Seven Villanous Rulers

Attila the Hun
Attila was widely known as The Scourge of God. He ruled the Hunnic Empire, invading and conquering other empires, territories, and countries during this time. Originally, Attila ruled the empire with his brother Bleda until he murdered him in 445 and became the sole ruler of the Hunnic Empire. After Rome refused to pay him tribute, he began to attack a stretch of land along the Danube. The Balkans and Greece were his next targets, which weighed heavily on the Roman treasury with each victory. Before his invasion of Gaul, the Western Emperor's sister, Honoria, offered herself to Attila. He accepted, and demanded half of the Western Roman Empire as her dowry, which was refused. After conquering Gaul, he returned his army to Italy in an attempt to reclaim Honoria as his bride. While preparing an attack on Constantinople and celebrating his marriage to Ildico, he suffered a severe nosebleed and chocked to death.

Ivan the Terrible
Ivan was born in 1530 and was taught by his boyars how to be the Grand Prince of Moscow, a title he was given after his father's death in 1533. In 1547, he crowned himself the first Czar of Russia. Ivan had a complex personality, he was described as being intelligent and devout, yet was prone to rage and episodic outbreaks of mental illness. He formed the Oprichnina, a section of Northeast Russia that was ruled solely by him and policed by the Oprichniki. He became desperate for his realm to reach the sea and launched Russia into a 24 year Livoniann War against Swedes, Lithuanians, Poles, and Livonian Teutonic Knights. After drought, famine, and an epidemic of the plague that killed between 600-1,000 people daily in Moscow alone, Ivan became mentally unstable. The Oprichniks soon became extremely violent towards the people of Russia. In a fit of rage, he killed his eldest son and heir by striking him in the head with his pointed staff. In 1584, he died playing chess, though a later examination of his remains found evidence of mercury.

Benito Mussolini
Mussolini's political career began in 1900 when he became a member of the Socialist Party. After his service in World War I, he formed the National Fascist Party in 1919, advocating for aggressive nationalism. he was elected to Parliament in 1921 and the following year he sent Fascists to march in Rome, resulting in Mussolini being granted joint leadership with King Victor Emmanuel III. He transformed Italy into a dictatorship, taking total control of all political, social, economic, and cultural life by imposing fear into the citizens by executing his opposition. He aligned himself with Germany during World War II and adopted Anti-Semitic policies in Italy. He was dismissed as King in 1943 and imprisoned until he was rescued by German soldiers. While trying to flee to Switzerland in 1945, he was captured and shot by Italian partisan troops. His body, along with other Fascists, was dumped on the ground of the Piazza Loreto in Milan, where it was shot, kicked, and spit upon before being hung from meat hooks at a gas station and stoned by civilians.

Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong began his career as a soldier during the 1911 Revolution in China. In 1921 he attended the National Congress of the Communist Party of China and was elected as a commissar of the Central Committee in 1923. In 1931 he was elected as chairman of the Soviet Republic of China. In an attempt to revive the Chinese economy, Mao established the Great Leap Forward, a program which favored industry over agriculture. As a result, a famine killed between 20-30 million people in China. The failure of the Great Leap Forward, led Mao to be replaced by Liu Shaongi in 1959, however he still remained chairman of the Communist Party.

Idi Amin
Amin began his career as a private of the British Army in Uganda in 1946, quickly rising through the ranks. The British tried to have Prime Minister Obote to prosecute him for brutality, but were unsuccessful. After Uganda became an independent nation, Amin helped him create army training camps. In 1971, he staged a coup and became President of Uganda. He ordered the execution of 600 troops who were loyal to Obote and purged entire ethnic groups from within his army. He consolidate power by giving his three separate security organizations (the military police, the Public Safety Unit and the State Research Center) the power to arrest and execute citizens and seize properties at will. During his rule, between 100,000 to 500,000 citizens were murdered, with thousands more tortured. He also looted the Uganda treasury. After a war with Tanzania, he was forced into exile in Libya, then Saudi Arabia, where he died of hypertension and kidney failure in 2003.

Joseph Stalin
Stalin joined the Social Democratic Party before pushing out his rivals and former allies to eventually become the dictator of the USSR. In 1928, he began his Five Year Plans, an aggressive industrial and agricultural program which left thousands of peasants dead, as well as getting rid of his political opposition through purge trials and secret executions. The Great Purge was aimed at members of the Communist party, who were accused of sabotage, terrorism, and treachery. He also began to deport ethnic minorities from the USSR. During World War II, he was an ally with Nazi Germany, until Germany invaded Russia. He then became an ally of Britain and the United States. He became paranoid in his later years, which led to the persecution of his closet collaborators. Stalin died in 1953 of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Adolph Hitler
After World War I, Hitler became a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi) and in 1921 he became chairman. In 1933 he was given dictatorial powers of Germany, and began murdering political opposition. He began World War II when invaded Poland. His need for the expansionism of Germany drove him to attack Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Great Britain, Greece, Yugoslavia, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Russia. He stripped Jews of their rights and set up concentration camps, where they were brutally used as slave labor, gassed, or shot. Hitler ordered the execution of six million Jews, millions of Gypsies, communists, political leaders, and homosexuals. Facing defeat, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945.