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Anyone who says one stupid owl or woodpecker is more important than hundreds or perhaps thousands of human beings' lives.
I lived in the heart of the Spotted owl fiasco a few years ago. I worked at a mill in Yreka California. You dont know what fear is until you have one of those big 5 foot saw blades detonate like a grenade because some idiot spiked a tree.
You dont know what fear is until you one of those big 5 foot saw blades detonate like a grenade because some idiot spiked a tree.
That's right, I forgot about them doing that. Jerks >:(
I will throw my hat in the ring and say that two unremarked villains are Genghis Khan, who laid waste to cities if they failed to submit, and Suleiman the Magnificent who did the same. Both conquered vast territories through the use of systematic death and destruction. There are tales of cities that surrendered at the approach of the Mongol Horde just because of the ferocious reputation.I cant remember who said it but earlier in this thread someone said that attacking civilians is a new development in warfare. you are wrong. Has no one heard of Jericho, Troy, or Carthage. There is a long history of civilians being considered legitimate targets in war. A modern difference is now we can bomb the cities where before they had to batter down the walls before the slaughter could start.
Carthage? Wasn't Carthage subdued at the Battle of Zama well outside the confines of Carthage's city limits? Troy technically is still unconfirmed….the Iliad is still classified as myth and epic poetry. You do have a point with Jericho though. You could have included Ai as well since Joshua laid waste to that city during the same campaign. Another example would be Ivan Dracul who slaughtered civilians who resisted his rule or sided with Mehmet II. Can you picture the road to Transylvania lined with rotting heads of victims pierced by wooden spikes? When Mehmet II saw the rows upon rows of beheaded people on stakes, he turned his army around and returned home. He couldn't even comprehend what he was about to face having never dealt with such a cruel foe. Some have argued that Dracul did it as a ruse to intimidate Mehmet because he knew he couldn't match his army, but that's just hearsay.
The Battle of Zama is where Hannibal was defeated. Afterwards Scipio went to the city proper, sacked it, killed all the men, sold the women and children into slavery, destroyed the city, and sowed the ground with salt. I would say that was pretty definitive as an example of civilians being targets. For some reason people like to think that modern times saw the first targeting of civilians, if they only knew.I thought Ivan Dracul impaled them bodily not just beheaded them.
The Battle of Zama is where Hannibal was defeated. Afterwards Scipio went to the city proper, sacked it, killed all the men, sold the women and children into slavery, destroyed the city, and sowed the ground with salt. I would say that was pretty definitive as an example of civilians being targets. For some reason people like to think that modern times saw the first targeting of civilians, if they only knew.I thought Ivan Dracul impaled them bodily not just beheaded them.
We Scipio did sack Carthage, but Carthage continued on many years after that albeit as a shadow of its former self. Dracul did impale his victims bodily, but he also beheaded them and stuck the heads on the pits of stakes.
How nasty were the Spanish Inquisitors?
Pretty nasty, but only if you disagreed with them. They are the ancestors of most modern day torture methods. They invented the modern techniques of putting people to the "THE QUESTION"
I see this thread is 15 years old, but I’ve been doing some research on this topic recently and want to update my answer.
It’s still hard to rank the “worst villain” of all time because “worst” is undefined, but I’ll define it as the “most brutal”. Here goes:
1- Stalin: the scope of his terror over the course of about 24 years, and the number of lives he affected through murder or other oppression, was astounding. If people were fortunate enough to escape murder or starvation, they might be forced to labor in a gulag.
2 – Mao: like Stalin, Mao affected massive numbers of people and turned them into victims. Mao’s long tenure in China meant untold damage to Chinese in the form of direct murders and starvation (up to 40 million were reportedly killed during the Great Leap Forward famine alone in the 1960s).
3 – Hitler: he did not kill the most, and didn’t bring his country to starvation, but he systematized killing like no other, and did his killing in a relatively short career which lasted about a dozen years.
4 – Pol Pot: the ambitions of his terror were crazy by any standards, and the fact that he annihilated such a huge percentage of Cambodia. Even though absolute numbers of his murder were not nearly as high as those of other dictators, Pol Pot was able to do it within a relatively short time span of about four years, and didn’t have to pay for his crimes at the end of his life.
