• @InverseParallax
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    115 hours ago

    He was a massive idiot, he personally decided agriculture was being eaten by birds, so he demanded every peasant kill a quota of birds.

    They did, and were immediately hit by the largest locust infestation in modern history.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign

    He killed 50 million Chinese purely because he was an epic moron with an incredible ego.

    • @[email protected]
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      113 hours ago

      Realistically I’ll have to look into this before trusting a random comment and I probably wont because it’s half the world away from me and he’s dead anyway.

      I am sure there is some subtly in personal culpability though because between Mao and peasants killing birds was a whole bureaucracy that evidentally thought it was worth doing (and idk how much is slavish obedience/fear).

      Temujin personally killed a lot of people. Like personally ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and his overall campaign was ~10% of human population at the time an estimated 40 million, which seems to be comparable to famine figures even if we personally blame both of them. Dude was a certified maniac and I think that especially given the overall lower population at the time and deliberate murderous intentions stands as histories greatest monster and most murderous person.