23A051 Three Great Evildoers by Jim Davies, 12/19/2023

"Three Evil Men" would have been a shorter title but I don't believe anyone is intrinsically evil; though we all have the capacity to do evil, and these three did a great deal of it. "But wait," you might say, "where's Hitler? And are not Churchill and Roosevelt the great saviors of freedom in the 20th Century, not evildoers?"

I can't think of anyone else who deliberately tried to exterminate millions of people because of the accident of their birth, and that does make Hitler an unique doer of evil. There have been many "pogroms" in history, but nothing on the scale of his. It's strange, this widespread hostility to such a talented and industrious race; I suspect most of it comes from envy. Nonetheless, his slaughter of about 6 million Jews falls well short of the death count resulting from what was done by FDR, Churchill and Stalin. "The Black Book of Communism" lists several other megamurderers, notably Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot, but I still pick this trio as the worst of the worst.

Winston Churchill was widely admired in my youth, and he did well to pull Britain back from the socialist abyss in 1951; and he was an inspiring leader during WW2. But as Patrick Buchanan brilliantly showed, he did more than anyone to start not only that war but WW1 before it.

The disaster of 1914 set the bleak tone for the whole Century, and Churchill is the one who tipped the balance, in the British Cabinet that August as it debated whether or not to join France and Russia in the war on Germany and Austria. He was an enthusiast for war, and had been ever since he played with toy soldiers in Blenheim Palace; and he was, it must be said, fearless. Fearless, but foolish. The UK had no obligation to join it, and had the BritGov said plainly in advance that it would, Germany would not - so WW1 would have fizzled out shortly after it began. But Churchill prevailed, 16 million died, and Europe was in hock to the US.

Then in 1939 he repeated the folly by using his influence in the media to turn British public opinion against Germany and so the BritGov entered that one too; and ended up virtually bankrupt. Had Britain not fought, nor would the US; instead of a Communist ruler Russians would have suffered a Nazi one but the rest of the world would have been unaffected.

Franklin Roosevelt noted how easily his country gained power by intervening (rather late) in WW1, and looked for a way to repeat the trick in WW2. Popular opinion opposed participating, so he engineered Pearl Harbor as a "false flag" operation, with stunning success. That was after he had prolonged the Great Depression for 8 miserable years by repeated intervention in the economy.

Result: another 60- to 80 million dead, communism throughout Eastern Europe, Western Europe under US influence, two atom bombs dropped that killed a quarter million civilians, and a 45-year Cold War to follow. FDR is therefore the worst US President in history, worse even than Abe Lincoln.

Josef Stalin ruled the USSR from 1924 to 1953 with unprecedented cruelty, even reversing Lenin's partial withdrawal from strict Marxism with his "New Economic Policy" that canceled collective farming. Hence the famines were repeated, and his agent Felix Dzerzhinsky implemented the starvation by killing farmers who refused to cooperate. One such famine was in Ukraine, which gave that country reason to hate everything Russian to this day.

In 1939 he made a "10-year non-aggression treaty" with Hitler, which lasted all of 2 years, then when the latter reneged he ran a defense with a classic Russian strategy of scorched-earth withdrawal until the invader's supply lines were long, then a devastating counter attack; not in the name of the glorious workers' paradise but of "Mother Russia", in what is still called the Great Patriotic War. Of the 60- 80 million deaths above, 27 million were Russian.

Post-war, Stalin continued his rigid communist rule which created the great network of prisons for dissidents and others of which Solzhenitsyn wrote in his Gulag Archipelago. He was an archetypical dictator, the epitome of government without limits.

These three evildoers were at best incompetent bunglers; at worst, they callously set about their programs of wicked domination and destruction. Yet each of them in his time began as a trusted leader of government and is even popular today! Lord Acton was right: "power corrupts." With these as exemplars, there is surely no question: such power must be denied to human beings. That's why we aim for the total elimination of government.