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Today's Top News
Adolph and Me
A middle school in Russellville, Arkansas is in hot water after its yearbook listed the "Top 5 Worst People of All Time" - to wit: Hitler, Bin Laden, Charles Manson, George Bush and Dick Cheney. Some parents were unhappy. Maybe they thought Cheney should've gotten the second slot? Icing on the cake: The school district tried to solve the problem by covering the list with tape, which promptly fell off. Cherry on top: In its report, Fox News spelled 'Adolf' wrong.
"Really?" said (school superintendent) Williams when told the tape could be pulled off. "Well, that's disappointing because the yearbook supplier told us this was a definite fix."
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89 Comments so far
Show AllOK. GW and Cheney are definitely some of the worst people of modern times, but of ALL time? Get a grip, historian: Genghis Kahn? Pol Pot? STALIN? Ceasar? Napoleon? Mussolini?
What's noticeable about the 'worst of all' bag is how it ripped a long time ago.
I was going to suggest them, plus Idi Amin. When I was a kid, we used to argue who was worse, Hitler or Stalin? It came down to whether you were Jewish or not. Both killed Jews, but Hitler killed a higher percentage. Stalin was directly responsible for more deaths, especially if you include the famine in the Ukraine in the 1930's.
There no doubt Stalin was a brute. Laventry Pavelich Beria was one of his Ministers and by any measure one of the most brutish and violent men of his time.
BUT As many Americans died in the famine of the the Great Depression (if mot more) as Ukrainians died in their famine. (there some 8 million Americans unaccounted for in that same time period with the sanitized US histories claiming they just left for other countries)
You will NOT read that in history books written in the United States of America just as you will not read of the Millions of Native Americans that died of starvation . malnutrition and outright murder.
http://rt.com/news/prime-time/where-did-americas-missing-millions-go-holodomor-lessons/
That 8 million unaccounted for deaths in the US great depression compares to some 5 million claimed to have been lost in the Famine in the Ukraine.
the only real difference between the thugs in the USA and Stalin was when 5 million starved to death in the Ukraine it was called genocide and a proof of the brutality of Communism and when 8 million starved to death in the USA it was a "market correction"
Fascinating. Thank you for the link. History seems to be repeating itself.
Wow! That is a history I didn't know about (but suspected). Will definitely check out this 'missing history'. The dead deserve to be acknowledged as having lived, no matter how convenient it is for the powerful to have us all forget them.
You didn't know about it because it didn't happen. Where are the obituaries? The first hand accounts of survivors? The oral history? The mass graves? Don't be so frigging naive.
Who needs evidence? The important thing is to satisfy your preconceptions.
This is a very profound comment, whether meant ironically or not. People are always dying of things other than old age. We pay attention to some, such as 911 or the Holocaust. Whereas others of equal scale are largely ignored. I think it has to do with the perceived value of the victims and whether there has been an organized campaign to bring it to the public. In the case of the Holocaust, there have been numerous campaigns, museums, etc. with the aim of individualizing the the incomprehensible numbers.
"Where are the obituaries? The first hand accounts of survivors? The oral history? The mass graves?" Do you know how much an obituary in the New York Times costs? Few know about or write books about individuals who die slowly and quietly in their homes, huts, or on the street for lack of food or medical care, even if the numbers are in the tens of millions every year. Few interview victims of civil war in Africa, even if the numbers are in the tens of millions. We do not talk on the evening news about the total cost of war, whether WW II or present, because it is not useful to the sponsors and owners of the networks.
Every day there are literally trillions of events every day in the world. And there are some serious authors who make an attempt to find out and report about unknown events they feel have significance. The news media also has to choose out of the trillions of events. They usually choose Lady Gaga or something involving a penis. But when it comes to deaths, social status and the political utility of those death are important factors in whether they get mentioned or not.
A poor Okie dying in a ditch in Fresno, or a destitute unemployed man freezing to death in an alleyway in New York, did not get obituaries - no more than a homeless person dying today does. And, don't be ridiculous; of course there would be on mass graves. You have read Steinbeck's (historically accurate) "The Grapes of Wrath", right? This stuff used to be required reading in high school. I guess it is banned from high schools for being "controversial" today.
The point is this - Stalin an Pol Pot were horrible brutes. But capitalism, in it's normal "free market" workings, anomynously kills millions around the world from starvation, overwork, war, and preventable, untreated illnesses - and now, climate disasters - year in, year out - just as surely as people being machine-gunned in mass graves.
And why are bogeyman lists so heavy of "communist" bad guys, while ignoring (off the top of my head - in no particular order) Diem, Franco, Salazar, Somoza, Batista, Rios-Montt, the Brazilian junta, The Argentine Junta, he Salvadoran Junta, Pinochet, Marcos, Fujimori, Mobuto Sese Seko, the business-run and govt.supported Colombian Death Squads, the CIA run contra Death Squads. Oh, almost forgot - the fascist CIA-installed Shah Pahlavi of Iran...
Eight million. That's the number. There would be records in churches, in small town newspapers, and in our oral history. People would have mentioned in in their diaries. There would be clusters of tombstones (unless there were...gasp! secret mass graves!) There is absolutely no evidence--none, outside of some Russian's fantasies--that eight million people starved to death in one year in the United States. That would have been about 7% of the total population. I realize how many people on this website hate both America and capitalism, but don't surrender your ability to reason to your ideology.
"There is absolutely no evidence--none, outside of some Russian's fantasies--that eight million people starved to death in one year in the United States."
There is evidence that the "Great Depression" lasted longer than ONE year. There is evidence that there are clusters and clusters of tombstones from that era. There is evidence that you are not privy to every diary, church record, oral history.
I realize that you have been fully indoctrinated by the "we're number one" meme that is ameriKKKa, but don't expect us to succumb to your ideological idiocy.
My mom told me about going with her dad to take food to starving people. She said that they would go into houses bare of furnitue because they burned it all to keep warm.
Why would there be mass graves for eight million people who die one by one over the whole US? Don't be so frigging naive.
A few years ago, as we watched the same little girl that we had seen for the past ten years, walking down the same street, who could be "saved by our fifteen cents a day," my wife called the number on the screen and asked if her donation could go toward helping starving children in the United States.
Answer? "There are no starving children in the United States, only in foreign countries." Click.
Even when there have been news programs about children going hungry, shoeless, etc., in places like Appalachia, and the inner cities, our policy is apparently that in the "land of plenty," no child goes hungry.
But the same cute child, on the same street, in a South American country still begs for our fifteen cents a day to lift a child out of poverty. (As long as it is not a needy American child.)
If they lopped fifteen or twenty percent off that bloated MIC budget, we could correct our own problems and maybe much of the world's also. If they knocked it down to the budget when it was the "War Department," we could live in paradise, around the world.
There are no obituaries for all the Native Americans that died in the residential schools. The first accounts are ignored. You sir are the one that is naive. The lack of mass graves does not show that people have not died. That is an idiotic comment. Millions of Americans die each year.
None of these will be found if the people refuse to look and you sir are one of those that will refuse to look> If you do research you will find the oral accounts of survivors who describe how they resorted to eating grass and the bark of trees to survive but very few researchers bothered to get this information as it ran counter to their illusions of what America was.
If you do not believe this happens all you need to is look to the research being done today. In this world of mass media look at the lack of news about all those ill people suffering the effects of the Gulf spill. That it not reported on hardly means it does not happen.
The evidence is there in the statistics.
Precisely. People simply refuse to accept ugly truths because they are unable to. There are no 5.8 million obituaries detailing those that starved to death in the Ukraine. Nor are there mass graves or tombstones to each. Nor were there oral histories. Nor were there Church records.
The Ukraine was CLOSED to foreign investigators coming into that country to "Interview Survivors". There was no agencies in Russia trying to determine how many starved. Yet the number of 5.8 million was somehow arrived at.
What was happening at the time was millions of Americans were demanding the US turn to Socialism and Communism and had reports of hunger in the USA been divulged to the public the clamor for the same would have grown. The press got on board by suppressing such information claiming instead that No one was going hungry in the USA while there mass famine in the USSR.
A genocide was committed against the Native Americans as well wherein within just over a couple of Centuries the population dropped from some 18 million to under 500 thousand. This is not the sum total that was lost as this would suggest that population of 18 million would never have grown via new births. Yet there are millions of Americans who pretended it never happened. Nor are there newspaper accounts of it happening. Nor are there mass graves. Nor are there Church records.
So as far as the deniers are concerned those 18 million plus people never existed.
So just how did researchers in the West arrive at the number of 5.8 million dead in the Ukraine?
They did not count the dead. They did not interview survivors. They did nod read obituaries. They did not go into the USSR in 1952 and look for mass graves.
What they did do was use demographics just as the Russian researcher did. They took the census size of the population prior to the famine. They took the birthrate in the years prior to the famine. They took the population size of the Ukraine after the famine. They allowed for the same birth rate through that period. They then calculated what the population size should have been . They used the EXACT same methods.
Now can such a methodology be flawed? Certainly. But if flawed it can not be flawed just in the case of the United States of America yet remain applicable for the Ukraine.
I will use another example of this double standard and that the lancet study used to arrive at 800k dead in Iraq. The methodology used is the EXACT one used to measure such deaths in places like the Congo, Somalia and that was used to measure the deaths of the Kurds to Iraqi forces prior to the first Gulf War. This methodology was used by the State department in the USA when it suited its purposes.
When it was used in Gulf war 2 to show how many killed by the US Invasion it suddenly dismissed as inaccurate and flawed.
But you've made my point: you live 5,000 miles away from Iraq, and don't speak their language, yet you know all about the half a million people who died there. The argument here is that 7 million people died from starvation and not one single person--out of 120 million Americans--noted it. Please.
Stalin is purported to have murdered twenty millions, the "holodor"( forced famine) in the Ukraine is estimated to have taken one million lives but records were not kept so the numbers are vague.
http://www.enotes.com/genocide-encyclopedia/ukraine-famine
That so many deaths in the USA of the thirties would go unreported seems rather a stretch to me as it does, apparently, to you as well.. Of course it is said that the death of one is a tragedy but the deaths of millions is a statistic.
I have read into much history of the period, and it's the first time I heard this one go by. There must be a pretty big stone it's hidden under.
Let's say for argument sake this tidbit is true. That would put FDR, who presided over most of the Depression, up there with the other grandies of evil. I know a couple of Repubs who would love that.
FDR didn't kill anyone -it was just the normal workings of the capitalist system - a "market adjustment".
Charles Manson really should be taken off this list. It could be grounds for a libel suit by him. He's nothing but minor league compared to these "great figures" in Western savagery.
Manson is always mentioned as one of the biggest "serial killers" of all time, which he is not. If we're talking about sheer numbers, he isn't even a serial killer by definition alone, and hardly worth mentioning in the annals of "big" murderers at all. He was responsible for the deaths of what...5? 6? And he didn't even kill them himself. Bundy killed 30, possibly more. Robert Pickton killed over 60 women. Gacy killed over 30. Albert Fish killed over 100 that are known, at the turn of the twentieth century.
I'm not diminishing the people that Manson was responsible for killing, but the cult that is built up around him has always confused me, and the label "serial killer" that seems to be attached to him. He is a relative nobody in the annals of murderers that stand out for their brutality and for the sheer numbers of people they killed. Yet he is always listed as "one of the worst."
And you are correct, back to your main point - even Fish and Gacy were small potatoes compared to the real mass-murderers such as Pol Pot, Stalin, George W. Bush, or Obama, each responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions.
Yes it was Capitalism. Food cost money. People had no incomes. There were no social programs to provide the people that income.
The drought also struck and much of the US farmland abandoned as people looked for jobs.
The accounts of farmers in California destroying their crops in order to prop up prices as recounted in Grapes of Wrath are accurate ones. This was to try and prop up prices as demand plummeted.
Those that did manage to get jobs for what was called by them "Starvation Wages" called them such because it did not earn them enough to feed their families so how on Earth do people believe those that did NOT manage to get a job were able to afford food with NOTHING.?
Millions of women and families were abandoned by their husbands as their husbands hopped the rails to try and find work. There were no support programs for these women or children. Yet we are to believe none went hungry or starved to death.
If people would bother to look they can research the internet and find thousands of first hand accounts of widespread hunger during the depression. They can also see pictures of entire families living in shacks. They can see pictures of bone rail thin women and children and men that would not have been out of place in one of the Concentration camps in Germany.
Or they can continue to insist it never happened and go on cheering for Uncle Sam and "The free market".
And yes my mother and father grew up during that depression and it struck less severely in Canada then in the USA. They also grew up on the farm where they were at least able to grow food. And yes people went hungry. My Mother tells me of Gypsy families that would roam farm to farm trying to sell junk so as to get enough food for the next day and how sickly and skinny the children were. She would tell me how even as farmers she too went hungry as much of what was raised had to be sold as there was no income to buy other staples. She would tell me of having little more then a slice of bread smeared with pig fat for lunch. My dad tells of bone rail thin men who would wander farm to farm on foot looking for work and how my grandfather would have one move a log pile to one spot one day and another move it back to the first spot the next in return for a meal.
Yet those Gypsies and other families had LESS.
Unlike some I do not filter out what I do not want to hear.
Thank you, GW, for your elegant prose on the Great Depression. Your emphasis on the arts is especially moving. When I try to imagine the next phase of our dying country, it's both the words of Steinbeck and the WPA photographs that come to mind.
The Depression era always fascinated me--the history of it, the art it produced, the social ethos, the politics. Of course, I always studied it from a safe distance, certain that we learned our lessons and it could never happen again.
http://www.english.illinois.edu/Maps/depression/photoessay.htm
We are headed in that terrifying direction again soon, mark my words. I have a feeling that the starving, homeless masses of that era will pale in comparison with what lies ahead.
Indeed, I agree. I no longer look upon those photos as past, but prologue...and prologue to something far more sinister, as you say.
That Russia Times article is a load of h@rsesh!t. It was a defensive article in response to the Ukraine disaster of the early 1930's - nothing else. In discussing the hardships of the great depression, not one of the many people I have known from that era referred to starvation of any sort. While plenty of first person accounts of this era have been written, show me one referring to starvation.
You another of those that filters out the information that he does not wish to hear. You did not dispute the numbers. You simply claimed that because he is Russian he can not be correct. This is idiotic and shows you have been conditioned into believing only the US Government can tell the truth.
This is a fact. There were hunger marches in the United States of America during the depression. There were food riots wherein stores were broken into by mobs in order to loot them for food. There was a mass march on Washington DC by ex Military veterans and their families because they could not get enough to eat. All of these were met by violent force by the US Government.
This is a fact. As peoples incomes and wages dried up they could not afford food. As the demand for food plummeted those growing them complained to the Government. The Government responded by destroying food stocks so as to prop up the price.
Now use a little common sense rather then resort to that brainwashed mind of yours.
If there was no one going hungry why would mobs break into stores for food and just where were people their income to BUY that food when they HAD no income?
If you would bother to do some research you will find first hand accounts of people that went hungry. You will also find medical reports that estimated over 50 percent of all children suffered from malnutrition and chronic hunger. But none of them died?
What a crock.
There were plenty of people for whom the Depression was something you read about in the newspapers. Like my parents, who took a slow boat to Nassau on their honeymoon in 1936. The Depression dented their bank account, but it didn't wreck their lives.But my father, at least, knew what was going on. The father of an ex-girlfriend of mine went broke keeping his factory running, and kept paying the workers until he ran out of money and had to shut down.I wouldn't doubt for a minute that millions died fof starvation during the Depression: people are dying of hunger right now, right here.Just some notes from the other side of the tracks.
GwNorth,
Spot on! I thought of people like Rockefeller and Warren Buffett. How many millions have died because of oil corporation pollution and resource wars these fellows profited off of and "urged" our bought and paid for representatives to vote for? The USA is exceptional in that its' brand of reptilian monsters have better PR than those other beasts in the world. Has anybody ever quantified the dead from anti-union practices of Coca Cola in Central and South America? What about the suicides in India from Coca Cola water stealing and polluting practices? Grandpa Warren just doesn't want to talk about this stuff.
I find it heartening that a young child would include Bush and Cheney in a rogues gallery. This means the alternative media on the internet is getting through to the younger generation. This is very bad news for the elite. They prefer the mindset of the people like the bigot poster here called likeitornot. Victims of brainwashing like him espouse the view that we've got to do it to them or they will do it to us. It's the ultimate perversion of the golden rule.
Hmm. Ever hear the reggae song "Idi. Idi Amin, greatest man that ever been"? Not kidding. Heard it on the radio in London, 1974ish.
Oh, I dunno. The kids seem to be doing at least as well as the next lot of pundits. And 50 years later, what are the historic details that graduating class will most surely remember?
Those two started wars in which tons of depleted uranium was dropped on the environments of Iraq and Afghanistan...Have you seen pictures of DU babies? At least which Genghis, Pol Pot, Stalin, and da b'ys died they stopped killing...people stopped being killed by them....Garge and Dick,,,,gonna kill people for the next 100,000 years...
*Garge = Newfoundland slang for George....
As much as I dislike Dumya and believe he is a war criminal; Kissinger should be on the list. He is recognized as a war criminal by some nations of the world.
Actually, Cheney belongs as #1. I just heard Seymor Hersh on Democracy Now saying that our military exponentially increased under Cheney which is against our Constitution and I dare say overwhelmingly without any singular national control. Like everything else in our US#1, we lost control over Wall Street, Pentagon and all five, count them, banks, all of them too big to fail. I don't think the Shrub knew anything about this when Cheney conferred first with the energy boys and then with the folks at the Pentagon. All Neocons contributed, fantastic!
Rather silly but they made a point of showing how bad the Cheney/Bush cartel was,,, and still is. Fotunantly we didn't have the looming depression hit during Bush's term, where Bush could have legally enforced martial law and take over permanently. We wouldn't be reading this article has that transpired, or reading much of anything else.
At that level of rottenness, it's hard for one to outdo the other. It's beeen said that if USAn presidents were judged by Nuremburg standards, every one since Truman would have ended up on the gallows.
Yes, I believe that Noam Chomsky made that statement.
Well, it is rather subjective as to who would make the top ten and what criteria might be used. I wonder why Manson was on the top 5 but not McVeigh for example? Is that rather telling?
Personally I'd get Stalin, Pol Pot and Idi Amin added and perhaps Mussolini too.
Then again there's a few US Presidents that could make the list for precipitating indirect deaths and Obama may yet make the contender list.
-Oh, and I'd add Stephen Harper too.
My penis piercing has a charm bracelet attached to it. I call it my Dick Cheney.
Just be careful that if you go out hunting with ex-Vice Presidents that you make sure it's not in plain sight.
NedB,
Oh no! Now you've done it! Homeland security just added another mandatory check for TSA to make on all airline passengers (male AND female - you never know by appearances...) for penis piercing.
If evidence of penis piercing is found, you will be placed on the "no fuck" list.
Obviously, they were just trying to send a message. No way they belong on that list. They play golf and accidently shoot their friends in the face! Anyway, we elected them right! So, the American population should be on the list by my reckinan.
I didn't have anything to do with electing them!
Barry must be crushed that he didn't make this august list.
Give him time, I'm sure he'll make the @$$hole hall of fame.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who classify and those who don't classify people. Being from the relatively small tribe of "non-classifiers," I find these "worst" (and "best") lists to be utterly nauseating. Why do we think we have to rate everything (and in superlative terms, no less)? Does not each us (classifiers and non-classifiers) have his/her own quantum of good and evil? He who is without sin....
Sorry if this spoils the "fun" of the Arkansas kids and the CD posters.
Phoenix 20, another sinner.
"There are two kinds of people in the world..."
You do realize that is a classification, right?
Of course, it's called a "joke." If not by Mark Twain, should have been.
The photos are proof positive--Bush and Cheney are Hitler and Mussolini reincarnated.
Moved to US mass starvation comment.