Hitler and Stalin weren't evil to be honest. People seem to think "killed a lot of people" amounts to being evil. Both were well intentioned and did a lot of good. People forget that both had a LOT of propaganda leveled against them. This does not mean they were right in everything they did, simply that you can't come close to putting them on an "evil" list.
Hitler for example was an international man of the year, one of the reasons why he is so quotable is that he was right about 99.9% of everything he said and believed. That is why he's such a "go to" guy for left wingers when they want to speak against science, technology, progression, or taking any kind of strong action. Association with Hitler discredits an idea far more than it should because of a powerful propaganda campaign. It's important to note that the Hollywood version of Hitler has him as some kind of a lunatic who along with a tiny group of people instituted a reign of terror, with that tiny group of people somehow being omni-present both to oppress his fellow germans, and to somehow occupy the nations he conquered. Looked at with some common sense it's easy to see he wouldn't have had the manpower. People forget how charismatic he was, and that a lot of these nations he conquered actually wound up joining up with him as allies. In many cases the militaries he defeated were largely nationalists, where he had a huge amount of support with the rank and file of the countries he went into. In some cases like Romania, all he really did was promise things like the re-romanianization of property. Hitler was not some screaming maniac, what makes him scary is that he's the charismatic leader nobody sees coming. To a liberal for example Obama is actually more Hitler-like than someone like Dubbya, because they LIKE Obama... and that's the key element.
Even The Holocaust isn't as black and white as people make it out to be. Was it wrong, did it go too far? Of course it did. It was most assuredly an evil thing due to the scale. Was it entirely unjustified? No, it most certainly was not. If you do some reading about it outside of US Propaganda and actually looked for an answer on "how could people do such a thing" you'll find that the root of the problem was basically Jews running massive organized crime syndicates and having done so for centuries at that point. Simply put Jews wound up running things like money lending businesses for a long time since the job was considered petty, or prohibited by religion. This lead to various kinds of loan sharking and book keeping operations due to a monopoly. Combine this with a lot of racism, especially then, and the fact that Jews refused to sell the properties they wound up owning to anyone who wasn't Jewish, and you can see where a lot of the anger was coming from. Prior to The Holocaust you had cases with Jewish people doing things like insuring the profitability of a building they were renting (meaning tenants were ensured) locking everyone inside, and lighting the place on fire for money. This is to say nothing of how one of Hitler's big activities during the war was to recover art treasures. People tend to forget Hitler was literally pulling stuff out of the private collections of Jewish crime lords, and even the basements of synagogues that had been missing for hundreds of years. Right now there is stuff is Museums that have had claims made by Jewish families about ownership based on the basic claim "hey, we rightfully stole that, and then someone took it back from us". This is also why some of those fortunes in gold held by churches and banks haven't been returned, the money was stolen or collected through criminal activity.
Now of course where The Holocaust went wrong, is that Hitler being a complete idiot went beyond a major crime crack down, into base racism. He hated Jews so was using it as an excuse to kill them all off. He didn't just go after the rich criminal classes and associates but all the poor as well, he wound up turning a bit of fairly well justified vigilantism into an exercise in ethnic cleaning. People however went along with it because this was apparently fairly gradual and when the situation is slowly built up over time, it becomes fairly difficult to see when things are going too far.
The point here is that very few people ever bother to check the "why" on Hitler or how the Nazi propaganda justified this kind of thing. People get too fixated on the horrorific results where they scream "why" and don't bother to actually seek an answer or pay attention to it when they do.
Also do not misunderstand, the point here is not to make some massive defense of Hitler (and I'm hoping people don't take it that way) so much as to say that in the scope of history he's not the most evil. He's kind of an example of "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".
Stalin is another popular target, because he's a Commie and like Hitler his philsophy wound up being opposed to the US. Stalin is a touchy subject because where Hitler was outright wrong in where he went, Stalin is harder to call evil at all seeing as he acted to save his country from a bad philsophy. Russia probably would have collapsed entirely without him as opposed to becoming a powerful nation that wound up providing fairly well for it's people, all stories about lines for state provided shoes and bread aside, without him they might not have even had those things.
The basic thing with Stalin as I learned it, is that when the Communists took over you were dealing with unworkable left wing philosophy. You wound up with a bunch of peasants who thought that a change in goverment and national philsophy their lot in life was going to change. The average peasant was fighting for a better life, and so he wouldn't have to do back breaking labour with little or no reward. Anyone who knows anything about society knows that any civilization needs far more people at the bottom than the top. Society needs it's ditch diggers, factory workers, farmers, and food prep workers. The problem was that all these communish revolutionaries wanted to be doctors, lawyers, or artists, and contribute to society in the way they personally chose to. Pretty much an example of why communism doesn't work beyond a small level, nobody wants to farm for the benefit of others, and thus everyone winds up starving.
Stalin pretty much started the Gulags as re-education camps, the basic idea was to force people into the mindset where they would go back to work. Basically "new goverment doesn't mean anything changes for you". The Gulags were cruel, and killed a lot of people, but Stalin pretty much figured that even if he killed 99 out of 100 people, that one person who comes out and goes to work benefits society, and those that die were pretty much dead weight.
This is incidently why the so called "Steel Angel" has a sort of love-hate thing going, people hate and fear what he did, but at the same time he saved Russia and people kind of understand that, as well as when they look at the situation of the time, are faced with the valid question of what else would have worked?
This is not to say that Stalin didn't have a lot of negative traits, especially by our standards as Capitalists who believe in democracy as a principle.
The point here being to refute "the big two" since they aren't easy "go to" guys if you understand them. I'm pointing out defenses only for the sake of making a point, not to present an overall defense.
Now you might say, for those who read this far, "Therumancer, you've said that Hitler and Stalin had good intentions at least, and weren't all that evil, so who do YOU consider evil?"
Well that is a good question, especially seeing as even a lot of Seriel killers believe they are doing the right thing, it takes a special kind of whack job there like BTK to really score on the "absolute evil" meter. You know the "I torture and kill because I like it" guys as opposed to the delusional. Still none of these guys who qualify operate on a sufficient level to be considered a real "big bad".
My personal selection for most evil dude to draw breath, without going into truely ancient history where there is little in the way of records to study, is Pol Pot and his Khymer Rouge.
See, Pol Pot was a guy who didn't really have any real objectives other than to bathe in blood. His politics being mostly an excuse to kill people by all accounts, rather than him killing people for a purpose. He had no real plan as to how to build anything up to replace what he was destroying. He went about as far as "we rise up, we horribly murder the teachers and city people" and there was no real viable "what then" plan for building a society which contributed to the entire problem. When you had the left wing revolutions in the name of Communism and Socialism in places like China and France there were some truely horrific and evil things done (like say France's decapitation rampage) but the guys running the show at least had a plan. In France's case they did build a goverment, in Russia's case Lenin at least had a plan he thought would work, and Stalin was arguably able to salvage it with his personal reign of terror. Pol Pot pretty much had one plan "kill people".
The thing about Pol Pot is also that he didn't just kill people, he actually built literal death camps, which were murder factories designed to rape and torture as opposed to just execute. He wanted the people on the receiving end to suffer. With Hitler his disposal of Jews wasn't all that cruel, it was actually pretty mechanical, and actually that was one of the scary things about it. There WERE excesses involved, of that there has never any doubt, but it's important to note they were not officially institutionalized. Stalin in comparison didn't really set out to kill anyone, while it's true he didn't care if 99% of the people going into the Gulags never came out while still consuming oxygen, he was actually hoping for survivors who would be re-educated into working members of society. Basically Pol Pot wanted everyone dead, Stalin in the end wanted them to live, and that is an important distinction.
Looking at Nazi excesses, such as pictures of Jews being forced to work themselves to death in secret rocket factories, or Mengela's experiments, remember we're talking about black ops stuff that we know about largely because of the war being won. That kind of thing was being concealed from everyone at the time it happened as well, and even so, the basic attitude was to do it for the benefits being reaped, figuring "these people are going to die anyway" not simply because anyone was getting their rocks off from human suffering, or at least the goverments weren't.
Basically it all comes down to the details. Even with all of the things I pointed out Hitler and Stalin were evil, and big ones, but not the biggest. Pol Pot actually killed more people than the two of them combined according to what I was reading, and he didn't even have any kind of viable plan in place. He was making people suffer for the sake of making them suffer and where other famous mass murderers could probably make at least a consistant arguement about "this is why I am doing this", Pol Pot is more likely to just start screaming about social vengeance against the city dwellers and educated elite. Other mass murderers could probably outline a plan for what they planning on doing once these people were dead, Pol Pot had nothing more than a vague outline, figuring someone else could figure all that out, he was just there to kill.
So basically Pol Pot is the most evil.
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I won't get into Christianity other than to say that a lot of blood has been spilled in it's name, but it has done far more good than it has evil overall. Even a lot of it's excesses were well intentioned. Things like "The Crusades" were even fairly well justified, and even the excesses on the battlefield at the time weren't all that bad, being pretty much "business as usual" for when this was going on, unconnected to the purpose of the wars, it was simply how things were done then, the people then were not modern ultra-liberal democrats, but even so what happened during The Crusades was mild compared to what guys like oh say Vlad The Impaler did.
See, The Crusades got started because the Muslims decided to toss out the doctrine that they share the holy land with other "men of the book" which included Christians and Jews. They decided to slaughter the pilgrims going there. This needless to say slotted a lot of people off. It was one of those cases where a "perfect storm" of events lead to a war of vengeance that could not be sustained due to logiistics (which is why crusades kept failing). Remember at the time, it was very difficult and expensive to travel between continents over sea. A lot of the people making the pilgrimage from Europe were very wealthy nobles. There were the religious aspects, but a lot of very powerful people with entirely temporal interests lost relatives due to Muslim purges. You execute a Baron/Baroness, Duke/Duchess, or Knight/Lady Dame, and guess what? Especially then members of that bloodline now have it in for you. I can't remember but I seem to remember they got a few members of royal bloodlines as well. The point here is that there wasn't a clear seperation of Church and State at the time, but it wa a case where you had The Church screaming for blood for religious reasons, and the people in power all accross Europe demanding payback for the loss of loved ones. The kind of people who could raise armies in the name of personal Justice/Vengeance. Needless to say, it's not suprising where this all went. Numerous crusades were launched with various specific catalysts but in the end the tech to sustain an ongoing war didn't exist... exactly the opposite of the problem today, they had the right attitude to win, but not the means, today we have the means but not the attitude. Basically when your not even guaranteed that a ship full of troops and weapons and such you send is going to make it, it becomes difficult to reinforce. The Crusaders won massive battles, and the Muslim vitories were at best massively phyrric affairs when they had them, but the issue was that every crusader that fell was irreplacable for all intents and purposes due to a lack of reinforcement, where a victory ratio of hundreds or even thousands to one didn't matter when your in the back yard of the people your fighting and they can afford the losses. The Crusades are pretty much an example of what it is to win a war through attrition, and simply getting the other guy to eventually give up. The excesses of battles were incidently the realities of war at the time, especially when your dealing with pissed off people who had their families killed. Sure, The Crusaders murdered villages and did things like nail the corpses to poles up and down the roads, but The Muslims actually did exactly the same thing to the pilgrims travelling there.
For Christian excesses you need to really look at some of the more "interesting" Popes, The Borgias being a popular example. However it's important to also note that Christian deals with a lot of sects, and in there you have the whole issue of "Anti-Popes" and their followers as well. The ascension of popes has not always been a clear thing, and in cases where two power bases both declare someone a "pope" the winner winds up declaring the loser an "anti-pope", the same can be said of how The Church goes about striking some of the more... colorful, characters from their ranks. A given pope was a maniac? Well then we say he was an Anti-Pope and never actually took the mantle, due to whatever the political disputes of the time were invalidating the appointment (and with a job like that, there are always disputes). That's generally where you find the sickest stuff and examples of things that are unmitigated evil, but then again the same thing can be done with any major religion with a history going back thousands of years. Even as a Christian I can't (and don't even try to) deny this kind of stuff, but I can also point out that any other major faith like the Muslims, Hindus, etc... all have their fair share of characters as well. Honestly I think it's a positive sign that Christianity in general acknowleges where it went wrong at times, where I don't think most other religions have grown up that much. For example you generally won't see much self reflection by Muslims on The Crusades and their part in things, that isn't to say it doesn't happen, but let's just say the fact that you see so many criticisms of The Christian role isn't so much because Christianity was clearly wrong (especially by the times), but because Chrisians have progressed to become more introspective and self-aware. Nobody is going to kill you for suggesting some really bad things happened there, or at least not from the major churches of Chsitianity. In The Muslim World, it's a differan situation, you start talking about provocation and their own war crimes, outside of certain unusually enlightened people and groups your not going to see the same kinds of reception. I don't know enough about Hinduism to make any major comments or analysis.
At any rate, thank you to those who read this far, even those who disagree with me. These are my thoughts on the subject, and various issues raised. No need to say "TL
R" though I expect it, I kind of figured something like this was too long and rambling for most people, since the interest probably isn't that high to begin with.
