Excluding clichés, which person was the worst?

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We've had the "Hitler v Stalin v Mao v Genghis Khan v Jesus v Muhammad" debate too many times.

So, aside from those people (and other 20th century tyrants), which person was responsible for the most suffering?

Some suggestions:

Rachel Carson - by campaigning for DDT to be banned, she caused many thousands of deaths from malaria.
Thomas Aquinas - his views about sexual ethics continue to contribute to unwanted pregnancies and STDs. 40 million people have died from AIDS-related illness alone. Also contributed to Aristotle worship (see below).
Francis Burton Harrison - pushed through the Harrison Narcotics Act, which began the War On Drugs in the USA
Charles II - his sedition laws were a major motivation for the Pilgrim Fathers to leave Britain. All the suffering of Native Americans, and the continual screw ups of the American ruling class, can therefore be laid at his feet*
Georges Clemenceau - his contribution to the Treaty of Versailles caused misery for many Germans, and made Hitler's rise possible (this one might be cheating)
Aristotle - his ham-fisted attempts at empiricism saw him viewed as infallible. This set back the cause of empiricism by several hundred years, costing incalculable numbers of lives (probably in the billions)
*OK, this is an exaggeration!
Any other suggestions for people not conventionally considered evil but who caused a lot of suffering?

I really think Stalin and Hitler are in a totally different category than the people you mentioned.

Well, quite. That's why I excluded them in the interests of conversation.

You missed Cromwell.

Really hard to say.

Warfare is hard, as it's really to be judged by different standards -- strategic bombings of WW2 did have military implications when the war itself was industrial.

Abortion proponents*?

I suppose you can argue that the many millions killed each year would be a burden to this planet in some way, but that's a fairly poor argument if you consider an unborn child and one born to be of equal value.

*assuming that abortion is killing a human that would most likely be born

Interesting list you have there, surprised you put Rachel Carson on there given how her work has been deified but she is a good one given that most of her research was rather dubious and the millions and millions of people that have died since from malaria over the last 40 or so years after DDT was banned.

As for more people who aren't "conventionally considered evil", I think most probably fall into this category and the saying "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" generally rings true. The most evil damaging people in history probably weren't acting out of malice but rather because they thought they were right and held some moral high ground.

Or did I?

Thomas Aquinas' views on human sexuality prevented Henry VIII from getting a divorce.
This led to the persecution of both Catholics and Protestants in Tudor England. It was also the cause of concerns over England's military involvement in France - without which, there would probably not have been Civil War...

I did strongly consider including Henry, but decided Aquinas did the job.

Henry VIII did more of a job than St. Thomas Aquinas, who was just a cloistered monk.

I feel Thomas Aquinas was actually trying really hard to be liberal...within the context of his times, and the fact that he was a cloistered monk.

I don't believe Thomas Aquinas anticipated the results of his beliefs.

Well...
There was Mr. and Mrs Stalin. If they had never met-then little Joseph never would have been born.

Then there was Mr. and Mrs Schickelgruber, or Mr and Mrs Hitler, or whatever their name was....

Mr. and Mrs Tung, or Mao, I guess it was Mao (family names come first in the far east)- ditto


Henry Ford...he has the blood of the five million Americans who have died in traffic accidents on his hands. More than died in all of America's wars put together. In fact one fifth of the American troops who died in the Vietnam War were not slain by the VC, but were actually killed while serving in Indochina in "vehicle accidents".

The ancient Chinese alchemist who invented black powder. Ironically he was trying to find "the elixer of life" that would grant immortality. Instead he ushered in the age of explosives in warfare-shortening the lives of millions.

The Wright Brothers enabled 9-11 to happen. But thats only 3000 people.

Eeeeewwww! CROMWELL!

The man who defeated the Confederate and Royalist coalition in Ireland and occupied the country, during which time a series of Penal Laws were passed against Roman Catholics, thus ushering in 370 years of oppression by the British against the Irish.

At the Siege of Drogheda in September 1649, Cromwell's troops killed nearly 3,500 people after the town's capture - comprising around 2,700 Royalist soldiers and all the men in the town carrying arms, including some civilians, prisoners and Roman Catholic priests. Cromwell wrote afterwards that:

At the Siege of Wexford in October, another massacre took place. While Cromwell was apparently trying to negotiate surrender terms, some of his soldiers broke into the town, killed 2,000 Irish troops and up to 1,500 civilians, and burned much of the town. No disciplinary actions were taken against his forces subsequent to this second massacre.

Cromwell never accepted that he was responsible for the killing of civilians in Ireland, claiming that he had acted harshly but only against those "in arms".

Cromwell is still a figure of much hatred in Ireland, his name being associated with massacre, religious persecution, and mass dispossession of the Catholic community there. As Sir Winston Churchill noted, a traditional Irish curse was "mallacht Chromail ort" or "the curse of Cromwell upon you".

Existentially, none of them.
If we did not learn from one, another would have come along to teach us the same lesson.

All good answers, particularly "the guy who invented gunpowder".

Rather than the Wrights or Ford, how about Étienne Lenoir? Inventor of the commercially-viable internal combustion engine.

Yes. Lenoir paved the way for both Ford and the Wright Brothers.

Sir Walter Raleigh introduced the Old World to Tobacco.

The most ironic is the series of chemists in the 17, and 18, hundreds who figured out how to "fix" nitrogen from the atmosphere (I dont know if you can pin it down to one guy), and make the element usable in industrial chemistry. That resulted in (a) high explosives: TNT, nitroglycerin, and (b) artificial fertilizers. The former caused the deaths of millions in war. The latter... enables agriculture to feed billions!

My nominees:

--The Rothschild family (who financed both sides of various wars thereby guaranteeing larger personal profit while ensuring more intensive asymmetric warfare and resulting "Great Game" deaths, and ended up buying the Bank of England).

--Cecil Rhodes (who hoarded what was and still is a semiprecious junk stone called diamond, restricted its sale and marketed the daylights out of it until the average person would pay a year's wages to buy one; not to mention his creation of the murderous blood-diamond industry and his nominal scholarship which indoctrinates college students into the ways of globalism).

--The founders of every U.S. central bank including the privately owned Federal Reserve System (socializing federal debt while privatizing profit).

--The Wall Street banks (who financed the Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of Hitler and 1933 Business Plot against the United States).

--Henry Kissinger (war crimes, crimes against humanity, and offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture).

--The CIA workers (who conducted the unconstitutional projects against the United States and other nations that were admitted to the U.S. Senate Church Committee hearings of 1975).

@Fnord

Cromwell killed just as many English as he did Irish.

He also made Mullah Omar, seem like a reasonable guy.

He also used America as place to exile his opponents. I remember one American talking about how his ancestor fought in a battle at was exiled to the States by the King. I pointed out that his ancestor was fighting for the King and was exiled, by Cromwell. That shut him up, as he was talking about being free of the tyranny of the English crown. I'm not a Royalist, but is amazing how half baked some people's of historical relations are.

Generally, Fritz Haber is credited with artificial nitrogen fixation, though Carl Bosch managed to get it to work on an industrial scale.
Haber is a good shout. Although he was an anti-Nazi campaigner (and Jewish), he inadvertently did their war effort a great service.