so brutal and the ideas so warped that ideology really doesn't matter anymore. They've all eaten their own ideological allies just to prop up their own personal empires.

Quote :

"reading is fundamental"

My bad for trying to read and respond quickly at work. Just pointing out though that while dictators were dime a dozen, all of them added up together aren't going to touch the big three in terms of scale. It's reasonable to call out those three specifically even if the attempt to use it as a cheap shot at smearing socialism is a real, real stretch.

5/16/2013 2:10:00 PM

So...

If you had to live in one of these countries which would it be?

5/16/2013 5:51:23 PM

Why these guys gotta be so intense?

Why can't they be like Lenin, dude just wants to ball

5/16/2013 8:30:52 PM

Hitler looks like a HS principal without his mustache.

5/16/2013 11:44:53 PM

he looks like michael jordan with it.

5/17/2013 9:50:25 AM

Best book to portrait Mao

5/17/2013 8:02:59 PM

Yeah, Hitler pretty much ruined a fashionable stache.

5/17/2013 8:27:55 PM

Leon Krier argues that the nazis also ruined classical revival architecture for the second half of the 20th century.

5/17/2013 9:14:08 PM

5/18/2013 11:42:40 AM