What is The Worst Men in History?

 

American essayist, Thomas Carlyle once said that “history is but the biography of great men”. He also once said that Germany should be “the president of Europe”, though, so how much stock we can put in his opinion seems debatable at best.

No, history is really the stories of people. And people are a number of things. Some of them are great, sure. But some of them really aren’t. This blog is dedicate to those people: the worst men in  history.

That’s not to say that they’re necessarily the most evil, evil as a concept is often fairly subjective and if my blog was just about evil people, I’d write a post about Hitler and call it a day. No, people can be the “worst” in many different ways, and this blog is about all of them.

A few of them, for example, might be really racist (though, how that is or isn’t evil, I’ll leave to the reader). See Captain James Cook who, upon setting foot upon what is now called Australia, attempted to shoot the first indigenous person he saw. Some of them were really stupid, like King George II who sat on the toilet and apparently.. uh.. toiled so hard that his heart burst. Some of them are just really weird, like John Smith (of Pocahontas fame, in case you’re wondering exactly which white guy I was talking about), who found himself attracted to manatees (which isn’t the greatest endorsement of the Disney version).

While we’re on the topic, no: I’m not doing a worst women in history. Not because women haven’t been “worst” at some stage (Elizabeth Bathory comes to mind), but because so much of history has focused on men. Men have, as a gender, been the “worst” so many time because we have more consistently been given the opportunity to do so. Most of these worst men have held positions of power and, quite frankly, there haven’t been all that many women in those positions (at least, not comparatively).

So come join us on this indefinite project to look at the worst people history has ever produced. You’ll hopefully laugh, you’ll hopefully be surprised. You may even find yourself angry. You won’t be bored.