If you were writing Dante's Inferno, who are the three people in the center of the 9th circle?
Last edited Sat Nov 15, 2014, 06:03 AM - Edit history (1)
Dante put Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot in the most horrific depths of hell, gnawed forever by Satan.
While Satan is obviously a fictional character and hell an allegory for living psychological states, it's a morally enlightening exercise to think about who you regard as the three most absolute evil human beings of all time.
It would be a trivial answer to just pick the three biggest murderers and say Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. But if you look deeper at the nature of their horrors, you find that's not necessarily an intelligent answer.
Stalin and Mao killed people mainly via the chaos and paranoia they recklessly unleashed, magnifying their minutest impulse into a political imperative. They were akin to catalysts of a riot, rather than architects, and then acted desperately to stay in power against both real and imagined conspiracies to overthrow them like vast numbers of other tyrants in history. What distinguished them was not their crimes, but merely the scale of the states they ruled.
Dante reserves the 9th Circle for betrayers, and in my book the three betrayers in the lowest frozen depths who are eaten perpetually by Satan's three heads, are the betrayers of democracy - those who inherit its gifts, and throw them away as if they're nothing.
#3 Richard Nixon
Nixon grew up in the bosom of American democracy, privileged and nourished by it, and still could find nothing in his heart but contempt for everything it stood for. After a long series of some of the greatest leaders the world has ever known, he bullied and lied his way into power, and then used that power mostly to fuck everyone over and try to make himself into some kind of monarch. He had even tried to make a ridiculous special Secret Service uniform that looked like some pompous Praetorian Guard costume, but nobody else was interested. Dick Cheney in later decades was merely a degenerated clone of Herr Nixon - all the bloodthirst and hate with none of the political competence. But Nixon deserves the blame for Cheney's crimes too, since so much of what he did led directly to them, as well as the crimes of the Reagan administration between the two.
#2 Adolf Hitler
We tend to think of Adolf Hitler as the worst person who ever lived, mostly for aesthetic reasons. Mao probably killed more people, but it was the way Hitler killed them that gets to people - the rationalization along aesthetic lines, as if mass murder were a genre of art. It was as if an entire nation adopted the viewpoint of a serial killer.
But it's also the radical contrast between those crimes and the circumstances preceding them that makes us think of him as the absolute worst. Adolf Hitler rose to power democratically, arguing his way into a significant minority share of legislative authority in the Weimar German government before politicking himself into the Chancellorship. Only from that position did he declare himself dictator and embark on his career of Satanic madness.
Ruination that took a thousand years to unfold in the Roman Empire, unfolded for Germany in a generation: Monarchy, to democracy, to tyranny, to ruin. And he brought down an entire continent with him, and sowed the seeds of the Cold War that nearly ended the species. The narcissistic rat preferred to see his people reduced to ashes than to see them move beyond him. But Hitler lived in a time when there was a Bulwark of Freedom to fight him and refute his ideology. Not so the vilest human who ever lived...
#1 Julius Caesar
It's hard to understand the Roman Republic and early Empire today. They were utterly alone on Earth, standing like a mile-high column in an absolutely flat plain. There were military competitors - the Persians/Parthians for instance. And the distant Empire of China was very orderly and technologically advanced. But these were just elaborate kingdoms - more developed versions of ancient Egypt. Rome was something else. Not a rigorous democracy like Athens had been, but the most liberal and progressive large-scale society on Earth for centuries. They claimed to be "the world," and they were not wrong. Their philosophers stood upon the open plain and saw immortal truths, and the freedom to choose their path.
But for all the problems that came along afterwards - the conspiracies, the civil wars, etc. - Rome still believed in the open plain, in the freedom of people (as they defined "people" - Roman men, of course) to choose. And then some charismatic, ambitious general decided that the freedom to choose was the problem, and stabbed it in the heart as surely as he himself was a decade later. He swept in from his Gallic conquests with an army of soldiers who had known only a life of obedience rather than the freedom of Rome, and turned the entire "world" the Romans knew into a macrocosm of his camp in Gaul.
No one in all of history is as diabolical as Caesar. His own unfeigned words in De Bello Gallico are those of an unfeeling bastard who ordered the total extermination of entire peoples who resisted him, bragging about horrors even his contemporaries found somewhat shocking. The machine they had unleashed centuries earlier had come home to roost, and there was cruel justice in that, but the man who directed it against Rome herself was the singular author of two millennia of ever-diminishing freedom and ever-waning light. A man who had known all the blessings of a free republic, come home to murder it in its hour of weakness, and unleashing 1500 years of tyrants, madmen, and selfish hereditary monarchs on people reduced to universal slavery.
He caused vast numbers of slaves to be freed, only to enslave everyone else as subjects to the tyrant. He fed the poor, only to guarantee an unending future of poverty and misery. He feigned respect for institutions he destroyed, and created himself the founder of what Rome hated most: Monarchy.
Who knows what might have been possible if Caesar had been something other than he was? Nothing inherently stood in the way of industrialization and growth into modern republic. It could have happened 2,000 years before it did. Instead, an endless series of miscellaneous and boring history of feudal tyrants, military dictators, useless Fortunate Sons inheriting the slavery of millions for a hundred generations, callous religious cults rising in the darkness where the light of philosophy had died under tyranny, and chaos.
The five centuries of Rome as a charnel house of oppression belong to Caesar. The thousand years of "Rome" as a degenerate Eastern autocracy belong to Caesar. The medieval chaos in the ruins of Rome belongs to Caesar. The deplorable ignorance and fanaticism of medieval Christianity belong to Caesar, since it grew in the soil he had sown. The millennia of kings and tyrants throughout Europe who ruled in his name, or inspired by his example, right up to 1917, belong to Caesar. The Kaisers and the Czars belong to Caesar. Napoleon belongs to Caesar. The Holy Roman Emperors and the French Kings belong to Caesar.
He stood upon the Open Plain, and decided to dig a hole 2,000 years deep. Fuck you, Julius Caesar.
What do you think?
= new reply since forum marked as read
Speaking of which, here's Nixon's personal design for a Secret Service uniform:
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Fucker basically wanted lictors.
This was Cheney's Suggestion
in all of US history---and you would put him in the 9th circle? What kind of Democrat are you? 
He'd definitely be right up there on my list. 
I'd definitely put Hitler first, though I only know about him from history. And possibly Stalin. I did spend some time in the USSR, so learned more about his atrocities, and my grandparents emigrated from Poland, so heard about him from my grandmother. But you're right, Cheney will probably be a minor character if he's remembered by history at all. 
