Naturally this list is subjective to an extent, and probably contains some mistakes and things that I missed. However, I think the top 3 are somewhat obvious and its no great surprise why I chose the regimes and dictators that I did. My criteria was their death toll, their reactionary power and influence, and also their plans and the resulting death toll, even if some of those plans were not fulfilled.
10. Mussolini
The fascist dictator of Italy. He came to power in a coup in 1922 supported by the large capitalist companies, the monarchy and the Vatican. His supporters assassinated the socialist leader Matteotti* and he launched a reign of unmitigated terror. Mussolini suppressed all democratic strivings and used relentless demagogy to try to fool the masses into believing that his fascist system was a “classless society” where workers and capitalist billionaires both work together as equals. Needless to say, the capitalists were in power and got all the profits, while the workers suffered oppression.
*A reformist, but exceptionally a firm anti-fascist
On behalf of the imperialist capitalist class of Italy, Mussolini launched the rapid militarization of the economy. Politics became dominated by nationalist and expansionist rhetoric and goals. Italy intervened in Spain in 1936-38, invaded and conquered Ethiopia in 1936 and Albania in 1939, to turn them into Italian colonies and to enslave their peoples. Communists and other national liberation fighters waged a resistance struggle against fascist colonialism.
The outstanding Italian communist Antonio Gramsci died in Mussolini’s prison.
Mussolini joined the anti-comintern pact with Nazi Germany and joined Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. Mussolini was finally overthrown in 1943. He escaped to the Nazi puppet territory of Saló, but was captured by anti-fascist Partisans and executed by military tribunal in 1944.
9. Syngman Rhee and his successors
Son of an aristocrat, related to Korean royalty. Rhee studied first in an American school setup by Christian missionaries. He then received an elite education in the USA (with degrees from George Washington University, Harvard, and Princeton).
After Korea was liberated from Japanese colonialism by the Korean national liberation movement and the Soviet army, two rival Korean governments emerged: the legitimate people’s government, which included communists and other democratic and patriotic liberation fighters, and the American puppet government.
Originally the USA banned the people’s government in southern Korea, confining it to northern Korea, and established the American military occupation government which lasted from 1945-48. After this the USA created the South Korean puppet government, headed by Syngman Rhee as dictator.
The puppet government was deeply unpopular, being merely a veiled form of foreign American occupation. The Korean people desired unification of their country. The puppet government utilized Japanese colonial officials, supported feudal economic relations and was not in touch with the people.
Syngman Rhee’s government constantly sent invasion forces to attack villages in North Korea and provoked the Korean War. However, his government began collapsing immediately when the war started, due to its unpopular corrupt nature. His fascist dictatorship was only saved by American invasion troops. To enslave the population, Syngman Rhee’s forces and American troops conducted mass killings where hundreds of thousands of suspected communist and national liberation sympathisers were killed. Huge crowds of civillians were killed with machine guns.
In the Jeju uprising against Syngman Rhee and the following persecution by the fascists, 10% of the local population died. In the notorious Bodo League Massacre, Americans and Korean fascists killed 200,000 civilians. Millions of Koreans died in the Korean War and Northern Korea was bombed to complete ruins. All this only to protect Rhee’s fascist puppet government, to protect capitalism and American imperialism.
Rhee’s government was forced to resign by a popular movement in 1960, but it didn’t overthrow South Korea’s fascism. Leftist, communist and pro-unification parties continue to be illegal in South Korea. Leftist and pro-unification propaganda continue to be illegal. After his overthrow Rhee fled to the United States.
8. Suharto and the CIA’s anti-communist massacres in Indonesia
Suharto is on this list for his participationg with the CIA, in the killing of up to a million communists in Indonesia in order to prevent a revolution and liberation of the people. Other leftists, ethnic minorities and atheists were also targeted. The killings were carried out by the army and paramilitaries.
The killers had been to a large extent trained by the CIA. According to declassified documents the CIA knew about the mass killings, had its own plan to “liquidate” the leftist president Sukarno who had communist sympathies.
“The US also provided covert material support for the killings. Telegrams released by the US State Department in 2001 revealed that in October 1965, the US had supplied telecommunications equipment to the military to facilitate its attack, while in December it transferred Rp 50 million to the military-sponsored Kap-Gestapu death squad.” https://indonesiaatmelbourne.unimelb.edu.au/telegrams-confirm-scale-of-us-complicity-in-1965-genocide/
“US officials co-opted media outlets to actively spread military propaganda accounts of the killings both inside and outside Indonesia. This propaganda account described the killings as the result of a spontaneous uprising by “the people””
7. Churchill
Son of a Lord and a descendent of Dukes, Churchill served early in his career as a colonial official for the British empire and later as a leader of the conservatives. In his early career he wrote vitriolic attacks against communism and made anti-semitic remarks towards them. During this period he also voiced admiration for Mussolini’s fascism.
Churchill was a consistent supporter of the British empire. This is why he eventually started to oppose the policy to appease Hitler. He saw Hitler as a dangerous rival and realized Hitler couldn’t be stopped without the Soviet Union. Churchill still held secret negotiations with the Nazis. He delayed the opening of the 2nd front in WWII which would’ve helped the Soviets. Only when the Soviets were starting to win even without a 2nd front, did Churchill’s government support opening it.
Churchill made positive remarks about the Soviet Union during the war, but they all proved to be cynical and dishonest. He deserves a spot on this list because he was a forceful supporter of the bloodiest British colonialism. He considered Indian people to be animals without rights, he instigated the terrible famine in Bengal which killed millions by taking food from the locals to feed Great Britain. He launched the Cold War with his slanderous and demagogic speech in Fulton.
Churchill had wanted to invade the Balkans in WWII but the rapid advance of the Soviets and anti-fascist liberation struggles prevented it. He still desired world conquest. He came up with a plan to launch world war III, by re-arming Nazi soldiers and uniting with all the Western capitalist countries to invade the Soviet Union. Luckily the bloodthirsty plan of this maniac was not carried out.
6. Leopold II of Belgium
Leopold II, the king of Belgium is notorious for his colonialist policies. In the Belgian colony of Congo, he ruthlessly exploited the population for profits. The population was forced to cultivate rubber and those who failed to deliver, were beaten, tortured, had their limbs cut off, or were killed. As many as 10 million natives were killed in this way.
A few (dis)honorable mentions:
–Nicholas II of Russia: the Tsar of Russia, also known as “Nick the bloody”. He kept the people in total darkness and oppression, tried to suppress all democratic, progressive and scientific strivings, banned all workers parties and their publications. His rule was characterized by decay and stagnation. He waged many failed wars to enlarge his empire: the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, WWI etc.
His soldiers carried out countless massacres of workers, most famous being the Lena gold field massacre, where hundreds of striking workers were killed, and the Bloody Sunday Massacre of 1905, which sparked the 1905 revolution by firing and using swords on unarmed demonstrators. He sponsored the anti-semitic far-right thugs, the “black hundreds”, who terrorized workers and minorities.
–Augusto Pinochet: Fascist dictator of Chile. He overthrew the socialist president Allende in a violent coup, and launched a campaign of terror. This was done in collaboration with the CIA and American imperialism. He launched a free-market restoration in Chile which caused mass misery, and was praised by American and British leaders. Pinochet’s torturers are notorious for their gruesome methods.
–C. G. Mannerheim: Finnish white guard leader. He served the Tsar as an officer and had monarchist views. In 1918 he led the whites in the Finnish civil war, committing countless mass killings. Mass graves of his victims exist in nearly every Finnish town, even small towns. Out of the 80,000 reds imprisoned in the white terror, almost half died, either due to mass executions or due to terrible prison conditions, such as deliberate starvation. In WWII he collaborated with Hitler.
–Stepan Bandera: Ukrainian fascist leader who committed mass killings against Jews and other ethnicities. He is revered by the government of modern day Ukraine as a hero.
5. Chiang Kai-shek
Fascist dictator and leader of the nationalist Kuomingtang (KMT) party. The KMT was originally a leftist, democratic revolutionary party led by dr. Sun Yat-sen, but Chiang turned it into a far-right fascist party of rich capitalists and landlords.
In 1927 Chiang carried out a coup and established his fascist dictatorship, which lasted for more than 20 years. The KMT had been allies of the communists in the national independence revolution and against feudal warlords, but Chiang betrayed the alliance, carrying out huge massacres against communists and all progressive people.
During the ensuing Chinese civil war, Chiang launched five extermination drives against the communists. His actions, including total blockade of the communist territories, terror, and even deliberate flooding of large regions, killed tens of millions of people.
When Japan invaded China, Chiang refused to effectively resist Japan. He persecuted patriotic anti-Japanese activists. Even after he was forced (almost at gun point) to join with the communists in resisting the Japanese invaders, he did so reluctantly, still continuing to blockade communist territories and betraying them at every turn.
Chiang’s KMT prevented land reform and allied with feudalists everywhere. He also started forming close ties with American imperialism. After Japan’s defeat he restarted the civil war, but lost due to the overwhelming unpopularity of his regime. He had killed tens of millions, prevented the economic and cultural development of his country, betrayed his country to the invading Japanese, became a puppet of US imperialism and supported everything reactionary from fascism to corrupt warlords who kept peasants virtually as serfs or slaves.
After his total defeat in 1949 Chiang fled with his remaining troops to Taiwan, where he established himself with the military and financial support of the USA.
4. Hirohito and militarist Japan
In Japan feudalism was replaced by semi-feudal militarist-fascist capitalism. The Japanese imperialist capitalist class launched a rapid militarization of the economy, so that they could fund their economic development by plundering and conquering other nations, and establish an empire.
“Imperialist Japan’s further aggressive designs were set forth in blunt terms in a memorandum drawn up by the head of the Japanese cabinet, General Tanaka, in 1927. “To conquer China,” the memorandum stated, “we must first conquer Manchuria and Mongolia. To conquer the world, we must first conquer China. If we are able to conquer China, India and also the South Seas countries will fear us and capitulate before us. The world will then understand that East Asia is ours and will not dare to dispute our rights…. Having gained possession of all of China’s resources, we shall proceed to the conquest of India and the South Seas countries, then to the conquest of Central Asia, and, lastly, Europe.” (Liberation Mission of the Soviet Armed Forces in the Second World War by A. A. Grechko, p. 371)
With the advent of militarist-fascism even the limited bourgeois democratic rights were abolished. All political parties were dissolved in 1940. Ruthless terror was waged against communists and all democratic and progressive forces. People were kept in semi-feudal exploitation.
The Japanese militarists invaded Manchuria and rest of China in the 1930s, attacked the Soviet Union in 1938 and had plans to conquer territories from it. They also joined the anti-comintern pact with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Besides Manchuria, the Japanese militarists also imposed colonial exploitation on Koreans and many other peoples. They advocated racist theories about Japanese racial superiority and treated other nations as cattle, killing them in cruel ways such as using them as practice targets, burying or burning them alive. Japanese militarists were even extremely cruel against their own wounded soldiers.
The Japanese militarists are notorious for their huge massacres, war crimes and acts of genocide, such as the rape of Nanking. They took hundreds of thousands of males for slavery and women for sex slavery. The Japanese secret unit 731 conducted experiments to develop biological weapons, including weaponised bubonic plague. They carried out lethal and grotesque experiments on unwilling prisoners. Heroic soviet scientist Magdalena Petrovna Pokrovskaya created the worlds first truly effective anti-plague vaccine in 1934, and against direct orders she tested it on herself in order to speed up the development of the drug. She did this, because she suspected the Japanese were attempting to weaponise the plague.
Japanese militarist-fascism came to an end due to the crushing blows dealt to it by the national resistance in China, Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere, its losses to the USA, and its land army being crushed in Manchuria by the Soviet forces. The Japanese Empire at its height had included the southern half of Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan, the Pescadores, Korea, the Bonin Islands, the Kwantung protectorate in Manchuria, and the island groups held as mandates from the League of Nations (the Caroline Islands, Marshall Islands, and Mariana Islands. In the early years of the war, Japan had conquered vast new territories, including a large part of China, South-East Asia, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies.
The death toll of Japanese militarism is in the tens of millions. After being occupied by the USA, Japan was turned into an American imperialist military base.
3. The British Empire
The British empire was the largest empire in history. Its development is linked with the development of capitalism. British colonialism created the conditions and speeded up the accumulation of capital for capitalism. This took place through huge theft of natural riches, massive taking of slaves, conquering and enslaving countless nations, and even exterminating or nearly exterminating entire nations.
The death toll of the British empire is well over a 100 millions. It conquered and suppressed the independence of nations all over the world, in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Americas and elsewhere. It created capitalist development in Europe, but hindered and distorted the development in conquered territories. The situation can only be remedied by national resistance struggles against imperialism in all the oppressed regions, and establishment of world socialism and communism.
Even in the 20th century Great Britain tried its best to suppress the national liberation of India, various nations in Africa and the Middle East, and has clung to Ireland tooth and nail. The Irish succeeded in freeing a portion of their country, but Great Britain has used extreme violence and continues to use terror and deception, to prevent the independence of Northern Ireland.
Such British atrocities in Ireland include the execution of the leaders of the 1916 independence struggle, the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972 when paratroopers shot at protesters, the hunger strike in 1981, when political prisoners demanded their rights, and instead of accepting it the prison authorities and the government allowed 10 prisoners to starve to death, including Bobby Sands who was elected a parliament member during his imprisonment.
Although the British Empire is technically no more, as it lost most of its influence and colonies after WWII, Great Britain still continues to be a powerful imperialist country, which intervenes militarily into its old colonies, has attempted and somewhat succeeded in economically subjugating them, and takes part in crimes against humanity with other imperialist powers such as the USA.
2. Hitler and Nazi Germany
Supported by the biggest capitalists, bankers and weapons manufacturers Hitler’s Nazi party gained some electoral popularity. The party relied on deceptive demagogy, trying to get popularity both from nationalism, socialism and anti-semitism. After being made chancellor by Hindenburg, Hitler staged a coup and established a fascist terroristic regime.
Hitler immediately started the militarization of the economy and rapid preparations for wars of conquest. He did this on behalf of German capitalists. Germany had lost its colonies after WWI and needed new markets. The massive state contracts for armaments helped this problem temporarily, but long term the issue was supposed to be solved by colonialism. Hitler particularly wanted to enslave Russia. His plan also included extermination of entire nations, such as the Jews.
Western imperialist powers appeased Hitler and wanted him to attack the Soviet Union. They allowed him to conquer the Sudeten lands, Czechoslovakia, Austria and even attack Poland without doing anything. Only when Hitler invaded France and England to rid himself of rival imperialists did the Western powers begin fighting him.
The Soviet Union was the only world power that consistently opposed Hitler, fighting him in Spain, opposing the destruction of Czechoslovakia, opposing the conquest of Austria etc. Hitler created the anti-comintern pact specifically to destroy the USSR. However, the Nazi invasion of the USSR failed and Hitler’s regime collapsed under powerful blows from the Soviet army.
The Nazis carried out deliberate mass murder on an industrial scale. In the holocaust they killed at least 6 million Jews, and also millions of other minorities, communists and anti-fascists. The holocaust is considered probably the most notorious mass killing in history, and for good reason. However, Nazi crimes go beyond that. The invasions they started killed tens of millions.
In the Soviet Union alone, the Nazis killed more than 10 million soldiers and more than 15 million civillians. Countless villages were burnt and the population exterminated or taken into slavery. These actions were all done in order to turn the Soviet Union into a colony, and to get slaves for German capitalists. The Nazis also propped up murderous puppet dictators in numerous countries: Horthy and Szalasi, Tiso and Nedich, Bandera and Antonescu etc. etc.
Hitler’s death toll reaches tens of millions, and had he not been stopped by the Soviets, he would’ve killed many many more.
1. US imperialism and colonialism
The United States began as a settler colonial project. The European colonists exterminated indigenous tribes in order to steal their lands. The extermination was done by warfare, by deception, by deliberately spreading diseases to the natives, by confining the natives into ghettos or “reservations”, by forcibly sterilizing them, by forcibly converting them to christianity and trying to destroy their culture.
Rich settlers began bringing African slaves to work the land. The United States eventually conquered some foreign colonies, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba etc. but it mainly relied on internal colonialism: by bringing foreign slaves and exploiting them in colonial fashion on American soil. Slavery and plunder was used to create the capital for American capitalism.
Even after the slaves had been freed, many of them were forced to remain as share-croppers, working for their previous masters. The African Americans were still utterly without rights, and racial segregation remained in force in the United States until the late 20th century.
In its racial segregation and bloody colonialism the United States continued the same path as the murderous British colonial empire and Hitler’s Germany. Black people were frequently lynched in the USA in SS fashion, and the modern American police force continues this tradition.
The workers’ movement and all democratic movements have always been persecuted by American reactionary rulers. There have been numerous “red scares”, where the government has used death squads such as the Pinkertons, and fascist terror such as McCarthyism against leftists, anti-war activists and communists.
The American reactionary government has always supported unscientific obscurantism, eugenics and racist pseudoscience, denial of darwinism, denial of climate change and supported religious fundamentalism. To an extent this continues to our era.
The USA has become the most powerful imperialist state in history. It has waged so many aggressive and genocidal wars it would take too long to list them, but the Korean war in the 50s, the Vietnam war in the 60s and 70s, the countless invasions into South America, the invasion into Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are some of the worst.
In its wars the USA also continues the tradition of Hitler. In the Vietnam war the American imperialists relied on burning countless villages to the ground, creating huge ‘dead zones’ to hunt down the Vietnamese rebels, used chemical weapons, and killed as many civillians as possible as a deliberate plan to exhaust and exterminate the Vietnamese nation.
“By 1967, South Vietnam had been so utterly devastated by the massive attacks, that it was threatened with extinction as a cultural and historical entity, along with its environment. After the they could not break the NLF by war, the US shifted more and more into trying to break the population. The CIA reported that in the bombings of North Vietnam, 4 out of 5 of the victims were civilians. It was even considered to starve the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table, by long-term destroying their food economy.
The 1968 Tet offensive – conducted almost entirely by South Vietnamese NLF forces – proved that the US wasn’t winning this part of the war either. By then US forces were suffering a severe loss of morale. After Tet, the US however still had the power to undertake an ‘accelerated pacification campaign’, really a mass-murder operation that killed tens of thousands and destroyed much of what was left of the country.” (US Humanitarian Narratives to justify the Vietnam War, p. 6)
“Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, imprisonment without due process were virtually a daily fact of life during the war in Vietnam. They were no aberrations, they were the necessary outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest level of the military (and the government).” (p. 8)
“To quote a Vietnamese villager’s perception of the US military: “If a gunner saw anyone, even a woman or a small child or a water buffalo, he blew them apart.”” (p. 10)
“Entire cities were treated as free-fire zones. In the streets, everyone was fair game.” (p. 10)
“More than 60% of army officers said in a survey in 1969 that they would use torture or threaten so during interrogations. Most of the time, officers directly ordered soldiers to carry out crimes such as the burning of villages. In Quang Ngai district, 70-80% of homes had been wiped out. Even” (pp. 12-13)
In its later wars the USA deliberately targets civillians with air strikes, and creates “black sites”, secret prison camps where political prisoners are tortured with the most inhuman methods.
The USA has created the most powerful secret police in world history: the CIA and its various supporting organizations. In Europe the CIA recruited Gestapo and Nazi agents, for example the ‘Gehlen organization’. The CIA has been responsible for countless attacks on different countries. It trained guerrilla and sabotage groups to attack all socialist countries in Europe, it has been involved in countless coups in the Middle East and Latin America.
The number of slaves and natives killed by the USA may be as many as 100 million. The death toll of American imperialist wars is tens of millions: millions killed in Korea, millions killed in Vietnam, possibly several millions killed in Iraq, hundreds of thousands killed in other invasions and regime change operations.
SOME ADDITIONAL INFO:
https://espressostalinist.com/genocide/indonesia-east-timor/
British empire killed 165 million Indians in 40 years: How colonialism inspired fascism
https://archive.globalpolicy.org/us-westward-expansion/26024-us-interventions.html
https://www.infoplease.com/history/us/major-military-operations-since-world-war-ii
About Chiang Kai-shek you can read e.g. books by Edgar Snow and William Hinton. You can find them under the “China” section here.
How South Korea started the Korean War (video)
“Falsifiers of History” by Soviet Information Bureau (Audiobook) (Text)
US Humanitarian Narratives to justify the Vietnam War
ML-Theory 
Nice. Love your site. I figured your Vygotsky article was triggered by people like how I used to be. Last year I was into his stuff and now I realize that there were others that you can clearly find on the Marxists Internet Archive… So my question is: what is your humble opinion about Antonio Labriola with his metaphor for “genetic marxism”? Was he radical for his day? Should we try and imitate his way of thinking?