Short Solo

The 20th century stands out as one of the most violent in human history — an era when authoritarian leaders routinely turned entire populations into scapegoats, justifying mass slaughter in the name of social order or national pride.

That level of violence hadn’t been experienced since the 16th century ethnic cleansing / genocide of people indigenous to the land. European colonialism across the Americas led to the deaths of an estimated 60 million Indigenous people between 1492 and 1600.

If I were asked to comment on the single worst villain of the 20th century – I’d immediately say Hitler. In fact Hitler is the only world leader I can remember studying in elementary school.

I remember the Cold War mostly through the lens of pop culture — the Soviets were the villains in hockey and WWF’s Nikolai Volkoff was the cartoon version of the “enemy.” China, to me, was the distant country people disliked for communism and the One-Child Policy.

What I didn’t grasp at the time was the scale of what those regimes actually did to their own people — the purges, the engineered famines, the campaigns that starved or executed tens of millions. These weren’t just strict communist governments; they were systems that reached power and maintained it through mass violence on a scale that, in sheer numbers, exceeded even Hitler’s atrocities.

The chart below shows the worst villains of the 20th century. Leading is Mao followed by Stalin and Hitler.

Calling every political opponent “Hitler” — a common and, in my view, reasonable criticism of parts of the left — has diluted the term to the point where it’s lost much of its moral weight. The danger in cheapening that comparison is that it blinds us to the real lessons of history: there have been many leaders who brutalized, starved, or terrorized their own populations without fitting neatly into the Nazi analogy.

What matters is recognizing the patterns that lead societies down that path. We need to make sure our own country never becomes a place that collectively punishes segments of lawful, ordinary Canadians. The warning signs aren’t about left or right — they’re about any system that begins treating entire groups as problems rather than individual people.