The most evil person of all time is the man known as The Apostle Paul. This was the man who managed to corrupt the radical countercultural socialistic philosphy (click here for more) of a legendary (perhaps mythical) man called Jesus into a repressive religious tradition that has been the cause of tens of millions of deaths in war, the continuing intellectual repression of billions, and the expansion of human population which could possibly make the Earth into a lifeless Venus. Paul does not shoulder all the blame, but he more than anyone else is responsible for this debacle. He twisted a good philosophy to become a most useful tool for tyrants. Stand aside Hitler, there is one who is more reprehensible than thee.
Number two, is, of course Hitler, a man responsible for tens of millions of deaths and untold suffering. Though he abandoned some of its core principles, Hitler was raised in a religious tradition (Catholic) inspired by The Apostle Paul which helped to disable his critical judgment facilities and certainly contributed to his hatred of Jews. So here again we have some of the continuing evil influence of Paul.
The third most evil person of all time was Stalin. His philosophy was the perversion of another radical countercultural philosophy. It was not, as he claimed, Marxism but a short-sighted perversion of it. Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and others did not create Communism but instead tyrannical State Capitalism, in which the ends so justified the means that 20 million could be murdered with impunity.
In the ultimate Communist society envisioned by Marx in his last works, everything is voluntarily, not forcibly, shared. There was not any sacrifice of personal liberty. The ends never justified the means (that was Lenin's contribution, for which Stalin demonstrated the logical conclusion that the means are the ends). Marx's philosophies are a mixed bag (not unlike the mixed bag of sayings attributed to Jesus). But by the end of his life, Marx began to see the Truth more clearly than most. But it was that very Truth that most of his so-called followers ignored at their convenience.
Fascism and socialism are sometimes equated. But it should be remembered that the Father of Fascism, Hitler, destroyed labor unions and murdered socialists. Meanwhile, Hitler did not in any way appropriate the wealth of the non-Jewish wealthy; the non-Jewish wealthy got wealthier (and Hitler's own cronies joined the ranks of the wealthy). While it's true millions were murdered in the name (but not the true spirit of) socialism by Stalin, it can also be said that the most of the major wars of the 20th century were fought in defense of the wealth of a few. Thus 100 million died for Capitalism.
While the circumstances and techniques were different, the outcomes were similar to that of Stalin.
Despite his sobriquet (in the west), Alexander was the fourth most evil person of all time. Sure, he "unified" the world of his time, and spread Hellenistic culture, probably the greatest of that time, all over. But it was not the high Hellenistic culture of Athens that ultimately got spread around, but a cheap, tyrannical, colonialistic, fast-food version of it. Meanwhile, the fine cuisines of culture that had been cooked up everywhere else (such as Persia) over millenia were buried and forgotten. Alexander invented the real paradigm of Evil Empire.
Alexander's Hellenes were succeeded by the Romans. For all their badness (and remember they sacked Jerusalem), the Romans were mostly tolerant imperialists; as long as you made the required sacrifices to the Roman Emperor they would leave you alone (and meanwhile build aquaducts and keep the roads free of bandits; an acceptible trade-off for most subjects). The Christians really shouldn't really have had much problem with that, but the Christians (then as now, Paul's Christianity is fundamentally intolerant) decided that making an annual sacrifice was against their Religion, which made them Public Enemy No. 1 in the eyes of the Romans. The fighting was so vicious because the stakes were so limited. Ironically, all the Christian martyrdom made Christianity more and more popular throughout the Roman Empire until ultimately the Romans had no choice but adopt Christianity as the state religion (funny how things work out). It was then that the Roman Empire (and its successor, the Roman Catholic Church) began to become as fundamentally evil as the Hellenistic Empire that had preceded it, because then it had the divine mandate to pave over all other cultures. A dark age of intolerance in the West began from which we still haven't escaped (honorable people were sent on pointless Crusades, nice people were burned, Galileo was imprisoned, and we still have such people as Jesse Helms who can't tolerate homosexuality). Here we have more of the evil influence of Paul again! When will it all end! A tiny crack of light appeared under the doors of perception in the 1960's, but a new opaque wall was constructed in the 1980's to cover it up.
The Christian philosophers such as Aquinas were correct in believing there is only one truth, and it is essential to find it. Postmodern relativism is fundamentally wrong (though it grew up as a reaction against lots of other lies). The problem with intolerance is that no one can perceive all of the Truth; it is too vast for any one person, book, or philosophy. There are lies within our truths and truths within other's lies. Therefore, we must tolerate liars, because we are liars too!
He didn't invent Prohibition or the War on Drugs, but had a strong hand in making them stick, along with curtailing freedom of speech and association on a grand scale. All this made his mobster friends rich and happy (and he denied the Mob existed most of his life). His relative Harry Anslinger, oversaw the beginning of the prohibition of Marijuana, which could have saved half of our virgin forests.
Now championing the War on Drugs with outrageous lies and propaganda secretly backed by billions of government dollars, General McCaffrey has never been a friend of the truth. The first victim of the his Gulf War command was, in fact, the truth, and later there were outrageous massacres of Iraqis after the war was supposed to have ended. A moral criminal of war and peace.
It has to be said, however, that McCaffrey wasn't the only U.S. War Criminal in the Gulf War, or other U.S. military actions. The infamous "turkey shoot" of helpless retreating Iraquis was not under McCaffrey's command.
Creator of a cult that derived from the dialectics as used by Marx, but turned inside out so that selfishness, not altruism, is the true morality. From this ridiculous assumption, all manner of horrors can be logically justified. She cannot be credited for originating selfishness, any more than Adam Smith can be credited for inventing Capitalism. But the cult had the effect of fooling and ruining the lives of thousands of naive followers. And worse, beyond the cult following itself, this sophistry has appealed to millions (including U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, one of the most powerful men in the world, just to name one), and has become the modern religion of capitalists, justifying the continuance of corporate oppression throughout the world. Virtually every religion and philosophy holds the contrary position, that altruism is (at least part of) the true morality, so Objectivism does not (and hopefully will never have) a following of more than a sliver of the world's population, but unfortunately that sliver includes many of the worst oppressors of our time.
"Free Markets" are not democratic in any way; they are lopsidedly controlled by those having the most economic power, i.e., they are plutocracies. The notion that most of societies interests should be controlled by "Free Markets" is not a science but a religion most well formulated by a philosopher named Adam Smith, and slavishly defended to this day by his followers such as Milton Friedman. Adam Smith is right down there with Karl Marx as one whose ideas have caused great harm to billions of people.
Although one of the greatest and most original thinkers of all time, for which I have listed him as one of the Greatest People of all Time, Karl Marx made grave errors of comission and omission in his work which made it a useful tool for tyrants. He certainly wouldn't have approved of those tyrannical regimes, but then he never approved of anything.
A brilliant inventor (who invented the bifocals, one of the most important inventions of all time, and many other things, for which I have also listed him as one of the Greatest People of All Time), but also a man of otherwise limited philosophical depth whose ideas justified the economic tyranny of Capitalism as well as the tyranny of Earlyism ("Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise.") which tyrannizes most of those in industrial societies today (workers, consumers, vacationers, and even school children). He only seems to have fully understood tyranny in government, and that is only one of the many faces of tyranny.
It is not natural for the human animal to go to sleep at sundown and arise at sunrise. Research is now showing that it is most natural to go to sleep at around 11pm...several hours after sundown, and most people do this. This tendency has nothing to do with artificial light; the cycle is synchronized by the stronger light of the sun. But in most industrial societies most people are required to get up before sunrise! It would be most natural to sleep a bit after sunrise. Curse that Benjamin Franklin!
Jesse is one of the current leaders of the counter revolutionary movement in the U.S., epitomized by racism, sexual procreationism, and the Helms-Burton act.