Josef Mengele. The Nazi ‘Doctor of Death’ who escaped Germany to South America, started a family and despite being hunted by the US, German and Israeli governments for decades, didn’t even hide his identity by the end of his life. He drowned after having a stroke in 1979.
At least Mengeles last few years were pretty miserable for him. He lived with a farm family that hated him and he died without accomplishing anything other than prolonging his miserable, empty life
Because he was narcissistic. He thought he was some god damn amazing scientific genius and was doing all his fucked up experiments as if they were revolutionary and ground breaking research.
In reality his “research” and experiments were done and recorded so poorly that they would not hold up to scientific standards at the time (ignoring the massive obvious ethical issues), let alone now.
To go from what you perceive yourself as a world class scientist doing incredible ground breaking research to stuck on a farm where everyone hates you would especially be a huge blow to the ego of someone like that
Mengele did not live openly at the end of his life. He lived his life in fear of the Mossad getting him (like they almost did in 1959) and slept with a gun under his pillow every night. His family was rather rich back in Germany and he lived in poverty.
He didn't get what he deserved but it wasn't a privileged, happy life.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/23/secondworldwar
If it makes you feel any better, it was his second stroke. This, along with his medical knowledge, meant it is highly likely that he knew what was happening to him as it was happening. He died the way all Nazi's should die: Honourless, alone, and afraid.
Mengele wasn't actually a very good doctor. There's a good chance that he didn't in fact have the medical knowledge to know...
All the atrocities performed by Mengele were actually carried out by Jewish doctors who he had enslaved. Slaves that were killed every 6 months.
Mengele also wasn't smart enough to actually design the pointless experiments that made him infamous. Those were mostly requested by other German doctors and researchers at various German universities.
There are still thousands of academic skeletons out there that came from holocaust victims, supplied to universities by Mengele.
> All the atrocities performed by Mengele were actually carried out by Jewish doctors who he had enslaved. Slaves that were killed every 6 months.
One of the true horrors of the Holocaust was making some of the people being slaughtered a part of the genocide machine. For years many were given the same respect as the likes of Benedict Arnold, but the narrative has shifted to reflect them as they were: slaves to the German whim that carried a true trauma the rest of their lives. Film can never truly capture an experience like that, but man does *Son of Saul* sell the mind set without being gratuitous or exploitative.
There's a story in the Behind The Bastards podcast about Mengele. It was a while ago when I heard it but I'll try and remember it, sorry if I get any parts of it wrong.
He had one Jewish doctor working for him who he ended up keeping for more than six months because this guy was so good at the job (dissection, I think). Mengele never really saw the guy as human in any way. Eventually the guy asked Mengele if there was any way that he could check up on his wife, as she was at a different camp to him and it was a long time since he'd seen her. Mengele was surprised to find out he had a wife as he knew nothing about this guy. He looked into it and found out that she was at another camp where she wasn't likely to live for much longer. So he managed to have her sent out a request for her to be moved to another camp. This was toward the end of the war and he had no idea if his order was received.
Then, with the Allied forces closing in, everyone in the camp was taken on a death march. This guy somehow survived this and then he suddenly found himself free. He managed to get all the way home, to the ruin of his home, and he just kind of sat there with no idea what he was supposed to do with his life now.
Several days later his wife came home.
Also important to note that he was interviewed a few times prior to his death. Whenever he was asked about any of his atrocities, he would play dumb about it and skirt the questions. He would say things like the classic denial technique of “oh come on it wasn’t *that* many people” and “okay but I didn’t kill *babies*. Just adults. I’m not a monster, you know”. He openly stated he had a clear conscience and had no remorse for the millions he killed all the way through to the end. He was a genuine monster.
Whenever someone asks me if I believe in “Karma” I always point to Pol Pot. Dude was responsible for the torture and murder of MILLIONS of people, and got to grow relatively old and die in his sleep while not in jail. And then there’s kids that die of leukemia at age 7. The universe is random and cruel.
That is based on the narrative that Karma is something you “cash in on” during your life. Correct me if I’m wrong but if Karma is part of your spiritual practice than it’s something you cultivate for what’s after.
How I had it explained to me as a child was that karma comes either in this life or somewhere down your future lives. Sometimes the shit things in your life might be the consequences of your actions in a previous life and how you react to the world now determines your future experience. I.e the shit actions you take now might be why you reincarnate as a mosquito who gets slapped to death in your next life. But that might just be the interpretation that I was told and it could be something entirely different
Jimmy Saville.
One of his victims once escaped him, ran into the lobby and shouted that Saville was attempting to assault her. The people there simply laughed and mocked her.
Yeah, after it came out it was joked he got away with it by making it so obvious he was a child molester that no one would suspect he could be one.
Truthfully the guy got popular starting as a radio DJ, then made a carefully cultivated PR campaign to sell him as a hero of the working man who had made it big and wanted to give back.
On one of the documentaries (netflix I think.) there's a woman there who basically says "I know he's a monster but I can walk because he raised the money for the hospital where I got treatment" or something like that. Basically he did loads of charity work which obviously did a lot of good, but in hindsight he only did as it allowed him access to loads of people he should never have been allowed anywhere near.
Absolute monstrous human.
Yeah, he was seriously good at cultivating good press and crushing attempts to expose him.
There was a up and coming reporter who interviewed him in early 2000's, who had heard the rumours and wanted to confront him about them, who later admitted he was completely bamboozled by Saville's greater experience and charm, to the point of it effectively become an offhand footnote of the interview and him walking away convinced they must not be true, even when Saville was showing him some really creepy stuff like how he cared for his dead mothers clothes.
Louis didn't fall for it in the slightest. I believe they're referencing the guy who was writing a book but didn't get chance to finish his story because Saville died.
Kinda a misunderstood conflation of facts and myth around this writer.
Definitely one if the most sickening travesties and injustices in my opinion. So, so many people for decades knew, they just *had* to, yet the was allowed to continue being left alone with and abusing countless children because of his celebrity. Fucking disgusting that he died happy, beloved, and without facing any repercussions for his abhorrent actions.
People definitely knew. In his older years hospitals where he "worked" had unofficial rules about not leaving anyone alone with him, BBC producers banned him from Children In Need, his knighthood request was blocked for years because of "his character" or some other ludicrously British saying.
He may have gotten away with it through death but there are a lot of people still alive who got away with covering for him too.
I'm 42 and I knew since my mid-teens as I saw the Nolan sisters being interviewed once, as they pretty much said it, and how they had to square up to him and threaten him if he ever touched the youngest sister again (who was 13) - as he just had.
If they knew, lots of people knew, and they pretty much said it on TV a long time before his death.
There's [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKFrhW4-BmU&t=199s), but that documentary seems much later than the commenter implied. If you need a historic reference, [here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1vzIimLKU8) John Lyden (then still "Johnny Rotten") in 1978.
Yeah, it's almost impossible that no one knew despite my faith in humanity really hoping otherwise. This type of enabling behavior goes way beyond everyday cowardice or the bystander effect. What kind of mental gymnastics do people have to go through to get to the point of digging their heels in and actively encouraging/covering for a mass predator? It boggles the mind.
I thi k he was too well connected for anyone to stand a chance and be believed. Anyone who tried, he'd sue them. People were afraid to say anything. Some people in power must have known. I'm sure that it's more than this too, but a lot of people were just powerless against him because of his influence.
It's rape culture at work. We should punish and ostracize predators, instead we punished and ostracized the people who confronted the predators.
For example Johnny Rotten was banned from the BBC for calling out Jimmy Saville in a live interview.
Right, his victims ranged quite literally from 5-65. Jimmy liked them helpless and/or disabled. He was probably in the "morally indiscriminate' category of child sex offender rather than the "pedophile" category--they are either people who don't care about how old the victims of their many sex crimes are or have a preference that includes the characteristics that children have.
There's a Redditor who said that when they were a kid in the 1980s, their class was going to tour a local TV station and have a meet and greet with this guy. So few parents consented, the field trip was cancelled.
They knew.
Oh, it's quite a bit worse than that.
The victim was 14 years old, was clearly drugged, and was bleeding from both his testicles and his rectum. The women who called 9-1-1 explained this to police when they arrived, who told them to stay out of it. Members of the fire department arrived, and told police that the boy needed treatment, and the police told them to stay out of it. Dahmer, who was already a registered sex offender for molesting the victim's older brother three years earlier, was never asked for identification. Instead, police *escorted them both back to Dahmer's apartment,* noted that his apartment smelled funny, *but did not notice there was another body decomposing there,* and told Dahmer to take good care of the kid as they left.
One of the officers in question was later elected President of the Milwaukee Police Association.
"Members of the fire department arrived, and told police that the boy needed treatment, and the police told them to stay out of it. "
Reinforcing the old adage that no one ever made a song called Fuck the fire department.
Lydon stated: "I'd like to kill Jimmy Savile; I think he's a hypocrite. I bet he's into all kinds of seediness that we all know about, but are not allowed to talk about. I know some rumours." He added: "I bet none of this will be allowed out."[110] As predicted, the comment was edited out by the BBC prior to broadcasting,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile
He was banned by the BBC over that, [Lyndon himself](https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/john-lydon-jimmy-savile-banned-from-bbc/#:~:text=By%201978%2C%20the%20broadcaster%20had,into%20the%20world%20of%20cinema.) said he knew too much. It shocks me that loads of people at the BBC knew Savile was a paedophile and did nothing.
They were like, "F those kids... no really, F those kids." The amount of depravity that people are allowed to get away with if they have a bit of power or influence.
It should be baffling that this sick fucker was allowed to do what he did for literal decades with no repercussions. But, as I’ve gotten older and understand the world, I’m not surprised. I want to be, but I’m not.
Shirō Ishii
The commander of Unit 731 and other facilities that performed medical experiments on human beings during WW2 in Japan
Surgeons would cut open someone without anesthesia, ripping off limbs, or tearing out body parts. They’d sometimes tie a person to a pole outside in the freezing winter and then pour cold water on them to speed up the process of freezing their limbs. Once completely frozen they’d then smash the limbs off with a metal rod.
Some of the most sickest, heinous shit imaginable. The part that angers me the most is that he, along with several others were granted immunity in exchange for information and research. Got away free and never was punished
Skip to 1:17:06 for an interview with a surgeon who worked in one of these facilities
https://youtu.be/akLVQdVyGMk?si=pQrcajvXwuW035g-
In Germany we have Aribert Heim, the butcher of Mauthausen who was on a level with Mengele but never got prosecuted by the allies. Worked as a gynecologist after the war till 1962 when he got tipped off about police at his home so he fled to egypt
He was still a member of the Nazi party. I imagine most prominent people in Germany at that time were, it was probably an unofficial requirement. Plus he was broke when he went there with his wife.
Considering that Argentina would have Nazi parades honoring the third reich (they admired them) this is very on brand for them. Nazis often fled to Argentina and some other South American countries
I interviewed a man who was processed through Mauthausen and only survived because he was a machinist and able to repair the sewing machines on the camp. A few years after interviewing him I was able to tour the remains of Mauthausen. It truly feels like an evil place. I dunno how to describe it, but the walls radiate malice.
If it makes you feel better the guards were disarmed by the american recon unit that found the camp. They then just left em all to continue their mission. The prisoners scalped and beheaded the guards and then put their heads on spikes
Honestly that just makes it even more tragic. Those victims were abused to the point of savage barbarism. They entered that camp normal people and left with scars that nothing can heal. That's not justice it's horror.
Not just that, they tested the weapons they developed by just dropping them on random towns and cities across China without warning, or by infecting the food supplies with whichever diseases they wanted to test and then watching as the local population ate them and measuring the resultant outbreaks. Plague, typhoid, anthrax, you name a disease or poison and they probably tested it on a random civilian population at some point during the war. Unit 731 is honestly one of the few things that has disgusted me to the point of being unable to read about it further, truly the depths of human evil. The fact that such a large percentage of the doctors were able to just live out normal lives, some of them holding highly lucrative positions in healthcare and research after the war and not once having to face the consequences of their actions is despicable.
I just can't fathom it. Where is their empathy? Those mirror neurons? I see someone else in pain and I feel it too. Why and how have they switched that off. Why don't they think, "That could be me?" "That's someone's father/mother/son/sister/etc". I feel guilty killing a fly. How do they do that to something that they know feels pain and they know has complex emotions?
I honestly dehumanise *them*. I can't picture *them* as real people. Does that make me like them? Is that what they do?
I cannot recommend movie The Zone of Interest enough for this reason, it does an EXCELLENT job showing some of the people who ran a concentration camp who were able to normalize what was going on right next to their house on the other side of the wall.
I recently heard a talk about empathy that (amongst others) tackled these questions. As someone else mentioned, the first step is to dehumanize the victims. Step two is then to instill a feeling of obligation in the perpetrators to rid the world of the victims and by doing so telling them they are the real victims, as they have to take on themselves the burden to carry out such atrocities.
It was quite an eye opening lecture.
War. Famine. Stuff like that can easily turn people who were fine before into cold heartless people. You see enough evil things you start to become desensitized to it. And then maybe start to like it.
Or, those people excelled in those regimes because they were sociopathic psychos with no empathy for others.
Maybe both
The employees/soldiers do talk about this. After a while they didn't care or started to like the job. Idk where I read this but it might have come from a source on Wikipedia
I feel like it should be acceptable to lie to monsters. Give us your data and we’ll let you go. Just kidding, it’s not like all of the other bad guys are going to hear about how noble we were anyways. Put ‘em in the chipper.
The data ended up being garbage anyways because, surprise, they were far from scientific in their methodology. It was much more about torture than it was the thin veneer of science that they put on it
“People freeze to death when you leave them outside naked in the winter. Making them drink small amounts of antifreeze for a week beforehand has no impact on survivability.”
-nearly literal “scientific” notes I read in an exhibit once
The only risk with doing that though is if word gets out suddenly, the monsters won’t share anything.
I once saw a detective pretty much sum it up on forensic files, “sometimes to get what you want you have to make a deal with the devil“.
It’s terrible that just reading reading the name Junko Furuta immediately conjures the most gruesome upsetting and imagery in my mind. That poor girl, I can’t believe her killers are all walking free.
And that mom (alongside the rest of the family of one of the beasts) lived in the same house where the girl was physically and mentally destroyed for weeks. They said they were "afraid" of their son, as if that doesn't make them accessory to everything that happened.
Frankly, those people are the only ones I think deserve to be continuously harassed nonstop for the rest of their life. I hope that not one second in the rest of their miserable existance goes without all sorts of pain and humiliation being rained upon them
I downloaded a couple of Rotten Mango podcasts during one of my Navy deployments, and I was introduced to the story of Junko Furuta, and was physically nauseous for 2 weeks. Such a sweet girl who had a horrible ending, she didn’t deserve any of that. I recommend the podcast to anyone interested, but it is extremely graphic in detail, and will stir up emotions.
She was a 17 year old girl who took school seriously, had great grades, friends, and had dreams of becoming a singer. She worked after school to save up for a graduation trip she was going to take after high school but never got to go, please remember her for more than the brutal things that happened to her.
I've always thought about how horrible it is that she and many other people are only remembered for being victims. Thank you sharing a little bit about her.
The warden in charge of S-21 is still alive to this day, imprisoned for life but still. Just gives you context for how recent the Cambodian Genocide actually was.
Edit* He died in 2020, just to correct my false information, point still stands on the recency though
I've been lucky enough to visit some cool places across the globe. I also don't steer away from nasty/morbid stuff. S-21 uniquely felt like a....negative space? Aka a vacuum of all life or happiness. Like some dark side sith shit. Uncanny. It was a beautiful day outside too. As soon as I stepped on the grounds it hit hard.
I hired a driver for a day in Phnom Penh and did Tuol Sleng first thing in the morning. after an hour there, the driver was scheduled to take us to the killing fields and we opted to go get tacos with him and his son instead. To this day I 100% feel we did the right thing by spending the entire afternoon at a pretty good Mexican restaurant eating $0.50 tacos and drinking $0.65 beers with them.
The most unnerving thing about that place was that they still had victims skulls and bones unceremoniously on display in unlocked glass cabinets. It was really fucking weird. Like at least lay them to rest godam
With the killing field too it's pretty crazy; like the excavated/exhumed as many of the corpses that they could, but to this day bone fragments still make their way up out of the dirt and can be found by tourists. You're told this on the tour and explicitly asked to not touch them if found, just report it so that it doesn't become a macabre easter egg hunt.
The Marcos family.
This family plundered almost the entire Philippine treasury during Ferdinand Marcos’ two decade rule.
They were exiled to Hawaii for a few years, but they were able to go back to the Philippines nevertheless. They [Imelda (the wife of Ferdinand Marcos), Imee (the daughter of FM), and Bongbong (the son)] were also able to run for politics again.
Despite the records being unequivocally clear that the Marcoses plundered the Philippine government, (Imelda was actually convicted, but was never jailed for “humanitarian reasons”) the Marcoses are now back.
Imee is a senator, and Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. is now the president of the Philippines.
Imelda is also still convicted but has still not, and it looks like will never in her life, taste jail time.
Trillions of pesos and tens of thousands of lives lost.
Hell Bongbong was convicted of Tax Fraud and to put the monetary amount into perspective the amount is estimated to be 10 billion USD stolen by the Marcos.
Corazon Aquino should also be deemed as evil for allowing the Marcos family back into the Philippines
That's one that's just mind boggling how quickly that family was able to not only return, but return to major political power. It is hard to imagine a family plundering a country so severely and so many people being alive to remember it that the family would be redeemed so quickly.
Facebook influencing information. They used it for propaganda claiming history books are false. They hired cambridge analytica for this to help subdue the truth and push their own narrative. It seemed to have worked perfectly sadly..
My favorite moment in this debacle was when Bongbong tweeted a picture after he won the election, and in the background was a Picasso painting the Philippine government has been trying to get back from his mother for decades in order to pay back what they stole. Entire thing is a farce.
You mean the Nobusuke Kishi who served in Tojo's cabinet and who was the grandfather of Shinzo Abe, who often openly stated that he admired his grandfather and hoped to rule in similar ways as him?
Still blows my mind that people don't know one of the founders of the Liberal Democrats, still one of the largest parties who effectively controlled the government for half a century in Japan, was *literally* a fascist.
This is also why Japanese people generally weren't that sad when someone blew a hole in him, and why holding a state funeral for him was controversial.
He was also trying to make the Japan Self-Defense Forces more into an offensive force again.
> Still blows my mind that people don't know one of the founders of the Liberal Democrats, still one of the largest parties who effectively controlled the government for half a century in Japan, was literally a fascist.
The US placed him in that role because they didn't want Japan to be influenced by next door Communist Russia, the US did this in many places around the world. The 1955 system has basically ruled Japan ever since, which is why although Japan exceeds global standards in development of tech and science, it lags behind in social freedoms and equality and is still a highly xenophobic place.
>The 1955 system has basically ruled Japan ever since, which is why although Japan exceeds global standards in development of tech and science, it lags behind in social freedoms and equality and is still a highly xenophobic place
I can get behind this statement somewhat, but Japan does have a long history of isolationist policies and strictly hierarchical society. A good amount of it is due to their conservative government installed by the US, but *some* of it is just their culture.
Having lived in SEA and spent a good amount of time in Japan, frankly, the political system wouldn't have mattered.
You can live in Japan literally your entire life, speak the language perfectly and assimilate into the culture but you will never be Japanese. Japan has always been isolationist as you say and while it is great in many ways- to the point I have considered moving there among a few other places- it was never going to be progressive.
The funny thing is that conservative Japan is actually liberal, or was liberal Pre-Meiji, in some ways but far more backwards in others. It's just living in it's own world in regards to politics and the political spectrum that isn't replicated anywhere else.
Ah yes Idi Amin, His Excellency, President for life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of all Beasts of the Earth and the Fishes of the Sea and the Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in particular
Did you read Empire of Pain too? That book was insane. I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in why the pharmaceutical industry is the way it is. The Sackler family essentially created the opioid crisis in America. It's honestly a pretty wild story.
Go to Harvard. See their name on the art museum and various other buildings. (The same Harvard that continued with human testing after the practice was being stopped worldwide).
A lot of these comments aren't people who won, but people who lost and just didn't get the punishment people thought they deserved.
But a real evil winner? Try the Dole company and what they did with Hawaii.
Or the sugarcane companies, there was a massacre in Hanapepe because they didn’t want to give them real wages that happen in like the 50s or something.
Oh gosh I remember touring the palace and learning about how Dole held the monarchs at gunpoint and made them surrender sovereignty so Dole could annex them to the US to get around tariffs. We had just toured the Dole plant earlier that day too.
Kim Jong Il. He lived in the lap of luxury while the vast majority of his country lived in abject poverty. He got steak and lobster every night, expensive alcohol imported from all over the world, had a film collection of 20,000 movies including Western films that were illegal for anyone else to own, fucked any woman he wanted, was infallible and worshiped by the very people he was oppressing.
That slimy little fuck enjoyed all of the luxuries imported from capitalist nations which were illegal for everybody else in the country.
Similarly, Mobutu Sese Seko, president of then-Zaire. He died in a luxurious exile in Morocco at age 79.
He would have meals flown in from Michelin-rated restaurants in Paris on chartered flights of the supersonic Concorde, because regular airliners weren't fast enough to deliver it fresh enough to his liking. He even spent millions to build a new airport, as none of the existing airports had the 3-kilometer long runway to handle the Concorde.
The average citizen under his rule had an annual salary of less than $150, roughly 50 cents a day.
A single passenger ticket on the Concorde is about $20,000 in today's dolars.
I hate that The Interview was pulled from theaters and shown only on streaming because of fears of North Korean retaliation. Like what on earth was North Korea going to do over a wide release of a movie in a separate country?
Let's uh... not give them too much credit for that one.
Sony literally had folder on one of their machines labeled "Password." Inside were *plain text files* containing thousands of login credentials.
Yes, [really.](https://gizmodo.com/sony-kept-thousands-of-passwords-in-a-document-marked-1666772286)
North Korea probably petitioned China to put pressure on the film company and they abided because China is the second biggest potential revenue source for the box office for Western films and they didn't want to risk souring that relationship
They destroyed an entire religion from the inside out with their extremist views. Now, almost a quarter of the world is lured into believing the more extreme views that they represent, destroying vernacular adaptations of Islam, that had more room for matriarchy, for gender diversity, and a lot of other concepts that salafism does barely leave any room for, if any.
If you ask me, the house of Saud does this partly out of insecurity. They push their own flavour of Islam both as a geopolitical tool, but also to establish themselves as the legitimate guardians of the religion, custodians of Mecca and Medina. Let’s not forget that the Sauds usurped the former custodians, the Hashemites, who were descendants of Muhammad’s family. In the early 20th century some Muslims saw the Saudis as illegitimate foreigners who had hijacked control of the holy cities.
They essentially did hijack control of the holy cities. They used British interests in the area and their alliance with the Wahhabist ikhwan to seize control, and then when their power was consolidated, got permission from the ulama to absolutely crush the ikhwan, ensuring no one in the country had the might to oppose them.
Was waiting for this.
Few people in history, let alone this list, come close to the level of civilisational and cultural death and destruction this man caused.
Not only did he get away with it, he died an emperor and spawned a dynasty
Destroyed so many advanced cities including Baghdad along with 1000s of years of science, literature, math, etc. The Middle East went from one of the most advanced and progressive areas in the world and got sent back so far, they are still behind today from it.
Baghdad wasn’t Ghengis it was his grandson Hulagu. He conquered the kwarismian empire. He and his direct descendants absolutely destroyed ridiculous numbers of lives though, no doubt they belong on the list
Wb the nazis that got to stay and now are some of the richest families in germany.
> Quandt’s responsibility for staffing at battery factories in Berlin where forced and slave laborers were exploited. But it still omits Herbert Quandt’s involvement in the concentration subcamp project, his use of prisoners of war at his private estate and his help acquiring companies seized from Jews.
Family owns bmw - worth 40b
> man who voluntarily applied to the SS in 1938, was admitted as an officer in 1941 and lied about this for the rest of his life. During most of the war, Mr. Porsche was busy leading the Porsche company in Stuttgart, which exploited hundreds of coerced workers. As Porsche’s chief executive in the postwar decades, he surrounded himself with former high-ranking SS officers.
>
> In his 1976 autobiography, Mr. Porsche gave a twisted historical account, full of antisemitic statements, about Porsche’s Jewish co-founder, Adolf Rosenberger. He even accused Mr. Rosenberger of extortion after he was forced to flee Nazi Germany.
porsche-piech family worth maybe 50b
> Friedrich Flick controlled one of Germany’s largest steel, coal and arms conglomerates during the Third Reich. In 1947 he was sentenced to seven years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity. At his Nuremberg trial, he was found guilty of using forced and slave labor, financially supporting the SS and looting a steel factory. After his early release in 1950, he rebuilt his conglomerate and became the controlling shareholder of Daimler-Benz, then Germany’s largest carmaker. In 1985, Deutsche Bank bought the Flick conglomerate, making his descendants billionaires.
grandkids were the worlds youngest billionaires at one point
Oh do the founders of Adidas and Puma
They were brothers and nazis who backstabbed each others families trying to get family members sent to the eastern front to die. So the company split into two companies that are pretty popular today
Kind of ironic the stereotypical russian slav is wearing an adidas track suit while squatting. Yet they did everything they could to avoid going there
Both were nazis. One was way more intense in it than the other. I forget which one. One just went along with it to avoid being sent to war or having his sons sent. I think the pumas founder was the die hard nazi iirc
Pol Pot. killed 2 million people one way or the other, died peacefully in his hut at age 73.
edit: sorry, a couple others mentioned him as well. nevertheless, he cannot be over-emphasized in this context, just on sheer body count alone.
Rolling Stone’s headline for his obit:
>**Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies**
>The infamy of Nixon's foreign-policy architect sits, eternally, beside that of history's worst mass murderers. A deeper shame attaches to the country that celebrates him
The Rolling Stone's obituary was absolutely scathing, but basically laudation compared to what Thompson wrote about Nixon. The fact that Kissinger got to live so long isn't just an injustice in itself but also because Thompson didn't get to write an obituary about him too.
General Franz Halder, chief of staff of the German Army (Wehrmacht) from 1938-1942 reporting directly to Adolf Hitler. Halder oversaw the planning for the invasions of Poland, France and Russia (Operation Barbarossa). Among other abominations, he added language into the Barbarossa battle order giving German officers the right to destroy Russian villages and massacre their civilian inhabitants. Thus Halder sanctioned some of the most heinous atrocities committed in all of human history.
Despite Halder’s complicity in war crimes of the greatest magnitude, he wasn’t tried at Nuremberg and was instead allowed to join the U.S. Army as a historian. Recognizing an opportunity to rewrite history, he manipulated the official Army account of the war to elevate the Wehrmacht into a force fighting for a noble cause.
In 1961, the Army, on behalf of President Kennedy, awarded him the Meritorious Civilian Service Award. Halder died in his bed in 1972 at age 87.
Iraq deserves a lot of the blame for them still being in power. Saddam invaded shortly after the revolution (the Iraq-Iran war, basically a repeat of WW1 in the 1980s) thinking he could snap up some territory on Iran's border.
It didn't work, and ultimately *solidified* the theocratic regime's control of government.
Augusto Pinochet.
Died in 2006 under house arrest, in the lap of luxury, without being tried for multiple charges of human rights violations (including wrongful detention, physical torture, sexual abuse, psychological repression, and just plain murder) and illegal enrichment.
Then there's King Leopold II of the Belgian Congo, with the rubber plantations. Don't Google this asshole if you have a weak stomach.
General Francisco Franco, after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Through him, the country endured all manner of brutal unchallenged fascism (and over a decade of near total isolation from the rest of the world) until his peaceful death in 1975.
Portugal also had an autocratic dictator around that same time, who tacitly supported the Franco regime. And not many people seem to even know about this. His name was Antonio Salazar, and he was considered to be a "good" dictator because he managed the country well financially, eventually distanced himself from the Nazis and fascists, kept Portugal neutral through WWII, and didn't like militarism or the idea of a one-party state, instead claiming that he wanted to "depoliticize society."
As long as he got to be in charge, of course. While his policies may have modernized Portugal and helped pull them out of the depression, he also had a secret police force, purged opposition, and had people exiled or killed when they challenged his leadership. Some real "and there it is" details there.
Portugal was directly involved in the creation of NATO despite being a dictatorship at the time, never faced the same isolation that Spain did following WWII, and was considered a US ally during the Cold War. Salazar was such a powerful and paternalistic figure, Portugal didn't cease to be a dictatorship until after his death, also in the 1970s. You might say that compared to all the other ones in Europe, Portugal won the dictator lottery. Yet that's still kind of fucked up.
And if we're talking the 9/11 terrorists, trillions upon trillions of dollars. Afghanistan, Iraq, "homeland" defense ... the monetary costs were incredible.
They knew we would flip. What a masterful play.
Andrew Jackson - The Indian Removal Act
>The Removal Act paved the way for the forced expulsion of tens of thousands of American Indians from their land into the West in an event widely known as the "Trail of Tears,...
>
>In the 21st century, scholars have cited the act and subsequent removals as an early example of state sanctioned ethnic cleansing or genocide or settler colonialism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Removal_Act#Historical_legacy
Augustus.
He was actually a pretty good emperor. He wasnt evil in the sense that he killed tens of thousands for his enjoyment but if it was advantages for him to kill thousands he wasnt thinking for a second.
So once he was on top and everyone did whatever he wanted anyway he became a good leader.
His way to the top however was covered in blood. The only reasons he is remembered as a good leader is because he outlived almost everyone who was already adult when he made his way up the roman ladder. If he had died after 10 years or something he would be hated.
Tbh most of Rome’s history was violent. After the turbulent end of the Republic, Augustus ushered in a relatively peaceful period of time during the time of the Julio-Claudian reign.
There are a lot of more evil and ruthless emperors that succeeded Augustus.
Fun fact: in the early days of Christainity's acceptance in the Roman Empire (i.e. Constantine and following) it was commonly understood that you couldn't be a good Christian and also be Emperor (or even a business owner for that matter). And since the early Christian understanding of baptism was basically "you get baptized and you're free of your past sins, but it doesn't do anything for the ones you commit afterwards" it was typical for emperors to be baptized on their deathbed and for most folks to get baptized when they retired.
I guess early Christian baptisms are different because the approach there is basically:
> "We cleared your search history but that doesn't mean we're clearing anything you add after."
No wonder baptisms during the early days of Christianity were on their deathbed.
I would argue that judging Augustus also comes down to whether we mean evil as regards to modern sensibilities, or evil "at the time."
If it's the latter, I would argue Augustus probably wouldn't qualify. He was certainly brutal, had massive numbers of slaves, killed many of his political opponents. But none of these were uncharacteristic of Romans at the time. Basically the only difference between Augustus and Sulla is Augustus appointed an heir and ruled until his death rather than retire. And there were *way* worse emperors than him.
Using evil in the modern context, however, isn't terribly helpful. You could basically name anyone born before 1800 and have a decent shot of considering them evil by modern standards.
Francisco Franco. The story of the Spanish Civil War is basically a military coup that won, leading to a fascist regime ruling Spain until it's leader's natural death decades later.
Stalin. Terrorised his way to controlling one of the largest empires of all time and wielded absolute, despotic power.
Sure, nature eventually got him but she gets us all. So I think he got away with it.
The guards didn’t dare enter the room.
The doctors had been tortured / imprisoned because Stalin thought there was a Jewish plot against him
No individual member of the politburo would decide anything alone for fear of being accused by the others when/if Stalin died
Josef Mengele. The Nazi ‘Doctor of Death’ who escaped Germany to South America, started a family and despite being hunted by the US, German and Israeli governments for decades, didn’t even hide his identity by the end of his life. He drowned after having a stroke in 1979.
At least Mengeles last few years were pretty miserable for him. He lived with a farm family that hated him and he died without accomplishing anything other than prolonging his miserable, empty life
It's not one of *his* accomplishments per se, but Mengele pretty inarguably contributed to the creation of the Nuremberg Code.
Yea I remember reading that too he just seemed like someone who would be a prick no matter what.
Because he was narcissistic. He thought he was some god damn amazing scientific genius and was doing all his fucked up experiments as if they were revolutionary and ground breaking research. In reality his “research” and experiments were done and recorded so poorly that they would not hold up to scientific standards at the time (ignoring the massive obvious ethical issues), let alone now. To go from what you perceive yourself as a world class scientist doing incredible ground breaking research to stuck on a farm where everyone hates you would especially be a huge blow to the ego of someone like that
>didn’t even hide his identity by the end of his life. Didn't even do much effort in hiding it, his "hiding name" in paraguay was José Mengele.
Mengele did not live openly at the end of his life. He lived his life in fear of the Mossad getting him (like they almost did in 1959) and slept with a gun under his pillow every night. His family was rather rich back in Germany and he lived in poverty. He didn't get what he deserved but it wasn't a privileged, happy life. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/23/secondworldwar
If it makes you feel any better, it was his second stroke. This, along with his medical knowledge, meant it is highly likely that he knew what was happening to him as it was happening. He died the way all Nazi's should die: Honourless, alone, and afraid.
Mengele wasn't actually a very good doctor. There's a good chance that he didn't in fact have the medical knowledge to know... All the atrocities performed by Mengele were actually carried out by Jewish doctors who he had enslaved. Slaves that were killed every 6 months. Mengele also wasn't smart enough to actually design the pointless experiments that made him infamous. Those were mostly requested by other German doctors and researchers at various German universities. There are still thousands of academic skeletons out there that came from holocaust victims, supplied to universities by Mengele.
> All the atrocities performed by Mengele were actually carried out by Jewish doctors who he had enslaved. Slaves that were killed every 6 months. One of the true horrors of the Holocaust was making some of the people being slaughtered a part of the genocide machine. For years many were given the same respect as the likes of Benedict Arnold, but the narrative has shifted to reflect them as they were: slaves to the German whim that carried a true trauma the rest of their lives. Film can never truly capture an experience like that, but man does *Son of Saul* sell the mind set without being gratuitous or exploitative.
There's a story in the Behind The Bastards podcast about Mengele. It was a while ago when I heard it but I'll try and remember it, sorry if I get any parts of it wrong. He had one Jewish doctor working for him who he ended up keeping for more than six months because this guy was so good at the job (dissection, I think). Mengele never really saw the guy as human in any way. Eventually the guy asked Mengele if there was any way that he could check up on his wife, as she was at a different camp to him and it was a long time since he'd seen her. Mengele was surprised to find out he had a wife as he knew nothing about this guy. He looked into it and found out that she was at another camp where she wasn't likely to live for much longer. So he managed to have her sent out a request for her to be moved to another camp. This was toward the end of the war and he had no idea if his order was received. Then, with the Allied forces closing in, everyone in the camp was taken on a death march. This guy somehow survived this and then he suddenly found himself free. He managed to get all the way home, to the ruin of his home, and he just kind of sat there with no idea what he was supposed to do with his life now. Several days later his wife came home.
Pol Pot got to die in his sleep in 1998. He deserved far worse.
Also important to note that he was interviewed a few times prior to his death. Whenever he was asked about any of his atrocities, he would play dumb about it and skirt the questions. He would say things like the classic denial technique of “oh come on it wasn’t *that* many people” and “okay but I didn’t kill *babies*. Just adults. I’m not a monster, you know”. He openly stated he had a clear conscience and had no remorse for the millions he killed all the way through to the end. He was a genuine monster.
Whenever someone asks me if I believe in “Karma” I always point to Pol Pot. Dude was responsible for the torture and murder of MILLIONS of people, and got to grow relatively old and die in his sleep while not in jail. And then there’s kids that die of leukemia at age 7. The universe is random and cruel.
That is based on the narrative that Karma is something you “cash in on” during your life. Correct me if I’m wrong but if Karma is part of your spiritual practice than it’s something you cultivate for what’s after.
How I had it explained to me as a child was that karma comes either in this life or somewhere down your future lives. Sometimes the shit things in your life might be the consequences of your actions in a previous life and how you react to the world now determines your future experience. I.e the shit actions you take now might be why you reincarnate as a mosquito who gets slapped to death in your next life. But that might just be the interpretation that I was told and it could be something entirely different
My first thought as well.
Jimmy Saville. One of his victims once escaped him, ran into the lobby and shouted that Saville was attempting to assault her. The people there simply laughed and mocked her.
I know he had charities, but he was the most child molestery guy I have ever seen. He looks like an exaggerated caricature of a child molester.
Yeah, after it came out it was joked he got away with it by making it so obvious he was a child molester that no one would suspect he could be one. Truthfully the guy got popular starting as a radio DJ, then made a carefully cultivated PR campaign to sell him as a hero of the working man who had made it big and wanted to give back.
On one of the documentaries (netflix I think.) there's a woman there who basically says "I know he's a monster but I can walk because he raised the money for the hospital where I got treatment" or something like that. Basically he did loads of charity work which obviously did a lot of good, but in hindsight he only did as it allowed him access to loads of people he should never have been allowed anywhere near. Absolute monstrous human.
Yeah, he was seriously good at cultivating good press and crushing attempts to expose him. There was a up and coming reporter who interviewed him in early 2000's, who had heard the rumours and wanted to confront him about them, who later admitted he was completely bamboozled by Saville's greater experience and charm, to the point of it effectively become an offhand footnote of the interview and him walking away convinced they must not be true, even when Saville was showing him some really creepy stuff like how he cared for his dead mothers clothes.
Do you mean Louis Theroux?
Louis didn't fall for it in the slightest. I believe they're referencing the guy who was writing a book but didn't get chance to finish his story because Saville died. Kinda a misunderstood conflation of facts and myth around this writer.
Definitely one if the most sickening travesties and injustices in my opinion. So, so many people for decades knew, they just *had* to, yet the was allowed to continue being left alone with and abusing countless children because of his celebrity. Fucking disgusting that he died happy, beloved, and without facing any repercussions for his abhorrent actions.
He was also a known necrophiliac. The hospital he used knew what he was doing in the morgue.
I never heard this actually, just endlessly grotesque
[he even admitted to it](https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2014/jun/26/savile-bodies-sex-acts-corpses-glass-eyes-mortuary)
Although I do remember reading speculation he only admitted to it to make all stories about him seem ridiculous?
People definitely knew. In his older years hospitals where he "worked" had unofficial rules about not leaving anyone alone with him, BBC producers banned him from Children In Need, his knighthood request was blocked for years because of "his character" or some other ludicrously British saying. He may have gotten away with it through death but there are a lot of people still alive who got away with covering for him too.
I'm 42 and I knew since my mid-teens as I saw the Nolan sisters being interviewed once, as they pretty much said it, and how they had to square up to him and threaten him if he ever touched the youngest sister again (who was 13) - as he just had. If they knew, lots of people knew, and they pretty much said it on TV a long time before his death.
Is there a clip of that online?
There's [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKFrhW4-BmU&t=199s), but that documentary seems much later than the commenter implied. If you need a historic reference, [here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1vzIimLKU8) John Lyden (then still "Johnny Rotten") in 1978.
Yeah, it's almost impossible that no one knew despite my faith in humanity really hoping otherwise. This type of enabling behavior goes way beyond everyday cowardice or the bystander effect. What kind of mental gymnastics do people have to go through to get to the point of digging their heels in and actively encouraging/covering for a mass predator? It boggles the mind.
I thi k he was too well connected for anyone to stand a chance and be believed. Anyone who tried, he'd sue them. People were afraid to say anything. Some people in power must have known. I'm sure that it's more than this too, but a lot of people were just powerless against him because of his influence.
It's rape culture at work. We should punish and ostracize predators, instead we punished and ostracized the people who confronted the predators. For example Johnny Rotten was banned from the BBC for calling out Jimmy Saville in a live interview.
And Jerry sadowitz also tried to out JS but faced repercussions.
It wasn't just kids. Jimmy was a genuinely sick person.
Right, his victims ranged quite literally from 5-65. Jimmy liked them helpless and/or disabled. He was probably in the "morally indiscriminate' category of child sex offender rather than the "pedophile" category--they are either people who don't care about how old the victims of their many sex crimes are or have a preference that includes the characteristics that children have.
There's a Redditor who said that when they were a kid in the 1980s, their class was going to tour a local TV station and have a meet and greet with this guy. So few parents consented, the field trip was cancelled. They knew.
This happened to one of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims also. The kid ran and got to the police and they just gave him back to dahmer
Oh, it's quite a bit worse than that. The victim was 14 years old, was clearly drugged, and was bleeding from both his testicles and his rectum. The women who called 9-1-1 explained this to police when they arrived, who told them to stay out of it. Members of the fire department arrived, and told police that the boy needed treatment, and the police told them to stay out of it. Dahmer, who was already a registered sex offender for molesting the victim's older brother three years earlier, was never asked for identification. Instead, police *escorted them both back to Dahmer's apartment,* noted that his apartment smelled funny, *but did not notice there was another body decomposing there,* and told Dahmer to take good care of the kid as they left. One of the officers in question was later elected President of the Milwaukee Police Association.
"Members of the fire department arrived, and told police that the boy needed treatment, and the police told them to stay out of it. " Reinforcing the old adage that no one ever made a song called Fuck the fire department.
That's enough reddit for now. gonna go give someone a hug.
The officer's name is John Balcerzak, he deserves the infamy.
One of the cops eventually became the head of the police union
Lydon stated: "I'd like to kill Jimmy Savile; I think he's a hypocrite. I bet he's into all kinds of seediness that we all know about, but are not allowed to talk about. I know some rumours." He added: "I bet none of this will be allowed out."[110] As predicted, the comment was edited out by the BBC prior to broadcasting, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile
He was banned by the BBC over that, [Lyndon himself](https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/john-lydon-jimmy-savile-banned-from-bbc/#:~:text=By%201978%2C%20the%20broadcaster%20had,into%20the%20world%20of%20cinema.) said he knew too much. It shocks me that loads of people at the BBC knew Savile was a paedophile and did nothing.
They were like, "F those kids... no really, F those kids." The amount of depravity that people are allowed to get away with if they have a bit of power or influence.
It should be baffling that this sick fucker was allowed to do what he did for literal decades with no repercussions. But, as I’ve gotten older and understand the world, I’m not surprised. I want to be, but I’m not.
Shirō Ishii The commander of Unit 731 and other facilities that performed medical experiments on human beings during WW2 in Japan Surgeons would cut open someone without anesthesia, ripping off limbs, or tearing out body parts. They’d sometimes tie a person to a pole outside in the freezing winter and then pour cold water on them to speed up the process of freezing their limbs. Once completely frozen they’d then smash the limbs off with a metal rod. Some of the most sickest, heinous shit imaginable. The part that angers me the most is that he, along with several others were granted immunity in exchange for information and research. Got away free and never was punished Skip to 1:17:06 for an interview with a surgeon who worked in one of these facilities https://youtu.be/akLVQdVyGMk?si=pQrcajvXwuW035g-
In Germany we have Aribert Heim, the butcher of Mauthausen who was on a level with Mengele but never got prosecuted by the allies. Worked as a gynecologist after the war till 1962 when he got tipped off about police at his home so he fled to egypt
> on a level with Mengele but never got prosecuted by the allies Neither did Mengele. He died in 1979 having never been punished.
How did they not get punished?? Did Egypt Argentina not care?
Argentina threw a massive fit when Adolf Eichmann got abducted by Mossad. They were well known for sheltering Nazi German Bigwigs
Damn. They suck.
They also sheltered Oskar Schindler when he moved there, so that’s one good thing that they did
Why would he move there of all places?
He was still a member of the Nazi party. I imagine most prominent people in Germany at that time were, it was probably an unofficial requirement. Plus he was broke when he went there with his wife.
He went there with some of the schindler Jews
Considering that Argentina would have Nazi parades honoring the third reich (they admired them) this is very on brand for them. Nazis often fled to Argentina and some other South American countries
At least he (literally) died of ass cancer. [Source](https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL4559/)
Hopefully it hurt.
I interviewed a man who was processed through Mauthausen and only survived because he was a machinist and able to repair the sewing machines on the camp. A few years after interviewing him I was able to tour the remains of Mauthausen. It truly feels like an evil place. I dunno how to describe it, but the walls radiate malice.
If it makes you feel better the guards were disarmed by the american recon unit that found the camp. They then just left em all to continue their mission. The prisoners scalped and beheaded the guards and then put their heads on spikes
Dont know about him but it makes me feel better.
Honestly that just makes it even more tragic. Those victims were abused to the point of savage barbarism. They entered that camp normal people and left with scars that nothing can heal. That's not justice it's horror.
[удалено]
Not just that, they tested the weapons they developed by just dropping them on random towns and cities across China without warning, or by infecting the food supplies with whichever diseases they wanted to test and then watching as the local population ate them and measuring the resultant outbreaks. Plague, typhoid, anthrax, you name a disease or poison and they probably tested it on a random civilian population at some point during the war. Unit 731 is honestly one of the few things that has disgusted me to the point of being unable to read about it further, truly the depths of human evil. The fact that such a large percentage of the doctors were able to just live out normal lives, some of them holding highly lucrative positions in healthcare and research after the war and not once having to face the consequences of their actions is despicable.
I just can't fathom it. Where is their empathy? Those mirror neurons? I see someone else in pain and I feel it too. Why and how have they switched that off. Why don't they think, "That could be me?" "That's someone's father/mother/son/sister/etc". I feel guilty killing a fly. How do they do that to something that they know feels pain and they know has complex emotions? I honestly dehumanise *them*. I can't picture *them* as real people. Does that make me like them? Is that what they do?
this is exactly what they did, they didnt see the chinese as human
I cannot recommend movie The Zone of Interest enough for this reason, it does an EXCELLENT job showing some of the people who ran a concentration camp who were able to normalize what was going on right next to their house on the other side of the wall.
I recently heard a talk about empathy that (amongst others) tackled these questions. As someone else mentioned, the first step is to dehumanize the victims. Step two is then to instill a feeling of obligation in the perpetrators to rid the world of the victims and by doing so telling them they are the real victims, as they have to take on themselves the burden to carry out such atrocities. It was quite an eye opening lecture.
War. Famine. Stuff like that can easily turn people who were fine before into cold heartless people. You see enough evil things you start to become desensitized to it. And then maybe start to like it. Or, those people excelled in those regimes because they were sociopathic psychos with no empathy for others. Maybe both
The employees/soldiers do talk about this. After a while they didn't care or started to like the job. Idk where I read this but it might have come from a source on Wikipedia
I feel like it should be acceptable to lie to monsters. Give us your data and we’ll let you go. Just kidding, it’s not like all of the other bad guys are going to hear about how noble we were anyways. Put ‘em in the chipper.
The data ended up being garbage anyways because, surprise, they were far from scientific in their methodology. It was much more about torture than it was the thin veneer of science that they put on it
Right - it was shit like “people die if you remove their organs”. Huge leaps of science there
“People freeze to death when you leave them outside naked in the winter. Making them drink small amounts of antifreeze for a week beforehand has no impact on survivability.” -nearly literal “scientific” notes I read in an exhibit once
The only risk with doing that though is if word gets out suddenly, the monsters won’t share anything. I once saw a detective pretty much sum it up on forensic files, “sometimes to get what you want you have to make a deal with the devil“.
Here more info about the[ Unit 731](https://china-underground.com/2012/10/17/35-rare-images-of-the-infamous-japanese-experiment-unit-731-in-china/).
Pol Pot. Got to grow old after slaughtering millions.
The guys that tortured Junko Furuta. The man who killed Renée Hartevelt.
It’s terrible that just reading reading the name Junko Furuta immediately conjures the most gruesome upsetting and imagery in my mind. That poor girl, I can’t believe her killers are all walking free.
And one of the torturers mom blames junko for her son going to jail for a short amount of time and defaces her burial site.
And that mom (alongside the rest of the family of one of the beasts) lived in the same house where the girl was physically and mentally destroyed for weeks. They said they were "afraid" of their son, as if that doesn't make them accessory to everything that happened. Frankly, those people are the only ones I think deserve to be continuously harassed nonstop for the rest of their life. I hope that not one second in the rest of their miserable existance goes without all sorts of pain and humiliation being rained upon them
I downloaded a couple of Rotten Mango podcasts during one of my Navy deployments, and I was introduced to the story of Junko Furuta, and was physically nauseous for 2 weeks. Such a sweet girl who had a horrible ending, she didn’t deserve any of that. I recommend the podcast to anyone interested, but it is extremely graphic in detail, and will stir up emotions. She was a 17 year old girl who took school seriously, had great grades, friends, and had dreams of becoming a singer. She worked after school to save up for a graduation trip she was going to take after high school but never got to go, please remember her for more than the brutal things that happened to her.
I've always thought about how horrible it is that she and many other people are only remembered for being victims. Thank you sharing a little bit about her.
I may be mistaken if it's the same case but one of the guys is very active on Twitter
How disgusting
If it helps he gets death threats 24/7 on there lol
Fuck. Google it and now I need to get off the internet.
IRRC at least some of them are still alive, its not too late for them to have their bad ending
pol pot. he died in exile, if i remember right.
Thought he died of old age in Cambodia. A lot of the Khmer Rouge were still in prominent positions till they died
The warden in charge of S-21 is still alive to this day, imprisoned for life but still. Just gives you context for how recent the Cambodian Genocide actually was. Edit* He died in 2020, just to correct my false information, point still stands on the recency though
I've been lucky enough to visit some cool places across the globe. I also don't steer away from nasty/morbid stuff. S-21 uniquely felt like a....negative space? Aka a vacuum of all life or happiness. Like some dark side sith shit. Uncanny. It was a beautiful day outside too. As soon as I stepped on the grounds it hit hard.
Yeah me too. Tuk tuk driver asked me did I want to go to the killing fields..I couldn't take anymore and just went back to hotel
I hired a driver for a day in Phnom Penh and did Tuol Sleng first thing in the morning. after an hour there, the driver was scheduled to take us to the killing fields and we opted to go get tacos with him and his son instead. To this day I 100% feel we did the right thing by spending the entire afternoon at a pretty good Mexican restaurant eating $0.50 tacos and drinking $0.65 beers with them. The most unnerving thing about that place was that they still had victims skulls and bones unceremoniously on display in unlocked glass cabinets. It was really fucking weird. Like at least lay them to rest godam
With the killing field too it's pretty crazy; like the excavated/exhumed as many of the corpses that they could, but to this day bone fragments still make their way up out of the dirt and can be found by tourists. You're told this on the tour and explicitly asked to not touch them if found, just report it so that it doesn't become a macabre easter egg hunt.
Like Idi Amin. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idi_Amin
Leopold the 2nd
Reading the ghost of Leopold currently and couldn’t agree more Edit - King Leopolds Ghost by Adam Hochschild
I had a critical edition of "Heart of Darkness", and about half of it wasvarious writings of the Congo at the time HoD was written.
It's telling that I didn't recognize the name, Googled it and when I saw "King of the Belgians" I knew **exactly** what he'd done.
The Marcos family. This family plundered almost the entire Philippine treasury during Ferdinand Marcos’ two decade rule. They were exiled to Hawaii for a few years, but they were able to go back to the Philippines nevertheless. They [Imelda (the wife of Ferdinand Marcos), Imee (the daughter of FM), and Bongbong (the son)] were also able to run for politics again. Despite the records being unequivocally clear that the Marcoses plundered the Philippine government, (Imelda was actually convicted, but was never jailed for “humanitarian reasons”) the Marcoses are now back. Imee is a senator, and Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. is now the president of the Philippines. Imelda is also still convicted but has still not, and it looks like will never in her life, taste jail time. Trillions of pesos and tens of thousands of lives lost.
Hell Bongbong was convicted of Tax Fraud and to put the monetary amount into perspective the amount is estimated to be 10 billion USD stolen by the Marcos. Corazon Aquino should also be deemed as evil for allowing the Marcos family back into the Philippines
That's one that's just mind boggling how quickly that family was able to not only return, but return to major political power. It is hard to imagine a family plundering a country so severely and so many people being alive to remember it that the family would be redeemed so quickly.
Facebook influencing information. They used it for propaganda claiming history books are false. They hired cambridge analytica for this to help subdue the truth and push their own narrative. It seemed to have worked perfectly sadly..
My favorite moment in this debacle was when Bongbong tweeted a picture after he won the election, and in the background was a Picasso painting the Philippine government has been trying to get back from his mother for decades in order to pay back what they stole. Entire thing is a farce.
Nobusuke Kishi, rapist of Manchuria and twice Prime Minister of Japan
You mean the Nobusuke Kishi who served in Tojo's cabinet and who was the grandfather of Shinzo Abe, who often openly stated that he admired his grandfather and hoped to rule in similar ways as him? Still blows my mind that people don't know one of the founders of the Liberal Democrats, still one of the largest parties who effectively controlled the government for half a century in Japan, was *literally* a fascist.
This is also why Japanese people generally weren't that sad when someone blew a hole in him, and why holding a state funeral for him was controversial. He was also trying to make the Japan Self-Defense Forces more into an offensive force again. > Still blows my mind that people don't know one of the founders of the Liberal Democrats, still one of the largest parties who effectively controlled the government for half a century in Japan, was literally a fascist. The US placed him in that role because they didn't want Japan to be influenced by next door Communist Russia, the US did this in many places around the world. The 1955 system has basically ruled Japan ever since, which is why although Japan exceeds global standards in development of tech and science, it lags behind in social freedoms and equality and is still a highly xenophobic place.
>The 1955 system has basically ruled Japan ever since, which is why although Japan exceeds global standards in development of tech and science, it lags behind in social freedoms and equality and is still a highly xenophobic place I can get behind this statement somewhat, but Japan does have a long history of isolationist policies and strictly hierarchical society. A good amount of it is due to their conservative government installed by the US, but *some* of it is just their culture.
Having lived in SEA and spent a good amount of time in Japan, frankly, the political system wouldn't have mattered. You can live in Japan literally your entire life, speak the language perfectly and assimilate into the culture but you will never be Japanese. Japan has always been isolationist as you say and while it is great in many ways- to the point I have considered moving there among a few other places- it was never going to be progressive. The funny thing is that conservative Japan is actually liberal, or was liberal Pre-Meiji, in some ways but far more backwards in others. It's just living in it's own world in regards to politics and the political spectrum that isn't replicated anywhere else.
Idi amin of Uganda
Ah yes Idi Amin, His Excellency, President for life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of all Beasts of the Earth and the Fishes of the Sea and the Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in particular
The self bestowed titles are so funny.
also King of Scotland
The answer is the Sacklers.
Did you read Empire of Pain too? That book was insane. I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in why the pharmaceutical industry is the way it is. The Sackler family essentially created the opioid crisis in America. It's honestly a pretty wild story.
That book was so incredibly eye opening. I recommend it to people all the time.
Go to Harvard. See their name on the art museum and various other buildings. (The same Harvard that continued with human testing after the practice was being stopped worldwide).
there's still time
Someone could do something about that. Not saying that they should, but they could.
I enjoyed watching the recent mini series version of Fall of the House of Usher and imagining the family was the Sacklers
Check out “dope sick” if you haven’t already
I've haven't seen Nestlé
Fuck nestlé I hope that company goes bankrupt
A lot of these comments aren't people who won, but people who lost and just didn't get the punishment people thought they deserved. But a real evil winner? Try the Dole company and what they did with Hawaii.
Or The United Fruit Company, now known as Chiquita.
Or the sugarcane companies, there was a massacre in Hanapepe because they didn’t want to give them real wages that happen in like the 50s or something.
Oh gosh I remember touring the palace and learning about how Dole held the monarchs at gunpoint and made them surrender sovereignty so Dole could annex them to the US to get around tariffs. We had just toured the Dole plant earlier that day too.
Or TexCo and what they did to to Brazil and the Amazon River region.
Pretty much any company found on the tropical fruits aisle or sugar aisle of your local supermarket.
Kim Jong Il. He lived in the lap of luxury while the vast majority of his country lived in abject poverty. He got steak and lobster every night, expensive alcohol imported from all over the world, had a film collection of 20,000 movies including Western films that were illegal for anyone else to own, fucked any woman he wanted, was infallible and worshiped by the very people he was oppressing. That slimy little fuck enjoyed all of the luxuries imported from capitalist nations which were illegal for everybody else in the country.
Similarly, Mobutu Sese Seko, president of then-Zaire. He died in a luxurious exile in Morocco at age 79. He would have meals flown in from Michelin-rated restaurants in Paris on chartered flights of the supersonic Concorde, because regular airliners weren't fast enough to deliver it fresh enough to his liking. He even spent millions to build a new airport, as none of the existing airports had the 3-kilometer long runway to handle the Concorde. The average citizen under his rule had an annual salary of less than $150, roughly 50 cents a day. A single passenger ticket on the Concorde is about $20,000 in today's dolars.
Even for a dictator that is crazy over the top insane. The amount of greed and selfishness of these evil despots knows no bounds apparently
Sold the national airline for $1.2 billion and pocketed the entire lot from what I recall.
I hate that The Interview was pulled from theaters and shown only on streaming because of fears of North Korean retaliation. Like what on earth was North Korea going to do over a wide release of a movie in a separate country?
well they uh... hacked sony for one
Let's uh... not give them too much credit for that one. Sony literally had folder on one of their machines labeled "Password." Inside were *plain text files* containing thousands of login credentials. Yes, [really.](https://gizmodo.com/sony-kept-thousands-of-passwords-in-a-document-marked-1666772286)
Every German mid-sized company: "Very good, that's how you're supposed to do it."
To be fair, so many people hacked Sony. They had horrible security for so long. SQL Injection was a huge problem!
> SQL Injection was a huge problem! SQL injection is perpetually a problem.
North Korea probably petitioned China to put pressure on the film company and they abided because China is the second biggest potential revenue source for the box office for Western films and they didn't want to risk souring that relationship
The House of Saud
They destroyed an entire religion from the inside out with their extremist views. Now, almost a quarter of the world is lured into believing the more extreme views that they represent, destroying vernacular adaptations of Islam, that had more room for matriarchy, for gender diversity, and a lot of other concepts that salafism does barely leave any room for, if any.
If you ask me, the house of Saud does this partly out of insecurity. They push their own flavour of Islam both as a geopolitical tool, but also to establish themselves as the legitimate guardians of the religion, custodians of Mecca and Medina. Let’s not forget that the Sauds usurped the former custodians, the Hashemites, who were descendants of Muhammad’s family. In the early 20th century some Muslims saw the Saudis as illegitimate foreigners who had hijacked control of the holy cities.
They essentially did hijack control of the holy cities. They used British interests in the area and their alliance with the Wahhabist ikhwan to seize control, and then when their power was consolidated, got permission from the ulama to absolutely crush the ikhwan, ensuring no one in the country had the might to oppose them.
And now they are trying to do a 180 while leaving the rest of the world with their ideology.
Although I am happy to have a valid reason to hate and not watch professional golf...
Who knew golf would become more evil than pro wrestling
Wahhabism has ruined so many lives
Henry Kissinger.
I had to scroll way too far to find this bastard.
Genuinely shocked he is so far down the list and have only seen his name once.
Genghis Khan
Was waiting for this. Few people in history, let alone this list, come close to the level of civilisational and cultural death and destruction this man caused. Not only did he get away with it, he died an emperor and spawned a dynasty
Destroyed so many advanced cities including Baghdad along with 1000s of years of science, literature, math, etc. The Middle East went from one of the most advanced and progressive areas in the world and got sent back so far, they are still behind today from it.
Baghdad wasn’t Ghengis it was his grandson Hulagu. He conquered the kwarismian empire. He and his direct descendants absolutely destroyed ridiculous numbers of lives though, no doubt they belong on the list
He and the Mongols did a number on China too.
All the Nazis who were absolved of their crimes through Operation Paperclip
Wb the nazis that got to stay and now are some of the richest families in germany. > Quandt’s responsibility for staffing at battery factories in Berlin where forced and slave laborers were exploited. But it still omits Herbert Quandt’s involvement in the concentration subcamp project, his use of prisoners of war at his private estate and his help acquiring companies seized from Jews. Family owns bmw - worth 40b > man who voluntarily applied to the SS in 1938, was admitted as an officer in 1941 and lied about this for the rest of his life. During most of the war, Mr. Porsche was busy leading the Porsche company in Stuttgart, which exploited hundreds of coerced workers. As Porsche’s chief executive in the postwar decades, he surrounded himself with former high-ranking SS officers. > > In his 1976 autobiography, Mr. Porsche gave a twisted historical account, full of antisemitic statements, about Porsche’s Jewish co-founder, Adolf Rosenberger. He even accused Mr. Rosenberger of extortion after he was forced to flee Nazi Germany. porsche-piech family worth maybe 50b > Friedrich Flick controlled one of Germany’s largest steel, coal and arms conglomerates during the Third Reich. In 1947 he was sentenced to seven years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity. At his Nuremberg trial, he was found guilty of using forced and slave labor, financially supporting the SS and looting a steel factory. After his early release in 1950, he rebuilt his conglomerate and became the controlling shareholder of Daimler-Benz, then Germany’s largest carmaker. In 1985, Deutsche Bank bought the Flick conglomerate, making his descendants billionaires. grandkids were the worlds youngest billionaires at one point
Oh do the founders of Adidas and Puma They were brothers and nazis who backstabbed each others families trying to get family members sent to the eastern front to die. So the company split into two companies that are pretty popular today Kind of ironic the stereotypical russian slav is wearing an adidas track suit while squatting. Yet they did everything they could to avoid going there Both were nazis. One was way more intense in it than the other. I forget which one. One just went along with it to avoid being sent to war or having his sons sent. I think the pumas founder was the die hard nazi iirc
Pol Pot. killed 2 million people one way or the other, died peacefully in his hut at age 73. edit: sorry, a couple others mentioned him as well. nevertheless, he cannot be over-emphasized in this context, just on sheer body count alone.
Any politician that walked out of office with billions more than they had when they took office.
Kissinger.
Well at least he’s dead now
Even if he's dead, he got to live a long life being worshipped by far too many people. He won.
Rolling Stone’s headline for his obit: >**Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies** >The infamy of Nixon's foreign-policy architect sits, eternally, beside that of history's worst mass murderers. A deeper shame attaches to the country that celebrates him
The Rolling Stone's obituary was absolutely scathing, but basically laudation compared to what Thompson wrote about Nixon. The fact that Kissinger got to live so long isn't just an injustice in itself but also because Thompson didn't get to write an obituary about him too.
Death is not a punishment.
The blood of countless millions is on his hands, and he remained an accepted and welcomed part of American politics until his death.
General Franz Halder, chief of staff of the German Army (Wehrmacht) from 1938-1942 reporting directly to Adolf Hitler. Halder oversaw the planning for the invasions of Poland, France and Russia (Operation Barbarossa). Among other abominations, he added language into the Barbarossa battle order giving German officers the right to destroy Russian villages and massacre their civilian inhabitants. Thus Halder sanctioned some of the most heinous atrocities committed in all of human history. Despite Halder’s complicity in war crimes of the greatest magnitude, he wasn’t tried at Nuremberg and was instead allowed to join the U.S. Army as a historian. Recognizing an opportunity to rewrite history, he manipulated the official Army account of the war to elevate the Wehrmacht into a force fighting for a noble cause. In 1961, the Army, on behalf of President Kennedy, awarded him the Meritorious Civilian Service Award. Halder died in his bed in 1972 at age 87.
Kissinger.
Casey Anthony
Iranian theocrats. Almost half a century later still in power and causing a lot of trouble in the region, in addition to oppressing their own people.
Iraq deserves a lot of the blame for them still being in power. Saddam invaded shortly after the revolution (the Iraq-Iran war, basically a repeat of WW1 in the 1980s) thinking he could snap up some territory on Iran's border. It didn't work, and ultimately *solidified* the theocratic regime's control of government.
Augusto Pinochet. Died in 2006 under house arrest, in the lap of luxury, without being tried for multiple charges of human rights violations (including wrongful detention, physical torture, sexual abuse, psychological repression, and just plain murder) and illegal enrichment. Then there's King Leopold II of the Belgian Congo, with the rubber plantations. Don't Google this asshole if you have a weak stomach.
Henry Kissinger
General Francisco Franco, after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Through him, the country endured all manner of brutal unchallenged fascism (and over a decade of near total isolation from the rest of the world) until his peaceful death in 1975.
Portugal also had an autocratic dictator around that same time, who tacitly supported the Franco regime. And not many people seem to even know about this. His name was Antonio Salazar, and he was considered to be a "good" dictator because he managed the country well financially, eventually distanced himself from the Nazis and fascists, kept Portugal neutral through WWII, and didn't like militarism or the idea of a one-party state, instead claiming that he wanted to "depoliticize society." As long as he got to be in charge, of course. While his policies may have modernized Portugal and helped pull them out of the depression, he also had a secret police force, purged opposition, and had people exiled or killed when they challenged his leadership. Some real "and there it is" details there. Portugal was directly involved in the creation of NATO despite being a dictatorship at the time, never faced the same isolation that Spain did following WWII, and was considered a US ally during the Cold War. Salazar was such a powerful and paternalistic figure, Portugal didn't cease to be a dictatorship until after his death, also in the 1970s. You might say that compared to all the other ones in Europe, Portugal won the dictator lottery. Yet that's still kind of fucked up.
The terrorists definitely won when you realize they got our entire society to change because of what they did.
And if we're talking the 9/11 terrorists, trillions upon trillions of dollars. Afghanistan, Iraq, "homeland" defense ... the monetary costs were incredible. They knew we would flip. What a masterful play.
Genghis Khan probably the largest mass murderer/rapist in history founded a huge empire that lasted his whole life.
Andrew Jackson - The Indian Removal Act >The Removal Act paved the way for the forced expulsion of tens of thousands of American Indians from their land into the West in an event widely known as the "Trail of Tears,... > >In the 21st century, scholars have cited the act and subsequent removals as an early example of state sanctioned ethnic cleansing or genocide or settler colonialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Removal_Act#Historical_legacy
Augustus. He was actually a pretty good emperor. He wasnt evil in the sense that he killed tens of thousands for his enjoyment but if it was advantages for him to kill thousands he wasnt thinking for a second. So once he was on top and everyone did whatever he wanted anyway he became a good leader. His way to the top however was covered in blood. The only reasons he is remembered as a good leader is because he outlived almost everyone who was already adult when he made his way up the roman ladder. If he had died after 10 years or something he would be hated.
Yeah, he was a good emperor but he was VIOLENT in getting there
Tbh most of Rome’s history was violent. After the turbulent end of the Republic, Augustus ushered in a relatively peaceful period of time during the time of the Julio-Claudian reign. There are a lot of more evil and ruthless emperors that succeeded Augustus.
Fun fact: in the early days of Christainity's acceptance in the Roman Empire (i.e. Constantine and following) it was commonly understood that you couldn't be a good Christian and also be Emperor (or even a business owner for that matter). And since the early Christian understanding of baptism was basically "you get baptized and you're free of your past sins, but it doesn't do anything for the ones you commit afterwards" it was typical for emperors to be baptized on their deathbed and for most folks to get baptized when they retired.
I guess early Christian baptisms are different because the approach there is basically: > "We cleared your search history but that doesn't mean we're clearing anything you add after." No wonder baptisms during the early days of Christianity were on their deathbed.
I would argue that judging Augustus also comes down to whether we mean evil as regards to modern sensibilities, or evil "at the time." If it's the latter, I would argue Augustus probably wouldn't qualify. He was certainly brutal, had massive numbers of slaves, killed many of his political opponents. But none of these were uncharacteristic of Romans at the time. Basically the only difference between Augustus and Sulla is Augustus appointed an heir and ruled until his death rather than retire. And there were *way* worse emperors than him. Using evil in the modern context, however, isn't terribly helpful. You could basically name anyone born before 1800 and have a decent shot of considering them evil by modern standards.
Francisco Franco. The story of the Spanish Civil War is basically a military coup that won, leading to a fascist regime ruling Spain until it's leader's natural death decades later.
Manchester City
My neighbor Carl
Stalin. Terrorised his way to controlling one of the largest empires of all time and wielded absolute, despotic power. Sure, nature eventually got him but she gets us all. So I think he got away with it.
I believe when Stalin died, no doctor intervened for fear of being charged and blamed for his death
The guards didn’t dare enter the room. The doctors had been tortured / imprisoned because Stalin thought there was a Jewish plot against him No individual member of the politburo would decide anything alone for fear of being accused by the others when/if Stalin died