You gotta love internet debates. Let them go on long enough and sooner or later somebody makes comparisons of their opponent or his ideas to either Hitler or the Nazis. This end point is practically guaranteed in any sort of political debate that it has it's own logical fallacy coined for it: Reductio ad Hitlerum.
Reductio ad Hitlerum is basically a variation of ad hominum or attacking the speaker. The idea is to try and discredit your opponent by suggesting that his opinion sounds like something Hitler or the Nazis may have thought and therefore is invalid or debunked. Of course in order for such a fallacy to have a chance of working (as far as a morally illiterate audience is concerned) you would have to invoke a person that most people would consider as downright evil.
Except that Hitler is so obviously evil that evoking his name is downright banal at this point. Occasionally more historically literate commentators will also throw other names around such as Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Idi Amin or Augusto Pinochet. Then I suspect that I might be debating with somebody who is closer to being my intellectual equal. But do you actually have to murder a million people to be considered evil? What if somebody used their evil tendencies a lot more subtly to evade detection until it was too late or did so much damage by their legacy that it was almost impossible to undo? What if they had the public convinced that they were really the force of good? What if the devil actually convinced people that he didn't exist?
Except when I search some blogs and media op-eds on the internet, about 90% of the time, suggestions for the most evil people in recent history are being made by people with an obvious political ax to grind. Other times, people would suggest individuals such as Benedict Arnold or John Wilkes Booth which are poor nominations. Benedict Arnold's plot actually failed. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Booth was tragic, but the American Civil War was obviously won by the Union at this point and firmly on the path of Reconstruction, so what did that accomplish?
I'm looking for individuals who truly did irreversible damage with their legacy or damage they we are still trying to undo. And as a bonus, they did so with a smug sense of self-righteousness. With this in mind, here are some of my nominations:
Joe McCarthy: You seriously have to wonder if he was really working with the Russians as a planted mole. It's hard to believe that somebody could be this inept and still be breathing. Unfortunately, his actions left any serious attempts to confront and combat Communism in the world open to skepticism and ridicule. He did so much to undermine Cold War foreign policy for decades.
James Buchanan: Worst. President. EVER! Which is a shame, because he had such an accomplished political career. But when Lincoln became president elect and southern states started succeeding from the Union he pretty much waited out his term allowing the newly formed Confederacy to organize, form a government and raise an army. I have little doubt that any civil war wouldn't have lasted much longer than 90 days if Buchanan had actually done his job and enforce the law.
Neville Chamberlain: I don't get it. Nazi Germany was clearly resurrecting their political and military ambitions that plunged Europe into the First World War, so his solution was to give Hitler more territory??? Smacking down Hitler early would have saved Europe 6 years of carnage and perhaps saved eastern Europe from falling to Communism. Needless to say, appeasement became a dirty word because of Chamberlain.
Earl Warren: If he simply interned the Japanese-Americans as governor of California during World War II, it wouldn't have been evil enough. What gets Warren on this list is that he later convinced enough people of his civil rights credentials to get himself on the US Supreme Court despite a lack of judicial experience, then proceeded to grant unprecedented freedoms and rights to the lowliest sociopaths in American history. And I'm not talking about Brown v Board of Ed. This man thought he could consolidate enough Justices to effectively side-step Congress and rule the country from the bench; that is until the Kennedy assassination ruined his fun. Earl Warren's reign on the bench pretty much guaranteed that there would no longer be any such thing as a bipartisan Supreme Court or an apolitical nomination.
Jimmy Hoffa: Probably did more to undermine organized labor than help it. He made the robber barons of the gilded age look like Boy Scouts by comparison. He pretty much made union synonymous with organized crime in the people's minds.
Nathan Bedford Forrest: His exploits during the American Civil War would be considered war crimes, even by 19th century standards. His brutality didn't end when the war did. Forrest became one of the founding members of the Ku Klux Klan whom would terrorize southern blacks for at least two generations.
Jason Gould and James Fisk: Inventors of the "golden parachute". Rockefeller at least developed kerosene that wouldn't explode when you lit your stove. Gould and Fisk produced nothing. They tried to hoard gold to drive up it's price and manipulate interest rates so that it became nearly impossible for the middle class to borrow money or pay their debts. They had bribed so many politicians that I wonder if they got a group rate.
Andrew Wakefield: You'd think that the eradication of crippling and fatal childhood diseases would settle the issue about vaccines once and for all. But Wakefield changed all that with a fraudulent paper published in 1998. This paper has since been retracted and refuted, but it has convinced enough naive parents not to vaccinate their children and allowing infectious childhood diseases to make a comeback.
Gilles-Eric Seralini: What Wakefield did for vaccines, Seralini did for genetically modified crops (GMOs) by publishing fraudulent and refuted studies about negative impacts of GMO's on health that continue to be cited in policy discussions about the use of genetically modified technologies and methods. Seralini's impact makes it very likely that we'll never see the end of starvation or poverty within our lifetime.
Hans Blix: Seriously, how can a man not see a proscribed nuclear program "hidden" in plain sight? As head of the IAEA he utterly failed to uncover Iraq's attempts at uranium enrichment. The Israeli bombardment of the Osiraq reactor and the 1991 Persian Gulf War rendered this issue mute. But when he became head of UNMOVIC he allowed Iraq to lead him in the same cat and mouse game they had played more than a decade prior; the same game that Iran and Syria are continuing to this day.
William Westmoreland: He didn't realize the type of war he was fighting in Vietnam until it was too late, and then tried to escalate the conflict using questionable tactics to provoke the NVA into a full scale battle, and when that didn't work, tried to cover it up. He pretty much demonstrated to the whole world that the US military can be worn down by attrition.
Caryl Chessman: If you ever wondered how a common thug and rapist can have such a large fan base among lonely women and manboobs, it's because of this man. "[snif] It's not right that such a handsome and sensitive man should get the gas chamber [snif; sob]" Chessman was patently guilty of his crimes, but his manipulation of due process combined with an eloquent demeanor guaranteed national attention, many fans, and invigorated a national movement to ban capital punishment. It takes a lot of chutpah to be your own consul and then appeal a guilty verdict based on a mistrial. Isn't he just dreamy?
This isn't an exhaustive list, but I find it starts some interesting conversations.
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