The professions
Amid the on-going hand-wringing at the news that a group of doctors are accused to plotting a bombing campaign I thought it might be amusing to do a list of professional mass murders, just to see which profession is the most evil. I decided it would easier to keep it to political mass murderers (although with Harold Shipman and Dr Crippen in the ranks I suspect doctors would be well out in front on this one too).
My initial, off-the-top-of-my-head, no googling list was:
Doctors: Josef Mengele, Che Guevara (note to student wankers wearing sweat shop-made T shirts featuring the Communist icon. His attitude to international affairs makes George Bush look like Woodrow Wilson. So stop doing it. People don't think you're cool and radical. They think you're a twat.)
Clerics: suprisingly hard this one despite the long historical link between religion and mass murder. There were Nazi collaborators like Fr Jozef Tiso and the Grand Mufti and Popes such as Alexander VI. Then, if you want to push things, Stalin was a former seminarian who later established a modern connection between atheism and mass murder.
The military: not as many as you might think, unless you live in Latin America. Pinochet and Galtieri spring to mind. As do African coup leaders like Obiang and Idi Amin. But the military gentlemen seem generally to have stuck to killing their enemies rather than vast swathes of humanity.
Teachers: this one's easy. Mao, Mussolini, Pol Pot. Clearly the most evil profession.
But I couldn't leave lawyers out of the list. The trouble was that whilst it's easy to find examples of venal and crooked lawyers, finding ones of historical significance. There's Tony Blair, of course, if you are an Independent reader. The trouble is, that if you are are an Independent reader, I am automatically going to discount anything you say. Otherwise the only lawyers of any historical distinction I could think of were Mandela and Gandhi.
Something's not right here. Could anyone help out?
My initial, off-the-top-of-my-head, no googling list was:
Doctors: Josef Mengele, Che Guevara (note to student wankers wearing sweat shop-made T shirts featuring the Communist icon. His attitude to international affairs makes George Bush look like Woodrow Wilson. So stop doing it. People don't think you're cool and radical. They think you're a twat.)
Clerics: suprisingly hard this one despite the long historical link between religion and mass murder. There were Nazi collaborators like Fr Jozef Tiso and the Grand Mufti and Popes such as Alexander VI. Then, if you want to push things, Stalin was a former seminarian who later established a modern connection between atheism and mass murder.
The military: not as many as you might think, unless you live in Latin America. Pinochet and Galtieri spring to mind. As do African coup leaders like Obiang and Idi Amin. But the military gentlemen seem generally to have stuck to killing their enemies rather than vast swathes of humanity.
Teachers: this one's easy. Mao, Mussolini, Pol Pot. Clearly the most evil profession.
But I couldn't leave lawyers out of the list. The trouble was that whilst it's easy to find examples of venal and crooked lawyers, finding ones of historical significance. There's Tony Blair, of course, if you are an Independent reader. The trouble is, that if you are are an Independent reader, I am automatically going to discount anything you say. Otherwise the only lawyers of any historical distinction I could think of were Mandela and Gandhi.
Something's not right here. Could anyone help out?
Labels: history
posted by buff and blue at 1:05 pm
3 Comments:
Of course teachers are the most evil profession - have you ever spent a sustained amount of time around other people's children?
Enough said.
Puss
Oh of course not. I hate children: if you want to study pure evil, they'd be the first ones I'd turn to.
Radovan Karadzic, and...what was his name...Martic? bloke who set up the Serb statelet in Croatia were both doctors (first a psychiatrist, second a dentist)
Mugabe was a teacher, too (at a Catholic school, to boot)
Lawyers?
To be honest the hourly rate would make being a murderous psychopath a false economy
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