Has anyone else in all of history ever wielded so much raw authority and terror as him?
>>1212071
Augustus Caesar easily
Qin Shihuang as well
FDR maybe
>>1212128
>american president
>raw authority and terror compared to emperors and dictators
lol
>>1212146
power granted by the popular will
during the war and prior he has immense popularity and therefore power
a popular president will always be more powerful than a brutal autocrat.
>>1212071
Ghengis Khan? Mao Zedong?
>>1212216
What about the terror part?
>>1212216
Clueless libertarian.
>>1212216
Popular, because he didn't generate a lot of terror among his citizens - quite the opposite. He was literally described as "cuddly".
>>1212071
maybe Vlad, you know, the impaling guy.
>>1212226
I could be wrong, but unlike Stalin who was a pretty brutal dude, Mao worst mistakes came from fuck ups.
It isn't like he was trying to murder 40 million people in the Great Leap Forward. He just a had a bad idea and he lost control.
Now he did incite the Cultural Revolution, but once against it spiraled out of his control
>>1212071
Probably not. One of the more unprecedented things about Stalin and communist party-states was the fact that the party was able to get into every single facet of peoples lives. This wasn't even the case in absolutist monarchies in their golden age.
>>1212226
Actually Mao might be the only guy to give Stalin a run for his money in this case
>>1213271
I think you're giving Mao too much credit personally. The dude was extremely misguided and arrogant. He hated receiving any criticism, even if it was a realistic and plain spoken assessment of issues with his policies. That's why during the great leap forward a lot of communist officials lied and tried to assuage him that everything was A-ok, exacerbating the problem. It's also why he purged Peng Dehuai when the latter dared to disagree and opine that the Great Leap Forward was a disaster.
Everything Mao did in Tibet was also terrible for the people there and deliberate. The way he handled the Cultural Revolution further seemed like the whole thing was set up to get dissenters out into the open so he could purge them, because god forbid anybody critique the great chairman.
Mao was a horrible person. I read a statement in a book once which I found compelling. The author said that if Mao had been an Emperor in Imperial times, he would have been certainly thought to have lost the mandate of heaven, resulting in widespread popular rebellion. There were so many disasters under Mao and his regime was one of the most brutal and terrible in all of Chinese history.
>>1213353
Sounds like you read the Chang/Holliday garbage book senpai
>>1212071
Saddam Hussein emulated him to perfection and would've been seen in the same light as Stalin today had he not been played by both the USSR and the states. In fact Saddam is a more realistic outcome of Stalin had there not been Hitler to occupy the Allies
>>1212071
This man. He changed 6 hearts already. When they learn how to clone bodies, he will rule the whole world with terror eternally.
>>1212146
FDR was literally bloodiest dictator ever and huge enemy of Freedom and God upon which US of A as built.
It's just liberals and FBI hiding evidence for it that caused him to be looked upon as some sort of good guy.
>>1216162
Holy shit, this delusion, but sources?
