Rodney Castleden - The Worlds Most Evil People. The Epitome of Evil

There are over 18 million websites on the internet relating to evil. Many of them are facetious or relate to games of various kinds. We are all afraid of evil, yet we make jokes about it and it is easy to see why. When we encounter evil, whether it is in a lurid newspaper piece reporting the trial of a serial killer or when we are betrayed by someone we thought we could trust, we are at a loss to understand. Evil goes against the grain for most of us yet it is part of the warp and weft not only of history but of the everyday world that we live in. Evil acts are shocking, yet common. Laughing them off and making jokes about them is sometimes the only way we can cope with them. But the very fact that evil is commonplace makes it essential that we look at it hard and steadily, and try to understand it, not least so that we can defend ourselves as best we may.

There is a point of view that there are no evil people at all, only misguided actions. No bad people, only bad acts. After writing this book, I cannot agree with that. As a result of a misjudgement or a mistake, any one of us can commit an evil act; we all have the capacity to do something wrong inadvertently. But most of the people featured in this book deliberately and systematically committed evil acts, and they often committed them over and over again. We should not try to make excuses for what these people did. On the other hand, it is in all our interests to try to understand why they did what they did, so that we can avoid creating the situations in which evil is born, and so that we can detect the early signs of evil in the making, so that we can bring up our young in a way that makes them least likely to tread the downward path towards evil.

Evil depends partly on the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Looking back across the centuries there seem to have been more evil people about at certain times than at others. The twentieth century was one of those times, possibly because technology and in particular the industrialization of warfare made it possible, using weapons of mass destruction, to kill very large numbers of people with relative ease. Evil sometimes appears or disappears according to your viewpoint. It is possible to see the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima as a good act, because it brought the Second World War quickly to an end, or as a necessary evil, because it did that but also killed a lot of people, or as an act of unqualified evil, because the people killed were civilians, slaughtered in cold blood, and they should never have been considered as military targets. The American decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima is a classic moral paradox.

The twentieth century saw an outbreak of evil that was completely unprecedented. There was a blood-letting on a scale that had never been seen before in human history. The 20 worst blood-lettings of the twentieth century each involved a million deaths or more; they were:

1.Second World War 50 million

2.Mao Zedongs regime in China 48 million

3.Stalins regime in the Soviet Union 20 million

4.First World War, including Armenian massacres 15 million

5.Russian Civil War 8.8 million

6.Warlord and Nationalist era in China 4 million

7.Congo under King Leopold 3 million

8.Korean War 2.8 million

9. Second Indo-China War 2.7 million

10. Chinese Civil War 2.5 million

11. German expulsions after Second World War 2.1 million

12. Second Sudanese Civil War 1.9 million

13. Congolese Civil War 1.7 million

14. Cambodia Khmer Rouge regime 1.7 million

15. Afghanistan Civil War 1.4 million

16. Ethiopian Civil Wars 1.4 million

17. Mexican Revolution 1.3 million

18. East Pakistan massacres 1.2 million

19. Iran-Iraq War 1 million

20. Nigeria: Biafran War 1 million

This list implies a lot of separate events but many of them are closely linked. They form part of a single, complex and appalling upheaval which some have described as the Haemoclysm, the Blood Flood, which swept 155 million human lives away. The Western Haemoclysm started with the Balkan Wars, led on through two World Wars to the establishment of Communism in Eastern Europe. By the end of the Western Haemoclysm, marked by the death of Stalin, 80 million lives had been swept away.

The processes of political and social change play a great part. There was a great sociopolitical spasm in which monarchy imploded and republicanism exploded, imperialism collapsed and self-government became paramount, traditional religions (apart from Islam) seriously weakened, and Communism and the personality cults of dictators strengthened. These and many other changes have generated the violence. And there are always evil people waiting to seize opportunities to take power for themselves and abuse it.

Necessarily, however long we make this book some people are going to be included and some left out. Napoleon and Charles Manson were left out, though they were on the draft list. A decision has to be made about who is more evil and who is less evil. We can ask ourselves hypothetical questions, Who would I least like to meet in a dark alley at night? or Who would I least like to be in a room with? The historian Professor Sir Alan Bullock, who wrote knowledgeably about both Hitler and Stalin, was once asked which of the two monsters he would have preferred to spend time with. He chose Hitler. Although an afternoon with Hitler would have been less exciting than an afternoon with Stalin boring, even, according to Bullock there was a better chance of getting through it alive. That makes Stalin easily the more evil of the two. Who would you least like to meet? My guess is that if you are a woman you will probably most fear a nightmare figure like Jack the Ripper. If you are a man, the choice is more open-ended. Probably all of us fear encountering Dr Harold Shipman, the GP from Hell superficially ordinary, yet lethal.

There are different kinds of evil. There is the expert pediatrician who falsely accuses parents of abusing or even killing their children evil by expertise. There is the lynch mob who throws stones through the window of a pediatrician, not understanding the difference between the words pediatrician and paedophile evil through ignorance (not that there would be a right window for stone-throwing).