RIP Suharto

And don't forget, he could execute political prisoners in the clutch like nobody's business ...

 

Hitler had bigger pythags.

 

Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Franco, Pol Pot - all the non-conference powerhouses - have to be judged separately. They made their bones - so to speak - without direct US help.

 

Exactly, JG. You can't compare The Big Five Conference of meglomaniacal, murderous psychopaths with the likes of Trujillo, Somoza, Baby Doc or even that Nazi-loving-and-harboring Stroessner, who are A-ball dictators to be sure.

Mixing my threads for the moment, this is the soccer equivalent of having our Ebbsfleet United group of plumbers and dustmen play Man Yoo or Arsenal. It's apples and watermelons.

When you're slaughtering 20-plus million of your own people through calculated purges and collectivization of food that creates mass starvation, you know you've arrived in the Big Leagues of Dictators.

 

Hitler and Stalin have to rank 1 and 2. Hitler is undisputed number 1 because he started a war and had big ambitions. He made a managerial science of killing people. The fact that he didn't steal money makes him, in my opinion, worse, although some of his minions stole art and loot.

Stalin killed a lot of his own people before WW2, and people tend to forget how he seized the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. That really wasn't much different than what Hitler did in other places in Europe. He has to rank behind Hitler because Hitler invaded his country and because the Russians went thru so much suffering fighting the Germans.

I'd have to give Pol Pot the number 3 spot over Mao. Pol Pot set out to commit mass murder over a comparatively short period of time. Mao was really bad in the Cultural Revolution, but he did fight a war to grab the country from another dictator.

Pinochet is an underrated horrible dictator. He overthrew a democratically-elected government - it may have been Marxist and they won less than 40 percent, but it was elected. Moreover, Chile had 50 years prior experience with democracy - it may not have been a perfect democracy, but it was more democratic than most South American countries.

 

Musharraf is an up-and-comer.

I hear he might play Tajikistan's Rahmon in BracketBusters this year, sponsored by the International Consortium of Rubber Hose Manufacturers, Brown & Williamson ("When you need to get that cigarette flesh burn just right, give unfiltered Pall Mall's a light!"), and Menards, where it's one-stop torture shopping. You can go the whole nine at Menards, from the electrical shock starter kit to the latrine you need to deal with the aftermath.

Save big money at Menards!