Who would make your list of the top 10 most evil and dangerous leaders in the past 100 years?

The short answer is yes.

The long answer is:
If I think of Mussolini's (which is really Giovanni Gentile's) definition of fascism, which is very unambiguous, I won't argue with the notion that these guys fell under that umbrella. However, if I think of the prominent brahmins in our present day of once unthinkable absurdities like $100B Pfizer profits aided by federal mandates and overwhelming bipartisan support, it's hard to think of any that wouldn't also favor "public/private cooperation" and state over individual power when it benefits their enterprise, except maybe (and let the word maybe not be ignored) for Ayn Rand Instutitute/Cato Institute megadonor magical-invisible-hand-is-always-right types like Charles Koch.

And my unqualified old-man-sitting-on-the-toilet philosophical explanation:
This kind of brings it full circle. People like Gentile (and Hitler and Mussolini) saw Anglo-American style capitalism as a grave threat to the world and socialism as a dead letter by the end of WW1 and sought a third way. Unfortunately, after the second world war that third way seems to have evolved and influenced both anglo-american (or what we can now call global) capitalism and what we used to call the Left and united them rather than being defeated idealolgically. My best explanation for that is that while the Hitlers and Mussolinis abandonded the Marxist hope in the old left, they didn't abandon neo-Hegelianism, at least in the sense of certainty of "progress," and belief in Hegelian dialectics, which is the actual root of the problem.

If you are looking for hope or inspiration, you have to go back before Hegel or you'll just end up in the same or worse place. You can go old-school conservative and find comfort in Edmund Burke and maybe take up traditional religion and argue for the divne right of monarchs. If that's unpalatable, you can return to the Revolution before German idealists turned on the Enlightment and read Thomas Paine and essays by the Girondists, invest in bulk ammunition, and call your poltical enemies "Jacobist, Neo-Hegelian scum".

Or you can be a proper full scholar, back to Veddic and Chinese philosophy and reconcile it with modernism by reading Schopenhauer and writing academic papers attempting to be actually intellectually honest and noble like the possibility of (pulling out of a hat) a "true universal canon as an alternative to electoral or revolutionary politics to improve life for civilization" or something like that.

But that's all I got. I have a meeting to go to.

 

Not Jacinda Ardern, that's for sure.

Top 10:
Adolf Hitler - Holocaust/WWII
Joseph Stalin - Holodomor genocide
Pol Pot - Cambodian genocide
Mehmed V - Greek and Armenian genocides
Theoneste Bagosora - Rwandan genocide
Xi - Rohinga genocide
Vladamir Putin - Ukraine War
George W Bush - Iraq War
Lyndon B Johnson - Vietnam
Mao Zedong - Great leap forward

 

1. Elon Musk
2. Ron DeSantis

Those two alone make all leaders of the past millennia look like saints.

 

Hitler
Stephen Silas

jk

 

Evil & Dangerous since 1923? Sorry to say, @deb4rockets, Trump doesn't even scratch this list. Really, no American President does.

• Vladimir Putin, has been accused of numerous human rights violations during his time in power, including persecution of LGBT+, Chechnya and Ukraine.
• Adolf Hitler, leader of Nazi Germany from 1933-1945, responsible for the Holocaust and other atrocities during World War II.
• Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union from 1922-1953, responsible for the deaths of millions of people through purges, forced labor camps, and famine.
• Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia from 1975-1979, responsible for the deaths of approximately 1.7 million people through execution, forced labor, and starvation.
• Mao Zedong, leader of the People's Republic of China from 1949-1976, responsible for the deaths of millions of people through the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq from 1979-2003, responsible for numerous human rights abuses, including the torture and execution of political dissidents and the use of chemical weapons against civilians.
• Kim Jong-il, leader of North Korea from 1994-2011, responsible for widespread human rights abuses, including forced labor, torture, and public executions.
• Idi Amin, president of Uganda from 1971-1979, responsible for numerous human rights abuses, including the killing and forced expulsion of ethnic minorities.
• Muammar Gaddafi, leader of Libya from 1969-2011, responsible for human rights abuses, including the torture and execution of political dissidents and civilians during the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011.
• Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria since 2000, responsible for numerous human rights abuses, including the use of chemical weapons against civilians, torture, and extrajudicial executions during the Syrian Civil War.
• Slobodan Milosevic, president of Serbia from 1989-1997 and president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997-2000, responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Yugoslav Wars.
• Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the abduction and use of child soldiers.
• Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of ISIS, responsible for numerous terrorist attacks, including the beheading of civilians and journalists.
• Omar al-Bashir, president of Sudan from 1989-2019, responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide during the Darfur conflict.
• Charles Taylor, president of Liberia from 1997-2003, responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity during the First Liberian Civil War and for supporting rebel groups in Sierra Leone.
• Radovan Karadzic, president of the Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War, responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the Srebrenica massacre.

 

Hitler

 

And you didn’t even make it to South America.

 

I don't think she ever said Trump would be on a top-10 list. Just rhetorically pointed out the dearth of female representation among the world's villains.

 

Contextually, most posts for @deb4rockets come back to Trump so I brought it up.

I mean, I don't disagree with her, Trump is terrible in every way. He just doesn't touch evil in the way the people I listed are evil. Would he do those things if it meant furthering himself? Absolutely. And the kids in cages on the border and keeping Gitmo open are definitely in the conversation but it's still not genocide.

 

So I have to admit I didn't read your OP and how it juxtaposes women to men.

Some of the most evil leaders I've ever dealt with, in business, were women. They were absolutely merciless and cutthroat. Not only that, they would flip on a dime and play the damsel in distress when cornered or caught in a lie.

I postulate that if you remove gender gap, misogyny and traditional male/female roles, you would get at least an even split in 'evil' leaders worldwide.

 

I think your key word here is 'voted'.

Take a look at the list I posted. Most of those people weren't voted in. Or if they were, it was a rigged election.

 

The only woman leader in the modern era who I would put in the dangerous leader category is Queen Victoria who oversaw the imperial century. Those British are responsible for many crimes against humanity.

 

@deb4rockets I don't think women leaders are more pacifist on the whole. It's just that leadership stems from violence and legitimacy means the sole wielder of violence in society. Since the average man is stronger than the average woman, evil and dangerous despots are more likely men than women because the woman despot was already stopped by the aspiring man despot.