the worst of the worst

‍ ‍    This is an excerpt from the economist Noah Smith’s “NoahOpinion” substack. For the full article, click here.

‍ ‍Who have been the worst regimes of the current century, so far?

      So far, the 21st century has been somewhat less destructive than the 20th—by 1926 we had already seen World War I, the Armenian Genocide, Lenin’s political purges, the Russian Civil War and so on. The years 2000-2026 have, thankfully, been somewhat less brutal and chaotic so far. But we still have plenty of tyrannical villains. Here would be a tentative top five:

      1. The RSF, Omar al-Bashir and the Janjaweed: There has basically been a rolling series of genocides in Sudan this whole century—the first Darfur genocide, the second Darfur genocide, the Masalit genocide and so on. Some of this was done at the behest of former president Omar al-Bashir, who encouraged murderous militias known as the Janjaweed, who later morphed into the RSF.

      2. ISIS: This is the closest thing we’ve had to the Khmer Rouge in recent decades. ISIS’ extremist ideology led them to create a nightmarish totalitarian state in the areas of Iraq and Syria under their control, genocide the Yazidis, and throw much of the Arabian Peninsula into chaos. Their total death toll wasn’t as high as some of the others, but this was because they were stopped quickly; they were so horrible that everyone immediately united to fight and destroy them.

      3. Vladimir Putin: Putin is one of the most aggressive leaders of modern times. He started wars in Georgia and Ukraine, and got heavily involved in the war in Syria. Over half a million people have died in Ukraine so far, and Putin bears some responsibility for the hundreds of thousands more who perished in Syria.

      4. Bashar al-Assad: In his desperation to hang onto power, Assad laid waste to his country, killing hundreds of thousands and even using chemical weapons on rebels before ultimately fleeing.

      5. The Tatmadaw: Myanmar’s military has been locked in a brutal civil war against ethnic minorities for decades, but in 2021 things really kicked into high gear after the army staged a coup against the country’s democratically elected government and put down protests with extreme brutality. The country is now an anarchic wasteland with war crimes galore.

      These tyrants and murderers are somewhat less impressive, numbers-wise, than their 20th century counterparts. They also don’t clearly fit into the “fascism vs. communism” dichotomy that dominated much of the previous century; they’re more likely to be motivated either by Islamism, local ethnic chauvinism or simple personal lust for power. But looking back at the 20th century, we should remember how bad dictators and totalitarian regimes can get, especially when they go to war—and how important it is to stop the worst of them in their tracks, before they can get even worse.