The following historical retelling of the lives of nine world leaders spread throughout history surprised me, emotionally grabbed me, and satisfied my love of history all at once. It is an irreverent guide to world history as told from a sub-continent India perspective.
For the full un-condensed article originally publish in March 2018, go to: russia-insider.com.
India is a country with its own world view, a self-sustaining civilization, and a history that has known savage invasions throughout the past several centuries.
You may find fault with this list of evil people, and you are likely not to recognize every one of those outlined. This reading may appeal to history buffs more than others, but however you feel about history, the nine world leaders described herein either directly or indirectly brought about world changes that, I suggest, are still affecting each of us today in one way or another.
Please keep in mind this is an Indian perspective of those nine evil ones who caused untold human misery in the sub-continent of India as well as across much of Asia.
9. Yahya Khan
It took Adolf Hitler 12 years to round up and kill six million European Jews, but the Pakistanis, led by their President Yahya Khan, March 1969-December 1971, killed three million of their own Bengali citizens in less than a year. The fair-skinned Pakistanis of West Pakistan had such a racist, visceral hatred for their Muslim brethren in East Pakistan that Yahya is recorded as saying furiously: “Kill three million, and the rest will eat out of our hands.”
The disruption of normal life in the region was cataclysmic: more than 30 million people – nearly half the population – fled the cities and went back to their villages, while ten million fled to India.
8. Talat Pasha
This genocidal maniac, whose deeds are well known, was the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire from 1917 to 1918. In 1915, Talat Pasha issued an order to wipe out the Armenians, forcing the entire population of Armenia – then under Turkish rule – into concentration camps.
With their belongings, naked people were forced to trudge miles with no food and were killed if they couldn’t continue. The entire male Armenian population of Ankara was exterminated. Out of 2.5 million Armenians, 1 to 1.5 million were killed. In 1921, an Armenian assassination squad ended Talat Pasha’s miserable existence.
7. Dick Cheney
Seventeen of the 19 hijackers of 9/11 were Saudi Arabians and yet the US invaded Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with Islamic terror. U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney lied and fabricated evidence to get the U.S. to go to war with Iraq. This led to the destruction of a secular country, its infrastructure and its army, but more tragically the war caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the displacement of millions.
Cheney used the war to make billions for his old company, Halliburton. This suggests that he destroyed an entire country with a view to making money for himself and his cronies.
Iraq was once a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism, but America’s war is directly responsible for the emergence of Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
The reason Cheney’s boss for eight years isn’t here is because George W. Bush was “an ignorant person who wanted to show his mother he could do things his father couldn’t”.
Cheney was the Svengali who prodded the IQ-challenged Bush to invade Iraq.
He is likely to be singled out for special treatment in hell.
6. Pol Pot
What’s unique about Pol Pot, the Prime Minister of Cambodia from 1976 to 1979, is that he wiped out 25 to 33 per cent of the population of his country – nearly three million.
Pol Pot represents the ultimate communist fantasy – to destroy their ‘class enemies’. He wanted to uproot Cambodian civilization, turning it into an agrarian society and the people into workers and peasants. He is the only person in history who ordered an official genocide against his country. He banned Buddhism, money, schools, markets and personal possessions. Doctors, teachers, engineers and other skilled people were systematically eliminated.
His communist government forced mass evacuations of cities, separating people from friends and families.
The torture of class enemies happened on a massive scale, with millions, including the elderly, pregnant women and children beaten to death after being forced to work insanely long hours. People were expected to work until they dropped dead.
Pol Pot was supported both by the Chinese and the Americans, because he was an enemy of the Vietnamese.
Cambodia’s nightmare finally ended in December 1985 when the highly professional Vietnamese army invaded the country and destroyed Pol Pot’s headquarters. He fled to Thailand and after a few years moved to China, where he was treated for cancer.
Pol Pot died in April 1998 of natural causes but is surely having a painful time in hell.
5. Timur Shah
Murderous tyrants fill history’s pages, but Timur of Samarkand was cruel towards both man and beast. Among his favorite pastimes was pushing elephants down steep cliffs.
A former bandit, Timur conquered Persia and Mesopotamia, invaded Russia, Georgia, Syria, Turkey and India. In Baghdad he had 90,000 people beheaded so he could build towers with their skulls. In Turkey, where he promised no bloodshed in return for surrender, he had 3,000 prisoners buried alive and pointed out that he had kept to the letter of his oath. He also captured the Turkish Sultan and his wives, kept the Sultan in a cage in his parlor and had his naked wives serve visitors food and drinks.
In 1397, Timur invaded India. The entire stretch of land from the Khyber Pass to the northern plains was subjected to massacres, rape, pillage and kidnapping. He easily defeated the Muslim sultanate ruling Delhi, but strong Hindu resistance made Timur even more vengeful than usual. During the ransacking of Delhi, almost all those not killed were distributed as slaves among Timur’s nobles. In his memoirs, he claims his 15,000 Turks each “secured from 50 to 100 prisoners….there was no man with less than 20” and that “women were obtained in such quantities as to exceed all count”.
Timur declared his army had only killed Hindus and spared Muslim civilians. That’s rich, coming from someone who wiped out the city of Baghdad.
Timur is most likely being repeatedly thrown off a steep cliff into hell’s lake of lava.
4. Aurangzeb
Aurangzeb was singularly responsible for the continuing Hindu-Muslim divide in India. The Mughal emperor came to the throne by murdering his scholarly older brother and heir apparent Dara Shikoh. He also blinded Dara’s young children.
Aurangzeb let elephants loose among the population and raided Hindu lands, destroying ancient temples. The number of stunningly beautiful temples he destroyed runs into the hundreds, if not thousands. Every Hindu in his kingdom had to pay the hated jaziya tax to be allowed to practice his religion. He claimed he was (unsuccessfully) “trying to destroy the ancient sovereignties of this country”.
Aurangzeb today would be the equivalent of the Islamic State’s Al-Baghdadi, if not Osama Bin Laden or the Taliban Mullah Omar.
As emperor, Aurangzeb banned music, dancing and alcohol in the Mughal Empire. In Sindh and Punjab where many Muslims attended Hindu Brahmin preaches, he ordered the demolition of all schools and temples where these took place, making it punishable for Muslims to dress like non-Muslims.”
By the late 1600s, a unique culture had formed in northern India, with Islam ready to shed its terrorist behavior towards other religions. Dara, who translated ancient Hindu texts into Persian, was symbolic of this remarkable transformation of Islam.
Hell is the right place for such a scumbag.
3. Mohandas Gandhi
Mohandas Gandhi’s pacifism caused great harm to India and Hindus. Muslims refused to listen to him and attacked Hindus who had been effectively disarmed by Gandhi’s appeals for peace. This encouraged Muslims to attack Hindus even more because they knew Hindus weren’t going to retaliate.
Had Hindus been allowed to attack Muslims, or at least be prepared to defend themselves with weapons, the cycle of Muslim violence could have been nipped in the bud. By going on hunger fasts in order to prevent Hindus from retaliating, Gandhi was the chief villain of Partition. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus were killed and thousands of women raped because of Gandhi’s imposed pacifism. He advocated a senseless surrender to murder.
Gandhi’s advice to the victims of communal violence was “breathtaking for its callousness in the face of human suffering”. During his prayer meeting on 1 May 1947, he prepared the Hindus and Sikhs for the anticipated massacres of their kind in the upcoming state of Pakistan with these words:
“I would tell the Hindus to face death cheerfully if the Muslims are out to kill them. I would be a real sinner if after being stabbed I wished in my last moment that my son should seek revenge. I must die without rancor. You may turn round and ask whether all Hindus and all Sikhs should die. Yes, I would say. Such martyrdom will not be in vain.”
Worse, believing he was some kind of mahatma (great soul), he tried to prove his self-control by often sleeping and bathing naked with other women. These women included his grandniece, Manu, and the wife of his grandnephew, who were both 18 when they started sleeping in the same bed as Gandhi, who was 77 years old at the time.
Such a pedophile belongs in hell.
2. Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa took money stolen from pensioners by financial fraud artist Charles Keating. She accepted donations from the murderous Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. She was also a friend of Enver Hoxha, the communist dictator of Albania.
Worse, Teresa’s 600 missions in 123 countries have been described as “homes for the dying” by visiting doctors. The doctors observed a significant lack of hygiene, even unfit conditions, as well as a shortage of actual care, inadequate food and no painkillers. Teresa claimed that “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s passion. The world gains much from their suffering.’’
Her nuns were not provided with medical training, the use of mosquito repellents, or information about malaria and vaccinations, because Teresa believed “God” would look after the nuns. One of her nuns got into trouble with the order for helping a man with dysentery who was dying. Teresa quoted Peter 2:18-23, which orders slaves to obey their masters even if they are abusive and difficult, and urged her nuns to obey superiors without question.
But she was a hypocrite: seeking out the best medical care for herself. Despite the fact that medical tourists from the West travel to India for treatment, Teresa reckoned India wasn’t good enough for her. She was admitted to California’s Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation.
Teresa was stingy even during national emergencies. During Indian floods she offered prayers and medallions of the Virgin Mary but no monetary aid.
Teresa’s fundraising sermons persuaded people that Calcutta is a city of lepers and beggars. Her nuns lied to the global media that the city had 450,000 lepers, knowing that this would make rich westerners despatch their dollars.
All abandoned children who are taken into Teresa’s missions are brought up as Christians. In India Teresa was (and her mission continues to be) actively engaged in proselytizing, which is not only illegal but has a negative impact on India’s complex social hierarchy.
For her lies, stolen cash and allowing little children suffer painful deaths, she is a favorite member of hell.
1. Winston Churchill
Prime Minister Winston Churchill managed to outdo Hitler and his Nazi cohorts. The Germans may have taken 12 years to murder 6 million Jews, but their Teutonic cousins, the British, managed to kill almost 4 million Indians in just over a year, with Churchill cheering from the sidelines.
Australian biochemist Dr Gideon Polya has called the Bengal Famine a “manmade holocaust” because Churchill’s policies were directly responsible for the disaster. He knowingly and enthusiastically caused the famine in 1942-43 by transferring vast quantities of food grain from India to Britain.
To Churchill, the starvation of Indians was less serious than that of Greeks. When the British administrators urged him to release food stocks for India, Churchill responded with a telegram asking why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.
Churchill’s hostility toward Indians has long been documented. At a War Cabinet meeting, he blamed the Indians for the famine, saying they breed like rabbits, and are a beastly people with a beastly religion. On another occasion, he insisted they were “the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans”.
He also pushed for the firebombing of German population centers such as Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz which killed 200,000 civilians in 1945. It was the only way the British could show they were in the war.
In 1944, Churchill came up with a cataclysmic plan to convert Germany into a “country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character”. The Morgenthau Plan if implemented would have starved 10 million Germans to death in the first year alone. U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt admitted Churchill was “bought off” by the American offer of $6.5 billion in Lend Lease.
No human being deserves to be in hell more than Winston.
Again, this is an Indian perspective, originating from within south central Asia with the center of the world for their purposes being India. You may very well find this different point of view eye opening and interesting. I hope so.
I didn’t agree with everything presented herein and I presume you Def-Con News readers won’t either.
As the old bit of advice states, Take what you can use and leave the rest.
And enjoy.
