Frustrated with my History project

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I'm feeling frustrated in trying plan and write a book on evil people in history, I've seen lots of books on Influential and 'Great' People in History so I thought why don't I do one on Bad people in History. I find History very interesting but I have found it such a problematic subject and trying to choose someone who is 'evil'. The obvious ones are Hitler, Pol Pot for example. But it frustrates me that in choosing someone I see as a bad person that bad person who is a villain in my eyes is a hero in someone else's eyes which I can't understand. I even feel like other countries blame us in the West for everything like what happened in Iraq with getting rid of Saddam and people were calling Bush and Blair 'war criminals' when democratic countries don't give orders to kill innocent people like the Nazis did. I find it difficult to choose someone if they are not seen universally as a criminal. I even struggle to find Saddam as a universally bad person.

Talk about Stalin. He is pretty often seen as being “evil.”

There were many tyrant kings in medieval days.

Caligula, Roman Emperor is seen as being evil in a perverse sense.

How about Charles Manson?

You have begun to discover how tangled life is. In your current situation, most of the trouble is that history is written by the victors, not the invaded. If Germany had won WW II, the history books would still say that it began with Poland invading Germany, rather than with a false-flag attack. Then, parts of the official history are trumpeted while most is forgotten. You have heard of "The Holocaust" but you probably don't know that, as holocausts go, it was pretty average in both numbers killed and in percentage of a population. There have been hundreds of others in history, but all the others combined get less publicity.
The people you want to write about are psychopaths, an incredibly slippery group. One scientist studying them would even visit convicted criminals, and be temporarily charmed into believing their lies every time. They consider themselves above human morality - they can trick normal people as easily as we catch fish.
So, I think your frustration is mostly realizing that addressing your topic requires getting out of a small shell and exploring a vast world, instead of describing a few impressions from inside.

What both of the above said. There are a few figures that most folks agree were evil like Hitler and Stalin and Jack the Ripper. Though even with the first two there a apologists, and even a few fringe admirers.

But for the most part you cant just talk about the "evil men of history" as if they were an absolute agreed on standard to judge who is evil. Both heroes and villians are mythologized into two dimensional charicatures. And, as Dear One said, mythological or real, each figure is often judged differently by different sides in both the figures own time, and in our time.

So ...welcome to the real world, and all of it's messiness!

Islam Karimov, the late president of Uzbekistan, was a former Communist apparatchik, a Muslim and a kleptocrat who was fond of boiling people in oil. Horrible person! Every type of bad government was represented in this tyrannical individual.

I did a speech years ago about the evils of Communism in countries ranging from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. One hundred million people murdered and many more having lives that made them wish they were dead.

The horrors wrought by radical Islam and the tyrannical dictatorships in those countries were just as horrible. As I said, in places like the former Central Asian U.S.S.R., they had a combination of both horrible systems.