Can the world, for Christ’s fucking sake, just get OVER Adolf Hitler once and for all? In the first place, he was SOOO 20th Century, and the last time I checked my wristwatch, we were a good ocho años into the 21st. And if you want to gauge a dictator’s “Evil Factor” by how many corpses he left in his wake, Hitler wasn’t even the champeen of his own century. I’m not sure who doesn’t want you to know this (well, I have a creeping suspicion, but it’s considered dangerous to even suggest it without getting zapped by a cattle prod), but the most conservative estimates have Josef Stalin out-killing Hitler by at least five million and possibly as many as 20 million, while China’s chubby-cheeked Mao Zedong blew both peckerwoods out of the water by slaughtering an estimated 40 to 77 million of his own countrymen. But if we keep focusing on those scrubs from the past, we risk ignoring actual bad men doing actual bad things today. And if you BABIES keep spitting the silver spoon out of your mouths on a High Holy Day such as July 4th by endlessly going wah-wah-wah about America, you ignore the fact that it’s far worse almost everywhere else across the globe. So in the spirit of earnest inquiry, I present to you 20* dictators who are acting like assholes as I speak. And just so you don’t suffer too much “Hitler withdrawal,” I’ve tried to find pictures of them in some variation of the “Sieg Heil” pose.
(*It’s actually 19, since Niyazov croaked a couple years ago.)
1. Kim Jong-Il
Country He Dictates: North Korea
Crime Against Humanity: Hasn’t sent his mom a Mother’s Day card for the past seven years.
2. Alexander Lukashenko
Country He Dictates: Belarus
Crime Against Humanity: Owns three cats but only changes their litter box twice a month.
3. Robert Mugabe
Country He Dictates: Zimbabwe
Crime Against Humanity: Has never returned a Blockbuster DVD on time.
4. Hugo Chavez
Country He Dictates: Venezuela
Crime Against Humanity: Makes right turns without flashing his turn signal.
5. Raul Castro
Country He Dictates: Cuba
Crime Against Humanity: Once said “yes” when his girlfriend asked him if she looked fat in her dress.
6. Saparmurat Niyazov
Country He Dictated: Turkmenistan
Crime Against Humanity: Farted in public elevators and blamed his bodyguard.
7. Than Shwe
Country He Dictates: Myanmar
Crime Against Humanity: Takes two (and sometimes three) papers from the newspaper box when he only paid for one.
8. Sayyid Ali Khamenei
Country He Dictates: Iran
Crime Against Humanity: Routinely steals bath towels from hotels and then doesn’t even use them.
9. Idriss Deby
Country He Dictates: Chad
Crime Against Humanity: Has never in his life put the toilet seat down after using it.
10. Omar al-Bashir
Country He Dictates: Sudan
Crime Against Humanity: Steals French fries from friends’ plates when they go to the bathroom.
11. Bernard Makuza
Country He Dictates: Rwanda
Crime Against Humanity: Holds loud cell-phone conversations in the movie theater.
12. Isaias Afewerki
Country He Dictates: Eritrea
Crime Against Humanity: Rarely chips in when his buddies decide to get a few six-packs.
13. Muammar Qaddafi
Country He Dictates: Libya
Crime Against Humanity: Once used a fake name during an online chat session.
14. Islam Karimov
Country He Dictates: Uzbekistan
Crime Against Humanity: Always peeks in the medicine cabinet when he’s visiting friends.
15. Hu Jintao
Country He Dictates: China
Crime Against Humanity: Never hesitates to take the last donut or slice of cake at a party.
16. King Mswati III
Country He Dictates: Swaziland
Crime Against Humanity: Still owes his friend ten bucks from when the Broncos won the Super Bowl.
17. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo
Country He Dictates: Equatorial Guinea
Crime Against Humanity: Will wear the same shirt three or four days in a row.
18. Pervez Musharraf
Country He Dictates: Pakistan
Crime Against Humanity: Neglected to report over 300 dollars’ worth of income in 2003.
19. Meles Zenawi
Country He Dictates: Ethiopia
Crime Against Humanity: Feeds off a neighbor’s wireless connection for his laptop and hasn’t once offered to pay him.
20. King Abdullah
Country He Dictates: Saudi Arabia
Crime Against Humanity: Has frequently slipped more than a dozen items through the “10 Items or Less” aisle.
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JIM GOAD IS A FUCKEN RIOT!
07.04.08 at 2:58 pm
like I’m supposed to believe there’s a country called “Chad”.
07.04.08 at 3:20 pm
Chad is a country fucktard
07.04.08 at 3:43 pm
Last time I checked, Chavez conceded defeat in a referendum on his proposals to amend the constitution to allow him to run for another term as president. Populist demagogue? Maybe. Dictator? Not quite.
07.04.08 at 3:50 pm
… so I guess there is a country called “Bruce” too? As if…..
07.04.08 at 4:53 pm
YEAH! THERE IS ALSO A COUNTRY CALLED NIGGER!!!!OR NIGER?
07.04.08 at 6:58 pm
Oh yeah, it’s always gonna be funny to hear a kid mispronounce country names like Niger and Nigeria. And they’ll have to “but why is it wrong?” through those saddest eyes and naive tears before you explain it’s just a bad word about black people usually. They still won’t get what they did wrong.
07.04.08 at 8:41 pm
Yeah, Hitler was a total pussy compared to Stalin or Mao, no Liberal i’ve ever talked to has agreed with me on that one. What’s there to agree with? Just check the numbers. This white guilt thing is getting tiresome.
07.05.08 at 4:26 am
Jimmy Kimmel(#6) and Harold Reynolds(#16) are dictators?
Does Jim Goad also work for Parade Magazine?
http://www.parade.com/dictators/2008/
If so, he get me an autograph from the guy who does Howard Huge?
07.05.08 at 6:39 am
O.J.—every year since at least 2005, David Wallechinsky of Parade Magazine, aided by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, has been doing a roundup of “The World’s Worst Dictators.” As they say in the biz, I was “riffing” on that feature.
07.05.08 at 1:54 pm
hitler invented emo, there’s nothing more evil than that.
07.05.08 at 2:05 pm
khmer rouge had their moment but no love from Goad. unfair man.
07.05.08 at 6:30 pm
theres no such country as “chad”, you fucking idiots.
ever thought about reading a book for once? or are you too busy photoshopping little hitler moustaches on mugabe??? Jim Goad you fucking suck
07.05.08 at 11:17 pm
I suspect “bandini” may be yanking everyone’s chains for sport, but since I’m a paranoid-schizophrenic passive-aggressive argumentative completist who can’t just let my nuts hang and have a good time…
From wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad
“Chad….officially the Republic of Chad, is a landlocked country in central Africa.”
From TIME:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1729686,00.html
“Mugabe sports a tiny Hitler mustache…”
Regarding the “Chad” joke, I was the first one to tell it on this site, so I’d be much obliged if you’d quit dangling from my jock like ants on candy:
http://streetbonersandtvcarnage.com/blog/places-people-and-things-i-wouldnt-mind-seeing-hit-by-an-asteroid-in-the-coming-new-year/
“Most African nations are, for better or worse, unashamed to be African….But instead, Chad chooses the name of some boring white guy who passes out on the frat-house sofa after two beers.”
07.06.08 at 12:19 am
no bush? what a joke, dorks
07.06.08 at 1:36 am
I am shocked and saddened by your need to “fact check” my gut instincts.
Just because it says it on wikipedia doesnt mean its true.
What are you going to do next, Google unicorns?? Good luck with THAT one buddy
07.06.08 at 6:24 am
and for your information “bandini” is actually my real name, you DICK.
07.06.08 at 6:26 am
Eh, I think hitler gets more attention than Mao and Stalin because he actively created a system to kill people, and he did it quick and efficiently, whereas Mao and Stalin’s murders were more passive, like, “Oh, let’s just let everyone in this area starve.” Also, the ideology between Mao and Stalin didn’t stipulate the mass murder of specific groups of people, although I guess you could argue it did against the bougie.
PS: the “oh, hitler wasn’t that bad” shpiel is such a tired way to get attention for being controversial, but what would I expect from the Goadster. I have to say, though, that the Goadster’s writing is better than I thought, and he does seem far more intelligent than I originally assumed, but the shtick is still just as tiresome. Branch out, Goadster. You have talent, stop wasting it.
07.06.08 at 1:49 pm
Jim Goad,
You are my favorite.
07.06.08 at 2:38 pm
(Let the following passages serve as hard evidence that I am unable to graciously accept compliments and will instead niggle on down the line.)
I would bet cold, hard cash (like, maybe three to five bucks) that the average American would be shocked to learn that Mao and Stalin out-murdered Hitler, so that’s why I keep hammering on that fact while the mainstream media continues to single out The Man Who Ruined The Charlie Chaplin Mustache For Everyone. As I see it, the tiresome shtick is this obsessive focus on Hitler at the expense of others whose actions actually cost more human lives.
I find it a wee bit ironic that those who insist all human lives are equal don’t tend to feel the same way about dead bodies. I’d like to see anyone who thinks the REASON someone was murdered is more significant than the basic FACT they were murdered trying to explain their precious li’l theory to surviving family members of Mao’s and Stalin’s victims.
My oldest brother was murdered in Paris in 1969. If I ever got a chance to apprehend his killer, that person would be flat on the ground before it even occurred to me to ask why he killed my brother.
But assuming you want to stress the point that the reason someone gets murdered is important, one could take a self-preservationist stance and argue that killing one’s own countrymen (which is what Mao and Stalin did) might rank as worse than killing some scapegoated ethnic “other” (which was Hitler’s modus operandi).
Drawing an inference of “Hitler wasn’t that bad” from what I wrote is as fallacious and dishonest as all the mental weaklings who misrepresented my comments in that old VICE article about slavery to mean I was saying “American slavery wasn’t that bad.” When one broadens the picture and points to atrocities that were equivalent or greater than the ones everybody and their fucking grandmother already knows about doesn’t automatically mean their intention was to downplay the “popular” atrocities. Usually, what I’m trying to say is, “The world’s a lot fucking worse than you might have suspected.”
(Side note to the person who mentioned Hugo Chavez: Are you trying to say he never dictated a letter to his secretary?)
07.07.08 at 8:41 am
Understood, but whereas Hitler and his followers I would term it direct murder, and with Mao Stalin it was much more indirect. Does that make sense?
07.07.08 at 12:43 pm
I am confused by the need to rank atrocities in a quantitative fashion. Mao, Hitler and Stalin all killed and tortured a lot of people in a variety of ways for a wide variety of fucked up reasons, and I would not want to live under any of their regimes. Jim – I can understand why you have a problem with one group of people holding up their suffering as somehow being worse, and hence, more important than other people’s suffering. I don’t think the solution is to diminish what one group of people have had to deal with.
I am Jewish, and while I might take shit for that on this sight, I should be honest about what informs (or dis-informs) my opinions. As you can imagine, I am not a fan of Hitler. Nor am I a fan of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot — etc. (I am sure someone will want to include atrocities committed by Jews in this list, and those atrocities are certainly out there). It bothers me when my fellow Jews make light of other peoples histories of persecutions, and it bothers me when people make light of historic persecutions against the Jews. No one should have a premium on suffering (Jews included). I am always surprised by the “who has suffered more” contest, though I understand when one group of people gets sick of eating shit and decides to defend themselves (whether it be with words or with weapons).
I don’t think this question of ” who was the worst dictator” or “what was worse…” serves to do anything other than to exculpate one group for their behavior, and blame another group for their expecting some sort of understanding of the rationales behind their defensiveness. One thing that always bugs me are those T-shirts depicting black people on slave ships that say “the real holocaust” — as if the fact that slavery was a horrific atrocity, somehow diminishes the negative impact of the holocaust (or visa versa). And yes — you are right — this shit is still going on today, and we shouldn’t let our obsessions with past atrocities, prevent us from recognizing what is currently in front of our faces. But ranking atrocities, and placing one people’s suffering above another’s (or below), does nothing but divide people who should be allies in the battle against oppressive forces.
07.07.08 at 1:26 pm
I had to go the whole weekend before I could see that somebody called me a fucktard! awesome!
07.07.08 at 2:12 pm
^nice trollage^
01.06.09 at 4:32 pm