Brian Taylor Wrote:I just finished reading The Fifth Harmonic. It's a little different from Paul's other books, but I liked it. I stayed up until almost 3 a.m. reading it, in fact. I have to comment on one line in the book that I found rather jarring, though, and which I think will sound very dated in a few years:

"Captain Carcinoma was Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden all rolled into one..."

Say what? Those last two don't even come close to being in the same league as the first two. This is even more jarring considering the monsters whose places they took:

Stalin: 60 million murdered

Mao: 35 or 85 million murdered (depending on whether or not you include those who starved to death from Mao's forced collectivization of agriculture)

Even Hitler comes in a distant third to these two (20 million). Pol Pot is several places further down the list when it comes to absolute numbers killed, but one can easily argue that he ranks up there with Stalin, Mao, and Hitler given that he murdered a third of his country's entire population.

Saddam Hussein is far, far, far down on the list of 20th-century mass murderers. The world is and has been full of tyrants at least as bad for a long time.

As for bin Laden... if you compare him to other NGMs (non-governmental murderers), it's true that he's near or at the top of the list. But he's a dilettante when you compare him to the leaders of just about any sizable government; his organization doesn't have the resources to amass the piles of corpses that the modern state produces so easily and frequently.