Who is the most evil creature to have done wickedness in our day?
ast week has set me thinking about evil and the need to establish a hierarchy of wickedness among the men who unleash it on the world. Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Lenin, for instance — how to rank them in infamy? Al] were mass killers but, curiously enough. Lenin, who murdered the fewest — not many more than three million — has the most to answer for, partly because he invented the 20th-century totalitarian terrorstate and established the pattern which all the others followed, and partly because his inhumane violence was a conscious creation. He was highly intelligent, well educated, gifted, and might have conferred some major benefit on humanity. Instead, embittered by his brother's execution, he deliberately cultivated anger and bloodlust, He gave up chess, his passion, because it diverted him from his fury; he stopped listening to music because it 'softened' him, as he put it. An analysis of his writings, speeches and instructions to comrades would show a higher proportion of violent expressions and killing orders than those of any other major tyrant. But this white heat of anger was the obverse side of the icy indifference to human life that he displayed and which so struck Bertrand Russell in his famous interview in 1920. The ability to remain unperturbed at the loss of life you have caused, originally cultivated by Bonaparte — see his notorious remarks to Metternich in 1813 when he said he would readily sacrifice a million men rather than an inch of territory — was refined to an axiom of government by Lenin.
By comparison, Stalin was an unimaginative man, a brute (though not without a gallows humour: Stalin's jokes always involved executions) who was, still more than Himmler, the bureaucrat of mass murder. Stalin liked to sit behind a desk and process bits of paper. He must have signed more death warrants than any other man in history, though Molotov came close. Stalin lacked the ability to link his signature to what actually happened inside the execution sheds scattered in their thousands throughout his horrific empire. He did not need to give up music or any other stimulus to the emotions, for they penetrated only a thin layer of sensibility, then struck against the hard, dead, inert core of his being.
Hitler and Mao Tse-tung were both artists; interesting, complex, even mysterious. No satisfactory book about Hitler has
been written, or is likely to emerge, until he ceases to be a demon and can be explored as a historical character. My own analysis is that he was a victim of that gruesome mental disease, anti-Semitism, which feeds on itself and gradually destroys the powers of reason, in individuals and groups. Hitler's career was a gradual, then precipitous, descent into irrationality, as AS pulverised his once-formidable brain and made him direct his still overwhelming powers of will to wholly psychotic ends. I cannot think of Hitler without shivering at the grim theatre of a mind overthrown by phantoms. The 'Arab Nation', as it calls itself, is similarly a piteous victim of progressive AS: imagine the unreason of Cairo TV in showing a 41part series based on the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, treated as a serious historical work, though made by people who know it to be a forgery of the crudest kind.
Mao, the greatest mass killer of them ail, with up to 60 million deaths to his score, was another version of the creative evil-doer, writing poems and perfecting his calligraphy while his murder squads were slicing throats and burning precious paintings and manuscripts during his Cultural Revolution. The poems, as translated, do not impress; his Chinese characters, I am told, lack the sensibility of the genuine article, which allows the expert to detect the precise state of the man using the brush. Mao was a plebeian, and there was something fraudulent about his adoption of creative activities thought suitable for an educated member of the ruling class. He went through the motions, but the spirit of Chinese civilisation was not conjured up. There was something crude and physically disgusting about his body, movements and speech. His 'thoughts' are notorious for their banality and sheer lack of interest. Moreover, his gigantic atrocities, unlike Hitler's, have no theme. His killings often seem aimless.
Where does •Saddam Hussein fit into this Pleiad of evil? Like Castro, whom he resembles in his narcissism and flippant habit of inflicting death personally, he was a student of sorts, at that noisy academy, Cairo University. But his training in killing came before, especially from a member of his family who taught him, 'God made three mistakes: he created Persians, Jews and flies, and it is our task to rectify God's errors.' Saddam has killed more than two million Persians and many more of his own countrymen, if we include Kurds, but no flies, There are more of those than ever. I first went to Iraq in 1957 under the old royal regime, which was a continuation of the British Mandate. There was much to criticise, but the Iraq Development Board was investing the growing oil wealth in a well-judged and wide-ranging programme of improvements: roads, bridges, airfields, water supplies, and public health, education and (not least) public honesty and accountability. If this had continued, the enormous rise in Iraq's income from oil (it would have been the largest producer after Saudi Arabia) could have made her perhaps the richest and best-educated nation in Asia, after Japan. The flies would certainly have gone the way of illiteracy, open sewers and a score of chronic diseases, which now flourish there. But in 1958 came the Baathist revolution, marked by the savage destruction of the old ruling class — one man, whose hospitality I had enjoyed, was literally torn to pieces in the streets of Baghdad — and its replacement by military gangsters like Saddam. For nearly half a century, all the money has gone on arms, wars and palaces. The country is not only poorer than ever but also ill-educated and brutalised, without law or civic discipline, and with only an angry Allah for comfort. The task of rebuilding a decent society will have to begin from the roots. But miracles are not unknown, especially in the Middle East, which invented them. Perhaps a great nation-builder will appear from Iraq's silent millions, a creator and justiciar whom the Americans and British can support.
I trust they will do all they can to keep out the troublemakers who have tried to maintain Saddam in power, especially France, which has signed S60 billion-worth of contracts with him, and Russia, whose policy aim is to keep the oil price, and with it the value of Russia's oil exports, as high as possible. One thing in which they are tremendously not interested is the good of the Iraqi people. Putin and Chirac stand in the lowest rank of the hierarchy of villains — petty creatures. Chirac's fingers itch for the till; indeed, he may well end his days in jail. But for the present his strong suit is humbug, and his appeal to the very worst instincts of the French — posturing, cultural and moral pride, verbal fantasising and grandiose delusions — has put him in the line of those political mountebanks like Louis Philippe and Napoleon III who briefly enjoyed the favour of the streets. Like them, he will end up here when the French turn against him.
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