Posted by Lord Aslak Viking on April 16, 1999 at 14:13:05:
Friends,
I have met interesting viewpoints on my suggested list for the
10 most genious minds of the Millennium. However, few of you have
come up with suggestions on how to perfect the list.
Maybe we ladonians find geniouses uninteresting?
Therefore, I launch the idea of making a new list:
The XX Most TWISTED Minds of the Millennium.
This is a bit more challanging. I have, very briefly, summoned a
few suggestions to this list. But I know there are many twisted minds
in the past thousand years I've forgotten... There must be a lot of twisted
inventors, artists, scientists, etc., that we could put on the list, right!?
Therefore, if you find this angle a little bit more appealing, don't
hesitate to make suggestions. Here are a few of the really, really twisted
minds the humaity has encountered during the past Millennium:
Hitler, Adolf
1889 - 1945
Leader of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party (from 1920/21)
and dictator of Germany (1933-45). Adolf Hitler's persecution
of the Jews in Germany began a month after he became
chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933. The total number of Jews
exterminated by the Nazis is estimated to be approximately
5,700,000. (This is about 12 percent of the estimated total
of probably more than 46,000,000 military personnel and civilians
killed worldwide in World War II.)
Pope Sixtus IV (FRANCESCO DELLA ROVERE)
1414 – 1484
In 1478 the pope, Sixtus IV, sent out a papal bull
setting up the Inquisition to deal with the supposedly
evil influence of the Jews and "conversos".
Too late, Sixtus IV realized the enormous ecclesiastical
powers that he had given away and the moral dangers
inherent in an institution the proceedings of which were
secret and that did not allow appeals to Rome.
Kevorkian, Jack (Dr Death)
1928-
in 1952 graduated from the University of Michigan
Medical School. Early in his professional training, Kevorkian
distanced himself from the medical mainstream. As a pathology
resident, he lobbied for carrying out medical experiments on
death-row inmates at the hour set for their execution, then
giving them lethal injections, which earned him the sobriquet
"Dr. Death." Later he advocated establishing suicide clinics
("obitoria") Kevorkian gained international attention when in
1990 he enabled Janet Adkins of Portland, Ore., aged 54 and in
the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, to kill herself
by using his so-called Mercitron machine. Over the following
3 1/2 years he was present at the deaths of 20 others.
In November and December 1993 Jack Kevorkian served two
jail sentences on charges that he had violated the state's law
against assisting in a suicide. In prison he threatened to starve
himself to death to protest what he called "this immoral law."
Frail and weakened by his second hunger strike, he was released
from jail on Dec. 17, 1993, after promising that he would not
participate in the deaths of any further terminally ill individuals.
Amin, Idi (IDI AMIN DADA OUMEE)
1924/25 -
Military officer and president (1971-79) of Uganda Amin
ruled directly, shunning the delegation of power. He was
noted for his abrupt changes of mood, from buffoonery
to shrewdness, from gentleness to tyranny. He was often
extreme in his nationalism. He expelled all Asians from Uganda
in 1972, an action that led to the breakdown of Uganda's economy.
In July 1976 he was personally involved in the Palestinian hijacking
of a French airliner to Entebbe.
Amin also took tribalism, a long-standing problem in Uganda,
to its extreme by allegedly ordering the persecution of Acholi, Lango,
and other tribes. Amidst reports of the torture and murder of
100,000 to 300,000 Ugandans during Amin's presidency, Uganda was
invaded by Ugandan nationalist and Tanzanian troops in October 1978.
When the invasion forces reached Kampala, Uganda's capital, on
April 13, 1979, Amin had fled the city. Escaping first to Libya, he
finally settled in Saudi Arabia.
Stalin, Joseph (IOSEB DZHUGASHVILI)
1879 - 1953
Secretary-general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
(1922-53) and premier of the Soviet state (1941-53).
After WWII and the Cold War, Stalin was responsible of
deportation of more than 50 nationalities, embracing about 3.5 million
people, to various parts of the U.S.S.R. The vast majority of these
were removed from European Russia to Asiatic Russia. The late Stalin
period witnessed campaigns against Jews and non-Russians.
Writers and artists who dared to claim that Russian writers and
cultural figures of the past had learned from the West were pilloried.
Russian chauvinism took over, and anything that was worth inventing
was claimed to have been invented by a Russian.
Hussein, Saddam (SADDAM HUSSEIN AT-TIKRITI)
1937 -
President of Iraq from 1979, who engaged in costly and unsuccessful
wars against neighbouring countries. Hussein launched an invasion of
Iran's oil fields in September 1980, but the campaign bogged down
in a war of attrition. In August 1990 his army overran neighbouring
Kuwait in a surprise attack. Hussein apparently intended to use that
nation's vast oil revenues to bolster Iraq's economy, but his occupation
of Kuwait quickly triggered a worldwide trade embargo against Iraq.
On Jan. 16, 1991, the U.S.-led military coalition drove Iraq's armies
out of Kuwait.
Best rgs,
Lord Aslak Viking
Minister of Propaganda