In this episode, we take a look at the list of dictators throughout history and determine who is the worst and who the best. We have 16 seeds and a bracket to determine who will go through and who will be eliminated. This episode is sponsored by Draftdave.
00:01:42.000and we're just he's the worst dictator ever no one even comes close hitler bad we'll never even consider today even though we have 16 seeds even insinuating that anyone is anywhere near as bad as hitler because he's the worst and i promise you no matter what we go through today that hitler is still the worst dictator no matter what however We think he needs to be included.
00:01:59.000We'll take him off the board, but we'll include him as the yardstick.
00:02:03.000We'll measure other dictators by a Hitler rating system.
00:04:03.000Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-il, Hugo Chavez, Ferdinand Marcos, and then the underdog, actually, Papa Doc from Haiti, Duvalier, who I should tell you, we are bringing this to you, it's sponsored by DraftDictators.com, the best betting book in all of dictators' betting books, and Papa Doc actually right now does seem to be a plus-2200 underdog.
00:06:45.000Hitler was 12 million total with the Holocaust, and that includes Holocaust, gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, I don't know what percentage they made up, and Germans with mental deficiencies.
00:07:26.000Hitler, obviously, was wrong, but he did in some capacity believe that he was looking out for a very small select group of people, the Aryans, and he thought...
00:07:36.000Hitler bad. He thought that the Jews were the problem. He obviously fabricated the idea that
00:07:40.000they carried with them communicable diseases. But he wasn't just killing all of his own people for
00:07:46.000no reason. Is it a psychopath who's killing someone who is handicapped, mentally deficient?
00:07:49.000Yes, absolutely. Sociopath is someone who kills for no reason, just because.
00:07:55.000Basically, human life lost, the ends justify the means.
00:07:58.000And we see that with some of these dictators, like Mao, like Stalin.
00:08:02.000Pol Pot, certainly, as a percentage of the population, was mind-numbing.
00:08:06.000And some of it was due to incompetence.
00:08:08.000You know, a little thing with Mao that people don't realize, he had no idea, for example, how to farm.
00:08:13.000So when you go in and your government takes control over all of the farms, well, guess what happens?
00:11:52.000Idi Amin was of course, this is what we're talking about, Uganda.
00:11:56.000Now, I know that you guys probably believe that, you know, the continent of Africa is a land of peace that has never seen any type of conflict before we, from the New World, came in, kidnapped them, and enslaved them.
00:14:03.000Okay, so Idi Amin officially, His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Ahadj Dr. Idi Amin Dada, V.C., D.S.O., M.C., Lord of all Beasts of Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in general, and Uganda in particular.
00:16:11.000And, you know, look, it's not really fair because we could have put him up against Pinochet in another bracket and maybe he would have made it through, but that's the nature of doing a tournament.
00:17:42.000But if you spend all this time learning about Adolf Hitler in school, you would think that you would learn just as much about Stalin.
00:17:46.000Please comment below how much you know about Joseph Stalin, how much you know about what had taken place in Russia back then, and I mean there's a lot of interesting if you want to get into.
00:17:55.000Oh yeah, we can get rid of the Ayatollah Khomeini and Mao, because yes, we'll be finishing up that bracket.
00:18:00.000And you can place your bets right now at draftdictators.com.
00:18:04.000Stalin, of course, you can go back to, um, what was happening there with, uh, with Lenin and with Trotsky and kind of this, this jockeying for power and Stalin was seen as more of a doer, less of an intellectual.
00:18:13.000They didn't respect him as much, but of course.
00:18:16.000Often when you have men of, of just what they would consider power, um, they'll step over the pseudo intellectuals, but this really, you're just one or two degrees removed from the founder of the feast, Karl Marx.
00:18:26.000The two revolutionaries fought the Tsarist regime under pseudonyms.
00:18:31.000Joseph Vissarinovich Dugasvili called himself Stalin, the Man of Steel.
00:20:29.000And of course, this was largely due to, again, the ineptitude of communism, the ineptitude of a top-down approach, and people not really being capable of keeping up with the supply, the demand, farming not working.
00:20:39.000This is the utopia that you end up seeing.
00:22:26.000This is where we've talked about this today, where you see identity politics, right?
00:22:29.000It's not just through the lens of race, but you'll see it as oppressors and the oppressed.
00:22:33.000With communism it was really about the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the ruling class, and at that point it was anyone who was, if you're American, upper middle class, you would be seen as ruling class in Russia because everyone else is in a bread line.
00:22:45.000So he purged the country of, and I have the list here, not only former landowners, but doctors, academics, and military officials.
00:22:51.000That's how that death count balloons out of control.
00:22:54.000You create famine, you basically end up creating the perfect petri dish where people can contract these diseases, and you've gotten rid of doctors.
00:23:01.000You've gotten rid of medical professionals.
00:23:53.000Now, we have another one to go with Stalin, and this is one that you may hear more often, because the left likes to parrot this, because it's kind of one fascist who they point to, who actually was right-wing.
00:25:03.000Also, I, too, at one point was thrown from a helicopter, but I lived because I'm a deity.
00:25:07.000That's another through line you'll see today.
00:25:10.000Chile was really one of those countries that was very, very poor.
00:25:14.000And if you look today, if you go to Chile, you'll still have a lot of people who actually say, you know what, we kind of would like a Pinochet-like figure today.
00:25:21.000And the reason for that is this was a country that was basically under the rule of socialism, communism.
00:25:25.000Pinochet did come in, take advantage of a coup, and he did kill people.
00:25:30.000But he wasn't, on a large scale, targeting citizens.
00:27:16.000But if you look during that period of time they were calling it the Chilean experiment because it was now becoming one of the most successful, one of the wealthiest countries in all of South America.
00:27:24.000And that largely happened as far as citizens, business owners, not everyone.
00:27:28.000He did help pick winners and losers and of course that's wrong and corrupt but it certainly was more of a free market economy than before and he was targeting people who he viewed and sometimes selected in a corrupt way those who would be interfering with the private exchange of
00:27:44.000So I fascist yeah I don't really know that it's fair to put him in dictator
00:27:49.000here. So it's kind of like the Jamie Kennedy experiment?
00:27:55.000Sure that's a day That's a dated reference, but it's in between your dates and today, so I don't know how you... Did you get MTV in the bunker?
00:28:34.000You do see a lot of, uh, similarities in Pinochet's approach to Javier Mille's now, but you kind of get the good without the, you know, the helicopter rides.
00:28:43.000Yes, I mean there could be some, we don't know.
00:28:44.000But the economic liberalization and making the government smaller, it's very similar in the way they're approaching similar economic situations with hyperinflation and unemployment and all that.
00:28:53.000Yes, and I do think that Chile is very, it's interesting to compare, we actually probably should have put them in the same bracket, but to Hugo Chavez.
00:29:00.000Or Chavez, you have a place like Venezuela that has all kinds of economic advantages.
00:29:03.000I mean, oil-rich nation, and drives it into poverty.
00:29:06.000As opposed to Chile, where it was in poverty, and for whatever, mostly bad, Pinochet did bring it out of the dark ages, economically.
00:29:15.000And so that's where you have people today say, you know what, not all of it was bad.
00:29:19.000They might have to mutter it, quietly, but you have to, in a lot of South American countries, your choice is communist guerrillas, or fascists sometimes.
00:30:52.000They try and separate, if you actually run a Google search, I don't know what the definition is right now, they'll say socialism, communism, they won't tell you that it's necessarily left-wing.
00:30:59.000Once upon a time, at least on Google, and I believe they even changed it with Miriam Webster, fascism was inherently right-wing.
00:31:05.000Well, hold on a second, we've just gone through a bunch of dictators and fascists, and we'll continue to go through them.
00:31:09.000Most of them are communists or socialists.
00:31:11.000I think the only exception, as far as truly being right-wing as we would know, would probably be Pinochet, right?
00:31:17.000Compared to, I mean, I know if we're talking about EDM in, but let's be honest, the guy didn't make it past the fourth grade.
00:31:33.000What we have here is about 2,000 political opponents killed, 25,000 killed or maimed in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, and of course you have the soldiers killed during World War II, so the percentage of the population is 2%.
00:31:48.000So again, we're talking about, that's, I mean, that's less than a third of a Hitler.
00:32:23.000And after he was shot with his mistress, who was Claretta Patesci, they were strung up by their feet on April 28th, 1945 in a square in Milan, and then they were disfigured by an angry mob.
00:33:44.000No, I think he was also probably racist.
00:33:48.000So, of course, the death of hundreds of thousands of people, Saddam Hussein.
00:33:55.000He was a law school dropout, I should tell you.
00:33:57.000So there's really no rhyme or reason if you're looking for a through line with education.
00:34:00.000Some only made it to the fourth grade, some were educated in Switzerland, and some just kind of went to law school, you know, like law schools, like a phase, you know, like art for you, or torn Levi's for some.
00:34:11.000Yeah, that was a lifelong passion, but Yeah, yeah, but not schooling necessarily.
00:34:17.000So he was involved in obviously both Gulf Wars, the Iran-Iraq War, and tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of his own citizens.
00:34:24.000As far as the body count with Saddam Hussein, believed to be about 750,000.
00:34:28.000Again, this is tough because a lot of different sources have different accounts.
00:34:45.000And they, uh, by the way, a lot of people don't realize this.
00:34:48.000A lot of people in the Middle East, of course, the Arabic world, big, big, big allies to the Nazis because they too didn't like the Judens.
00:35:48.000Yeah, we've never had him on the show again, one time, one more time, but it wasn't, I told him, you dick, hey, I don't give a shit about your estate.
00:35:54.000I said, you take that on down the road, Mr. Ross.
00:35:58.000Well, if at all possible, please avoid drawing the Prophet Muhammad or other religious figures or deities.
00:40:14.000So Sam from HR, what is it that you admire about Nikolai?
00:40:21.000Well, I have an unrequited dream that I would have a cult of personality with me, being that people see me as unremarkable.
00:40:29.000Nicolae Ceausescu, when he was the dictator of Romania, plastered his face and his image on everything.
00:40:36.000He also tried to enrich himself a lot, though, so he exported a lot of agricultural products from Romania to other countries, which unfortunately killed thousands of his own people.
00:40:50.000Wait, I'm sorry, did you just say that you view yourself as, like, a kindred spirit with him because you said you're unrem... Because, like, Nicolae was really good-looking.
00:40:59.000Um, I don't, I think I look a little better than, uh, Trichescu, you know?
00:41:02.000My, uh, my hair is still, uh, brown, and, um, I don't know, kind of, I can cut a dashing figure.
00:42:45.000You had, of course, with famine and other things going on, led to a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of orphans in Romania.
00:42:51.000And after Ceaușescu was deposed in the late 80s, the population actually went down because people were trying to get the hell out of Romania.
00:43:00.000Well, that makes sense, because I think he was the only person who said the world needs more Romanians.
00:43:15.000And of course that's a little bit of a backlash, too.
00:43:18.000If you look at a lot of communist nations, they believe in curbing population quite a bit, which we'll get to.
00:43:24.000The communist regimes, of course, as you see in China, which led to the one-child policy.
00:43:28.000So then you have smaller countries like Romania where they say, you know what, we'll what we want to have more Romanians and just the unforeseen
00:44:53.000It is definitively the highest, was Pol Pot, so obviously... And something else too, before Pol Pot, there were areas of Cambodia that had resorts where people like Frank Sinatra, the Rat Pack, would go down.
00:45:02.000It was sort of seen as the crown jewel of Asia in a lot of ways, Cambodia.
00:45:21.000His father, ironically, was a farmer, and his mother, we don't really know a whole lot about his mother, had some distant connections with the royal family.
00:45:29.000He graduated through Roman Catholic Primary School, then he went to France on an engineering scholarship after the war.
00:45:36.000And of course, the political party, you guys probably only know this in relation to the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge, right?
00:45:42.000And that helped create an environment with a lot of instability as far as Cambodia.
00:45:46.000Right, it was sort of embarrassing to the United States what had been allowed to flourish,
00:45:50.000you know, sort of in the, I guess I should say in the, in the, uh, the tailwind of the Vietnam War.
00:45:55.000And that's a big part of what led to, uh, the Pol Pot.
00:45:58.000There's an argument to be made, and I'll make it.
00:46:00.000That Henry Kissinger is directly responsible for the rise of Pol Pot.
00:46:07.000I don't think killing 150,000 Cambodian civilians for no gain did little to inspire the people to rise up around kind of that revolutionary force.
00:46:16.000And what was the reason for Kissinger?
00:46:18.000Well, he thought that's where the South Vietnamese insert, like the communist sympathizers and then the North Vietnamese Viet Cong, they thought they were kind of taking refuge in Cambodia.
00:46:27.000So he carpet bombed the absolute shit out of Cambodia.
00:46:39.000He instituted Pol Pot, the year zero policy, which killed a huge portion of the population.
00:46:46.000And year zero, to explain to you what this was, this was kind of trying to completely get rid of, it was replace old Cambodia with new Cambodia.
00:46:57.000It was, nope, we're going to do things completely different.
00:46:59.000So you would think, oh, Vietnam, Kissinger, people trying to fight, you know, if you're talking about Vietnam, well, then you just end up creating these super communists.
00:49:42.000And if you are not fit, if they see you as being a burden or a drain on the system, at a certain point they say, we've got to remove the drains.
00:50:06.000Now you have more... These are new pies that have been baked, that have created new methods of employment that, really, through innovation, is how we've solved a lot of our first world problems.
00:50:15.000A lot of these people are still in the third world.
00:50:17.000And they're in the third world because you can't bake any more pies.
00:52:56.000So, I think it's pretty clear here, Pol Pot's going to be going through, but let's get to, so you can do it all at once, I don't want to have to keep getting up and sitting down and getting up and sitting down.
00:53:59.000His name, you're gonna like this, George Greek, all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to gonquest, leaving fire in his wake.
00:54:09.000That's what his name, because it's Mabutu Sese Seko Nkud Nkud Nbendu Waza Banga, which just sounds made up, if it means all that.
00:54:17.000I like names that are direct and to the point.
00:57:12.000So people say he was a revolutionary man, but a revolution... Okay, the revolution led to what?
00:57:17.000Well, of course, led to what we have with Fidel Castro.
00:57:21.000Cuba, at one point in time, was a very, very wealthy nation that, of course, was just driven into abject poverty.
00:57:25.000Not saying Batista was great, to be clear, before people say this.
00:57:28.000He basically turned Cuba into a prison.
00:57:31.000Pretty much the island of Cuba became a prison.
00:57:34.000He started, actually, as far as his accomplishments, largest snitch network in the world, where he had the committees for the defense of the revolution.
00:57:42.000I guess 8.4 million of the 11 million Cubans were members, and this was one big giant snitching network, right, George?
00:59:46.000They roll them out, and now you have your Cuban cigars.
00:59:48.000And what happens is these cigars, as far as the quality control in comparison to some of the seeds that have been taken to the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua, they're great cigars.
00:59:58.000But they don't have that same taste as Cuba, but the quality control is leagues better.
01:00:03.000You buy a box of Cuban cigars, they'll be plugged, you'll have green tobacco because they don't have time to age it properly, and they'll develop mold.
01:00:19.000So, and that's because they don't freeze their tobacco.
01:00:21.000They flash freeze them in other countries.
01:00:23.000You look at Cuban cigars, and it's something that should be, it's an advantage that this nation has, that only this nation has, that can't really be identified or recreated.
01:02:40.000Hey, Ginger Snap, why don't you help me with this one, because you like Asians, and I'm not as familiar with Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines.
01:02:46.000Yeah, I mean, he wasn't The worst, you know.
01:02:57.000He has a weird legacy, sort of like Pinochet in Chile, right?
01:03:01.000Where he was very brutal with his opposition, but he was also seen by a lot of Filipinos as improving the economy and the stature of the country.
01:03:09.000But he was very Interesting in his younger life.
01:03:23.000Then, after being in jail for less than a year, got himself out, got the conviction overturned in the Philippine Supreme Court after writing his own 800-page appeal.
01:06:20.000And what I mean, horrible person, just like Hitler, bad.
01:06:24.000But he was the, his official title, I guess, is the incorruptible leader of the great majority of the Haitian people, the renovator of the Republic.
01:06:31.000Now I'm going to tell you, just that title is bullshit.
01:06:39.000The reason this guy is so funny to me is he's useless, yes, and he sort of got to, he benefited from I guess the umbrella policy because the United States was more concerned with Cuba at that time and wanted some allies in the region.
01:06:54.000So we sort of gave him a little bit of a pass, the United States, at that point.
01:06:57.000We knew some stuff was going on, but Haiti's never really been a threat to anybody.
01:07:00.000We thought if that's contained, it's maybe better to have some kind of a physical ally in that region.
01:07:48.000So they started calling him Papa Duck.
01:07:50.000He didn't believe in the voodoo stuff, but a lot of people in Haiti did.
01:07:53.000So he would use that to manipulate them.
01:07:55.000He would actually just, he'd tell some of his guards, and he knew that this would, the word would travel, he'd say, hey, and he'd grab like some kind of a skull candle and some chicken bones and say, I've got, I'm gonna go in my room here, I'm gonna go in this official office, close the door, no one come in, I have a seance to conduct.
01:08:11.000And he'd go in, and they'd be like, Papa Duck is calling down the guards, we better not And he was in there, like, smoking a cigarette.
01:08:42.000He would issue his national radio news alert, whatever it was, from your dear Supreme Leader, whatever his stupid made-up title was, and he would talk like Papadoc while claiming that he wasn't initially.
01:13:07.000His father was Kim Il-sung and then of course his son was Kim Jong-un and I feel like the most interesting thing about the Kims, I guess I'll do the first name last, Is the progressively aggressive hairdos?
01:13:23.000So like if you look at his dad, like, you know, Kim Il-sung, he had a little, like, what would be sort of more so seen as, alright, you're going to a bar, he's maybe a little bit eccentric.
01:13:32.000Then you go to Kim Jong-il, and he obviously had to outdo his dad, he's growing up in his shadow, so he's like, I'm gonna go really tight on the sides at this point and blow it out a little bit.
01:13:41.000Like, he wants people to think he had a deep perm for some reason.
01:13:44.000And then Kim Jong-il came in and he really, like, you know, he was absolutely a loser, so he was just like, I'm gonna take it.
01:15:20.000So I'm willing to bet they spend most of their time on the wavering.
01:15:26.000It's like that undecided vote here in the United States.
01:15:31.000And it's very hard to isolate him because the policies are so continuous between his father and his son that it's kind of the Kims, but he's oversaw the most death of any of them, so that's why we thought he was the appropriate one to put in.
01:16:24.000Yeah, things like that where they just, they convince people that they're a deity.
01:16:27.000Yeah, Putin too, they do that with Putin.
01:16:29.000They do it with all these people, but this is really silly.
01:16:32.000And when you actually read up a little more on North Korea, I sort of thought when Kim Jong-un died and everyone was crying in the streets, I thought the whole nation deserved a razzie.
01:16:42.000Turns out, some of them were actually sad.
01:16:45.000Right, so when Kim Il-sung died, the original, people were actually pretty sad about it because they did view him as a deity.
01:16:52.000With Kim Jong-il, there's a lot more razzying going on.
01:16:56.000There, some women in uniform were breaking down as a giant poster of Kim Jong-il rolled along, leading the funeral procession.
01:17:04.000The scenes of mass grief were displayed across the North Korean capital as the cortege drove through the streets heading for the square named for his father and the country's founder, Kim Il-sung.
01:17:16.000People wailed and screamed and beat their chests as the cars passed by.
01:17:22.000Lamentations were loud as the cars circled the square twice in their first pass around the city center.
01:17:29.000Yeah, it looked like they were, because that's also, it's really tough because if you have to force your population to, you know, to act sad when you die, and it's an entire population that can't act.
01:18:21.000I mean, if you got rid of Funyuns, you'd take out a couple million streamers right now on Twitch.
01:18:27.000Over 100,000 were in prison in gulags, so 13% as far as the number of his population.
01:18:33.000So, it's still pretty, you don't even think about that because you were most likely alive for Kim Jong-il.
01:18:39.000You know, we put him in Team America, World Police, and it was hilarious, and it's really, it's more, it's two Hitlers.
01:18:45.000Two Hitlers, as far as percent of the population.
01:18:47.000So imagine if, when World War II was going on, you had, you know, a film like, and you just had Hitler in there as a puppet and people were mocking him.
01:18:53.000That's really what you're doing at this point in time, it's just that you're so isolated from it, you're not aware of what takes place in the world today.
01:19:59.000But he did oversee the development of a nuclear program, which they still have, and that is the reason that they can exist as this lineage of dictators.
01:21:42.000And you can actually look at not only the technological advancements, not only the economies, not only look at the quality of life, you can even look at the size of the people and the stunted growth from the starvation that takes place in North Korea.
01:21:53.000There isn't really a reason for that separation to exist other than ideology.
01:21:58.000So when people tell you religion is the cause of all wars, hold on a second, or religion is the cause of all major deaths, You can look to a lot of these nations, and if you have a comparison, that's really valuable.
01:22:09.000And human beings, we always, just like pictures, we look for something in the picture for scale, right?
01:22:14.000That's how optical illusions can take place if you don't have something that's appropriate.
01:22:18.000And this brings us to, also in this bracket, Chavez.
01:22:21.000And this one is interesting to me, because Chavez, or sorry, as Sean Penn refers to him, a great world leader.
01:23:38.000There should be no reason for California to see a population decline when they have all kinds of natural resources, the ocean, you can grow anything there.
01:23:46.000They were starting off, they had a head start as far as they could.
01:23:48.000People are leaving because of policy, because of ideas.
01:23:52.000Venezuela is a place that should be wealthy.
01:24:00.000American leftists have been propping up Chavez and praising him.
01:24:04.000They want to distance themselves from Chavez now.
01:24:07.000But you had Sean Penn, you had Bernie Sanders, you had a long list of celebrities of people saying, yeah, no, Chavez is being misrepresented in the United States.
01:24:15.000Well, now they've just sort of gone to radio silence.
01:24:18.000So, Chavez attended a Venezuelan military academy.
01:24:32.000Socialism, of course, as far as his accomplishments, he turned Venezuela, again beforehand, the scale, from a near first world country to an entirely third world country.
01:26:59.000Then straight to jail, released in 95.
01:27:02.000Then he ended up becoming—was his title officially president?
01:27:06.000I'm trying to—it's hard for me to keep track—and then the elections, remember, that were held after, and of course they weren't real elections, right?
01:27:11.000These were just as I got 100% of the vote.
01:27:14.000We'll make all the references publicly available.
01:27:16.000You know, all the things they accuse Donald Trump of wanting to do, of never relinquish power, while they praise dictators who do it throughout the globe.
01:27:25.000And what you saw with him and what you saw with people like Mao and all these communist socialist leaders is they start drinking their own Kool-Aid, thinking, oh, well, maybe I really do know everything.
01:27:59.000So, okay, I think we know Papa Doc is going through, absolutely, but if Chavez and Kim Jong-il, who do we think should move on to our final eight?
01:28:14.000I kind of like Chavez just because Chavez, like, you know, we have more afterwards, like, you know, it makes the way for Maduro.
01:28:21.000You know, as far as it might be more interesting in the final eight, whereas we all know it's just Kim Jong-il goes to Kim Jong-un and they're both crazy.
01:30:31.000He did advance, so the odds have changed.
01:30:34.000Let us know who you think the worst dictator is, and who did you learn about before today, and who would you like to learn more about tomorrow, or the next day, however long this goes.
01:30:42.000Thank you to our wonderful researchers.