Don’t forget the power of sincerity combined with stupidity. Hitler was ridiculously incompetent—e.g., setting his organisations at each other’s throats in wartime? - and World War II only went as well as it did for him because he had excellent generals. Mao was a successful revolutionary, an inspiring leader and relentlessly terrible at actually running a country—his successors carefully backed out of most of his ideas even while maintaining his personality cult. Stalin was, I suggest, less existentially dangerous because he cared about maintaining power more than about perpetuating an ideology per se.
The danger Tim describes is one of stupid politicians with reasonable power bases doing dangerous things with great sincerity—not a wish to burn everything down.
Hitler, Stalin, and Mao aren’t just evil individuals. Somehow they are connected to a strucutre, a society, that enabled the evil.
Don’t forget the power of sincerity combined with stupidity. Hitler was ridiculously incompetent—e.g., setting his organisations at each other’s throats in wartime? - and World War II only went as well as it did for him because he had excellent generals. Mao was a successful revolutionary, an inspiring leader and relentlessly terrible at actually running a country—his successors carefully backed out of most of his ideas even while maintaining his personality cult. Stalin was, I suggest, less existentially dangerous because he cared about maintaining power more than about perpetuating an ideology per se.
The danger Tim describes is one of stupid politicians with reasonable power bases doing dangerous things with great sincerity—not a wish to burn everything down.