Читать книгу The World's Ten Most Evil Men - From Twisted Dictators to Child Killers - Nigel Cawthorne - Страница 4

There are so many evil people in the world that it was hard to limit the scope of this book to just ten of them. And when I say ‘evil’, I don’t just mean bad or misguided, or even misunderstood; I’m talking about people whose principal aim is to make life a living hell for the rest of us. Some, like Osama bin Laden and Charles Manson, may want to drag the entire world into bloodshed and chaos. Others, such as Robert Mugabe, are content to draw only their own people into the abyss. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam and Charles Taylor inflicted murderous misery on two nations apiece, while Radovan Karadzic was happy to order the extermination of others who were not like him.

Ian Brady tortured and murdered defenceless children in an attempt to break down the moral constraints that the rest of us rely on to get through life. Peter Sutcliffe killed vulnerable women for his own sexual gratification and then claimed that he was doing the work of God, while Dennis Nilsen killed because he could not stand to be alone – something we all must face, from time to time.

History is littered with truly evil characters. The twelfth-century Mongol leader Genghis Khan once stated: ‘I have committed many acts of cruelty and had an incalculable number of men killed, never knowing what I did was right, but I am indifferent to what people think of me.’ It is estimated that he killed up to a quarter of the world’s population during his lifetime. Outside the cities he conquered, he built pyramids of heads before completely destroying the internal fabric, but his evil did not stop there: when he died on the shore of Lake Baikal in 1227, he left orders that, if anyone gazed on his coffin, the next one would be theirs.

The evil deeds of Adolf Hitler are almost too infamous to recount. He started World War II, which resulted in the deaths of up to 60 million. There are no reliable estimates of the number of wounded or displaced, or those who endured other terrible privations. Hitler was also responsible for the systemic murder of some six million Jews, along with gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals and political allies, as well as direct enemies of Germany.

And it’s not just limited to men. In the 1860s, a million died during one woman’s attempt to make herself the Empress of South America. She was an Irish prostitute named Eliza Lynch, who was the mistress of Francisco Solano López, the President of Paraguay. To further her lover’s ambitions, she pushed him into simultaneously declaring war on Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay in 1863. In the six-year battle that ensued, Paraguay was completely destroyed. When Lynch eventually fled the country not a single male over the age of nine was left alive.

For the purposes of this book, I was confined to write about evil people who are, at the time of writing, still alive. There are more than enough of them. You may disagree with my choice – you are, of course, free to come up with your own list. I have not presented my own selection in any particular order (I think it would be tasteless to come up with a Top Ten). Again, you are free to rank them.

Nigel Cawthorne

Bloomsbury, London 2009