If history has taught us anything it is that the world is full of people with the propensity and ability to do great evil. Some are barbaric by their very nature, others are able to commit cruel acts because of their religion while still others contribute to human misery by their self-serving actions.
Since there have been a lot of evil people throughout history, it can be quite difficult narrowing it down to just 10 people. Also, different countries have their own local rogues so they may feel left out if they don’t find their favourite villains below. But you are unlikely to find fault with this list of nasty people who have caused untold human misery.
So on this new year, it pays to peruse this list and keep these folks in mind.
10. Yahya Khan
It took Adolf Hitler 12 years to round up and kill six million European Jews, but the Pakistanis led by their President Yahya Khan killed three million of their own Bengali citizens in less than a year. The Punjabis of Pakistan’s western half had such a racist, visceral hatred for their Muslim brethren in the eastern half that Yahya is recorded as saying in fury: “Kill three million of them, and the rest will eat out of our hands.” Ten million Bengalis fled to India. The disruption of normal life in the region was of such a cataclysmic nature that more than 30 million people – that’s nearly half the population – left the cities and went to the villages.
It is believed more than two million of those killed were Hindus. The rest, over a million, comprised Awami League members, students and academics. The Pakistanis then targeted women and raped at least 200,000. Among Yahya’s executioners in East Pakistan was General A.A.K. Niazi, who let loose his Punjabi and Pathan soldiers on the defenceless womenfolk, saying: “Main iss haramzadi qaum ki nasal badal doonga.” (“I will transform the breed of this bastard race.”) (http://tribune.com.pk/story/405014/genetic-engineering-in-east-pakistan/)
The saddest part is that after the surrender of 93,000 Pakistan Army soldiers to the Indian Army, none of these soldiers or generals were held accountable. India’s victorious generals not only prevented Bengali guerrillas from taking revenge on these Pakistani soldiers, but worse they ensured the comfort of these scumbags in POW camps for more than a year.
There is a special place in hell for Yahya.
9. Talat Pasha
Not many may have heard about the name of this genocidal maniac, but what he did is reasonably well known. Talat Pasha (http://imgur.com/gallery/YeCD7) was the Grand Vizier of the Sultan in the Ottoman Empire from 1917 to 1918. In 1915 he issued an order to wipe out the Armenian race, forcing the entire population of Armenia – then under Turkish rule – into concentration camps.
People were overloaded with supplies and forced to trudge miles with no food and they were killed if they couldn’t continue. People were naked when they marched. The whole male population of Angora was exterminated. Out of the population of 2.5 million Armenians, 1 to 1.5 million people were killed. Talat was killed in 1921 by an Armenian assassination squad.
Hell isn’t a complete place without Talat.
8. Dick Cheney
Seventeen of the 19 hijackers of 9/11 were Saudi Arabians and yet the US invaded Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with Islamic terror. US Vice President Dick Cheney lied and fabricated evidence to get the US to go to war with Iraq. This led to the destruction of a secular country, its infrastructure, its army but more tragically the war caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and displacement of millions. American, British and European soldiers used Iraqi civilians as target practice in an orgy of violence that lasted more than a decade.
Cheney also authorised physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape, sodomy and murder of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison by the US Army and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Worse, he used the war to make billions for his old company Halliburton. This makes it very likely that he destroyed an entire country with a view to make money for himself and his cronies.
Iraq was once a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism but America’s war is directly responsible for the emergence of Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
The reason Cheney’s boss for eight years isn’t here is because George W. Bush was “an ignorant person who wanted to show his mother he could do things his father couldn’t”. (http://www.rawstory.com/2015/07/dick-cheney-should-and-eventually-will-be-tried-as-a-war-criminal-former-international-court-judge/) Cheney was the Svengali who prodded the IQ-challenged Bush to invade Iraq.
Dick is likely to be singled out for special treatment in hell.
7. Pol Pot
What’s unique about Pol Pot, the Prime Minister of Cambodia from 1976 to 1979, is that he wiped out 25 to 33 per cent of the population of his country – that’s nearly three million.
Pol Pot represents the ultimate fantasy of communists – to destroy their ‘class enemies’. His plan was to uproot the civilisation of Cambodia and turn it into an agrarian society and turn people into workers and peasants. He is the only man in history that ordered an official genocide against his whole country and he declared that the Buddhist religion, money, schools, markets and personal possessions would all be banned. His communist government forced mass evacuations of cities. People were separated from friends and families.
Torture of class enemies happened on a massive scale, with millions including the elderly, pregnant women and children beaten to death after being forced to work for insanely long hours. You would be expected to work until you dropped dead. Doctors, teachers, engineers and other skilled people were systematically killed.
Pol Pot was supported both by the Chinese and the Americans, who saw him as an enemy of the Vietnamese.
Cambodia’s nightmare finally ended in December 1985 when the highly professional Vietnamese army invaded the country and completely destroyed Pol Pot’s headquarters. He fled to Thailand and after a few years moved to China, where he was treated for cancer.
Pol Pot died in April 1998 of natural causes but is surely undergoing a painful time in hell.
6. Timur
Murderous tyrants fill history’s pages, but Timur of Samarkand was cruel towards both men and beast. Among his favourite pastimes was throwing elephants down steep cliffs.
Once a bandit and cattle rustler, Timur conquered Persia and Mesopotamia, invaded Russia, Georgia, Syria, Turkey and India. At Baghdad he had 90,000 of the inhabitants beheaded so that he could build towers with their skulls. At Sivas in Turkey, where he promised no bloodshed in return for surrender, he had 3,000 prisoners buried alive and pointed out that he had kept to the letter of his oath. (http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/death-tamerlane#sthash.FKRhUxjN.dpuf) He also captured the Ottoman Sultan and his wives, kept the Sultan in a cage in his parlour and had his wives get naked and serve everyone food and drinks.
In 1397, Timur invaded Delhi which was then ruled by Sultan Nasiruddin Mahmud of the Tughlaq Dynasty. The entire stretch of land extending from the Khyber Pass to the northern plains was scorched by massacres, rape, pillage and kidnapping.
Strong resistance from the Sarv Khap coalition of the Jats made Timur even more vengeful than usual. After defeating the Sultan, he entered Delhi and left it in ruins. More than 100,000 Hindu slaves had been seized by his soldiers and camp followers. Even a ‘pious’ Muslim saint had 15 slaves. All of them were slaughtered before the attack on Delhi for fear that they might rebel.
During the ransacking of Delhi, almost all inhabitants not killed were brought out and distributed as slaves among Timur’s nobles. In his memoirs, he claims his 15,000 Turks each “secured from 50 to 100 prisoners….there was no man with less than 20” and that “women were obtained in such quantities as to exceed all count”.
Timur declared his army had only killed Hindus and spared Muslim civilians. That’s rich coming from someone who wiped out the city of Baghdad.
Timur is most likely being repeatedly thrown off a steep cliff into a lava lake in hell.
5. Alamgir Aurangzeb
There’s a reason Canadian Tarek Fatah (http://www.firstpost.com/living/why-i-danced-when-i-found-out-delhis-aurangzeb-road-was-being-renamed-after-dr-apj-abdul-kalam-2414280.html) said he danced at 2.00 in the night when he heard Delhi’s Aurangzeb Road had been renamed after APJ Abdul Kalam.
Aurangzeb was a piece of shit singularly responsible for the continuing Hindu-Muslim divide in India. The Mughal emperor came to the throne by murdering his scholarly older brother and heir apparent Dara Shikoh and blinding his young children.
He claimed he was (unsuccessfully) “endeavouring to destroy the ancient sovereignties of this country”. According to Fatah, “Aurangzeb today would be the equivalent of Caliph El-Baghdadi of the Islamic State (ISIS), if not Osama Bin Laden or Mullah Omar of the Taliban.”
Here was a man who had killed his elder brother to stage a palace coup, who had his own father imprisoned for life and had several Islamic leaders of India hanged to death, among them the spiritual head of the Dawoodi Bohra Muslims of Gujarat.
As emperor, Aurangzeb banned music, dance and the consumption of alcohol in the Mughal Empire. In Sindh and Punjab where many Muslims attended discourses by Hindu Brahmins, he ordered the demolition of all schools and the temples where such interaction took place, making it punishable for Muslims who dressed like non-Muslims.
But nothing is more of a testimony to the cruelty and bigotry of Aurangzeb than the executions of the Muslim Sufi mystic Sarmad Kashani and the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur. He considered the majority Hindus of his realm as ‘Kufaar’ and placed them as second class to Muslims, waged jihad against Shia Muslim rulers and wiped out all traces of the liberal, pluralistic and tolerant Islam introduced by his great-grandfather Emperor Akbar.
Islam, under the influence of Hinduism and the strong and sustained Hindu resistance, had lost its edge in India. By the time of emperor Shah Jahan in the late 1680s, a unique culture had formed in northern India, with Islam ready to shed its terrorist outlook towards other religions. Dara Shikoh, who translated the Rig Veda and other ancient Hindu texts, was symbolic of this remarkable transformation –albeit not without the resistance of the Islamic clergy – in Islam.
However, Aurangzeb not only set the clock back on this reconciliation but alienated all his Hindu allies. The partition of India (although British midwifed) can be attributed to the divide dug by this terrorist emperor.
His legacy lives on in the hearts of many Indian Muslims who regard him as a true Muslim as against the apostate Akbar. A young reporter whose byline can be seen in the Hindustan Times goes by the name of Aurangzeb. That some Indian Muslims continue to name their sons after an emperor most hated by Hindus is an indication of their fundamentalist mindset.
Hell is the right place for such a scumbag.
4. Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler needs no introduction. Compared with other tyrants, he may have killed far fewer people but where he’s head and shoulders above the other is the Teutonic efficiency of his killing machine.
Hitler’s Nazi regime was responsible for the deaths of more than 11 million people including 6 million Jews, 3 million Russians, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, 750,000 non-Russian Slavs, 500,000 Gypsies, 100,000 of the mentally ill, 100,000 Freemasons and 15,000 homosexuals. His actions caused the deaths of over 50 million people.
He believed Jews and Slavs were untermenschen or less than human, and therefore had to be eradicated from the face of the earth. His plan was to separate Jewish men from the women permanently and then work them to death so that within a few years there would be no Jew left in Europe. His Nazi cronies and scientists devised more efficient gas chambers that could kill tens of thousands of Jews an hour.
After dealing with the Jews, Hitler next planned to conquer Russia and turn Moscow into a lake in order to destroy the symbol of Slavic power. His plan for the Slavs was to transport them all beyond the Urals so that the entire stretch of land from the Atlantic to the Urals would be populated only by ‘superior’ Germans and Nordic races.
Hitler also refused to shake hands with Subhas Chandra Bose when the Indian leader approached him for joint war against Britain. Hitler’s refusal to allow captured Indian POWs to fight against British imperial troops may have cost him the war in Africa.
Not only did the Russians kick his butt hard, but he died knowing that Russia would take half his country.
Adolf has a permanent membership of hell.
3. Mohandas Gandhi
Mohandas Gandhi’s pacifism has caused great harm to India and Hindus. Muslims refused to listen to him and attacked Hindus who had been effectively disarmed by Gandhi’s appeals for peace. This encouraged Muslims to attack Hindus even more because they knew Hindus weren’t going to retaliate.
Had Hindus been allowed to attack Muslims, or at least be prepared to defend themselves with weapons, the cycle of Muslim violence could have been nipped in the bud. By going on hunger fasts against Hindus retaliating, Gandhi was the chief villain of Partition.
Hundreds of thousands of Hindus were killed and thousands of women raped because of Gandhi’s imposed pacifism. He advocated a senseless surrender to murder.
According to Indologist and orientalist Koenraad Elst, “The fundamental problem with Gandhi’s pacifism, not in the initial stages but when he had become the world-famous leader of India’s freedom movement (1920-47), was his increasing extremism. All sense of proportion had vanished when he advocated non-violence not as a technique of moral pressure by a weaker on a stronger party, but as a form of masochistic surrender.”
Gandhi’s advice to the victims of communal violence was “breathtaking for its callousness in the face of human suffering”. During his prayer meeting on 1 May 1947, he prepared the Hindus and Sikhs for the anticipated massacres of their kind in the upcoming state of Pakistan with these words:
“I would tell the Hindus to face death cheerfully if the Muslims are out to kill them. I would be a real sinner if after being stabbed I wished in my last moment that my son should seek revenge. I must die without rancour. You may turn round and ask whether all Hindus and all Sikhs should die. Yes, I would say. Such martyrdom will not be in vain.”
Worse, believing he was some kind of mahatma (great soul), he tried to prove his self-control by often sleeping and bathing naked with other women. These women included his grandniece, Manu, and the wife of his grandnephew, who were both 18 when they started sleeping in the same bed as Gandhi, who was 77 years old at the time.
Graeme Donald writes in Lies, Damned Lies and History: A Catalogue of Historical Errors and Misunderstandings: “All had to sleep naked and, just to make doubly sure of his resolve, Gandhi would take them to bed in pairs. Some as young as 12, several girls later acknowledged that they did often ‘render service’ to Gandhi but refused to elaborate.”
Donald adds that the girls were selected for their “pertness” to “stiffen his resolve” for celibacy. “Very much a case of ‘damn, failed again, must try harder tomorrow night.”
Such a man belongs in hell and you will certainly meet him there.
2. Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa took money stolen from pensioners by financial fraud artist Charles Keating. She accepted donations from the murderous dictator Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. She was also a friend of Enver Hoxha, the communist dictator of Albania.
Worse, Teresa’s 600 missions in 123 countries have been described as “homes for the dying” by visiting doctors. The doctors observed a significant lack of hygiene, even unfit conditions, as well as a shortage of actual care, inadequate food and no painkillers. ”There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s passion. The world gains much from their suffering,” was her reply to criticism.
Her nuns were not provided with medical advice, the use of mosquito repellents, or information about malaria and vaccinations because Teresa believed “God” would look after the nuns. One of her nuns got into trouble with the order for helping a man with dysentery who was in danger of dying. Teresa quoted Peter 2:18-23, which orders slaves to obey their masters even if they are abusive and difficult, and used this text to urge her nuns to obey superiors without question.
And she was a hypocrite. Each time Teresa herself fell sick she sought the finest medical care. Despite the fact that medical tourists from the West travel to India for treatment, Teresa reckoned India wasn’t good enough for her. She was admitted to California’s Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation.
Teresa was stingy even during national emergencies. During numerous floods in India she offered numerous prayers and medallions of the Virgin Mary but no direct or monetary aid.
All the abandoned children who are taken in Teresa’s missions are brought up as Christians. In India Teresa was (and her mission continues to be) actively engaged in proselytising work, which is not only illegal but will negatively impact India’s complex social hierarchy.
For her lies, taking stolen cash and letting little children suffer painful deaths, she is a favourite member of hell.
1. Winston Churchill
This sick scumbag deservedly takes the pole position in this list.
Like Yahya Khan, the British managed to outdo Hitler and his Nazi cohorts. The Nazis murdered 6 million Jews in 12 years but their Teutonic cousins, the British, managed to kill almost 4 million Indians in just over a year, with Prime Minister Winston Churchill cheering from the sidelines.
Australian biochemist Dr Gideon Polya has called the Bengal Famine a “manmade holocaust” because Churchill’s policies were directly responsible for the disaster. He knowingly and enthusiastically caused the famine in 1942-43 by transferring vast quantities of foodgrain from India to Britain.
Churchill was totally remorseless in diverting food to the British troops and Greek civilians. To him, the starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis (was) less serious than sturdy Greeks. When the British administrators urged him to release food stocks for India, Churchill responded with a telegram asking why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.
Churchill’s hostility toward Indians has long been documented. At a War Cabinet meeting, he blamed the Indians themselves for the famine, saying they “breed like rabbits”. His attitude toward Indians may be summed up in his words to Amery: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” On another occasion, he insisted they were “the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans”.
According to author Madhusree Mukerjee, “Churchill’s attitude toward India was quite extreme, and he hated Indians, mainly because he knew India couldn’t be held for very long.”
The fact is the British Prime Minister possessed an extraordinary range of prejudices. During World War II, in a memorandum to the war cabinet about policy towards Italy, he wrote: “All the industrial centres should be attacked in intense fashion, every effort being made to terrorise the population.”
He also pushed for the firebombing of German population centres such as Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz which killed 200,000 civilians in 1945. It was the only way the British were able to announce they were in the war.
In 1944, Churchill okayed a cataclysmic plan to convert Germany into a “country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character”. The Morgenthau Plan if implemented would have starved 10 million Germans to death in the first year alone. US President Franklin Roosevelt said Churchill was “bought off” after the Americans agreed to offer Britain $6.5 billion in Lend Lease.
No human being deserves to be in hell more than Winston Churchill.
Rakesh is a globally cited defence analyst. His work has been published by the Centre for Land Warfare Studies, New Delhi; Russia Beyond, Moscow; Hindustan Times, New Delhi; Business Today, New Delhi; Financial Express, New Delhi; BusinessWorld Magazine, New Delhi; Swarajya Magazine, Bangalore; Foundation Institute for Eastern Studies, Warsaw; Research Institute for European and American Studies, Greece, among others.
As well as having contributed for a research paper for the US Air Force, he has been cited by leading organisations, including the US Army War College, Pennsylvania; US Naval PG School, California; Johns Hopkins SAIS, Washington DC; Centre for Air Power Studies, New Delhi; Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC; Rutgers University, New Jersey; Institute of International and Strategic Relations, Paris; Institute for Strategic, Political, Security and Economic Consultancy, Berlin; Siberian Federal University, Krasnoyarsk; Institute for Defense Analyses, Virginia; International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, Washington DC; Stimson Centre, Washington DC; Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia; Center for Strategic & International Studies, Washington DC; and BBC.
His articles have been quoted extensively by national and international defence journals and in books on diplomacy, counter terrorism, warfare, and development of the global south.