History often provides warning signs before catastrophic events unfold. Join us as we examine the early incidents and warning signs that preceded some of the most notorious political figures of modern times. From failed coups to inflammatory rhetoric, these red flags went unheeded with devastating consequences.
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00:00In terms of ruthlessness, bloodlust, Stalin remains one of the greatest villains of the 20th century.
00:08Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at early incidents in the reigns of fearsome political figures
00:14that should have set off alarm bells worldwide.
00:17The bloody and cruel regime of Pol Pot is said to be responsible for the death of more than one million people.
00:23Osama bin Laden.
00:25We're going to turn now to an eerie recording, hidden away from more than a decade of former President Bill Clinton
00:30just hours before the 9-11 attacks, telling a group of Australian businessmen why he did not order a strike against Osama bin Laden.
00:36Here it is.
00:38And I'm just saying, you know, if I were Osama bin Laden, he's a very smart guy.
00:41I spent a lot of time thinking about him, and I nearly got it once.
00:44The al-Qaeda leader rose to global infamy as the architect of the September 11th, 2001 terror attacks on New York City.
00:51However, 9-11 wasn't the first time the militant leader was registered as a threat by the global intelligence community.
00:58Bin Laden, who had long harbored a grudge against the United States,
01:01was incensed by President George H.W. Bush's failure to pull American troops from Saudi Arabia as part of Operation Southern Watch.
01:09The U.S. government has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous, and criminal,
01:14through its support of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
01:17And we believe the U.S. is directly responsible for those killed in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq.
01:23As such, bin Laden issued two fatwas against the U.S. in 1996 and 98,
01:29condemning American support for Israel and its sanctions on Iraq.
01:33In the fatwas, he swore to exact vengeance on the U.S., which he would do just three years later.
01:38And then were you aware of George Tenet's statement in December of 1998 that the United States was at war
01:45with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda?
01:48I don't recall that, but I suppose I was generally aware of that,
01:51that the United States was at war with terrorism around the world.
01:54Benito Mussolini.
01:55We don't ask the justice of the world, but we hope that the world will be informed.
02:07Among the most notorious and reviled figures of the Second World War is Italian dictator Mussolini,
02:13whose longtime title was quite literally the Duke of Fascism.
02:17The prime minister, who held that title for nearly two decades before the start of the war,
02:22was an early adopter of propaganda.
02:24One year later, a new electoral law was forced upon the Italian people
02:27that guaranteed the fascist party an automatic two-thirds majority in parliament from that moment on.
02:32Il Duce had cut off from the people any future hope of democratic government.
02:36Governing under the fascist Spazio Vitale doctrine,
02:40Mussolini turned Italy into an oppressive police state in the mid-1920s,
02:44consolidating immense amounts of executive power and establishing a cult of personality around himself.
02:50Mussolini's tactics of suppressing dissent and turning himself into a godlike figure
02:55would prove disturbingly prescient with regard to the rise of fascist regimes in the 30s.
02:59Is this the impossible for you?
03:01Yes!
03:05What are the three words that form our dogma?
03:09Yes!
03:10Yes!
03:10Yes!
03:11Yes!
03:11Yes!
03:12Yes!
03:12Yes!
03:13Yes!
03:13Saddam Hussein.
03:15He may not have been hiding any weapons of mass destruction,
03:33but the fifth president of Iraq was controversial for a host of other reasons.
03:38The polarizing figure in the Middle East for his resistance to American imperialism
03:42and authoritarian tendencies.
03:44Hussein's later activities were presaged by the July 17th revolution.
03:48When I have read out your name, you shall stand up, recite the party's slogan, and leave the room.
03:55And so he begins reading out names.
03:57One by one, they must rise from their seats, say the slogan, and then they are led out of the room.
04:02They haven't been told where they're going or what's waiting for them on the other side of the door,
04:06but they probably have an idea.
04:08The revolution was a non-violent coup that successfully unseated the sitting administration
04:13and installed a Ba'athist government that would more forcefully address their grievances with Israel.
04:17Hussein played an important, if not central, role in planning the coup,
04:21and became Iraq's next president after taking over from his cousin, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr.
04:27The Iraqis are committed to their rights as much as they are committed to the rights of others.
04:33Without peace, they will be faced with many obstacles that would stop them from fulfilling their human role.
04:48In 1971, the administration of Second Ugandan President Milton Abote was overthrown by Amin, Abote's military commander.
05:14Amin had previously learned that Abote would fire him for embezzlement from the army,
05:20and was empowered by Israeli government forces to take action.
05:23I know him. He has been my friend. He has been giving me dinner, lunch in his house.
05:28If I go to Israel, I used to stay with Dayan. He brings air force band playing for me. We stay together.
05:36But I must make absolutely truth. The reason why I chased them from Uganda was because of the economy.
05:44Installing himself as the third president of Uganda, Amin presided over one of the most
05:48oppressive and despotic regimes in history. Before that, though, Abote charged Amin with
05:53ousting Mutesa II of Uganda, Abote's predecessor. Amin thus led the Battle of Mengo Hill, forcing
06:00Matusa into exile, foreshadowing the brutal violence that would define his leadership style.
06:06I think whatever any international community, especially the Western press, giving bad image
06:13and the picture of Uganda, that is completely nonsense. Uganda is very peaceful and Uganda
06:21does not violate any human rights. Slobodan Milosevic.
06:25To have a continuation of Yugoslavia, to preserve Yugoslavia as a country which existed,
06:32Serbia doesn't have any territorial pretension. Muslims in Yugoslavia are living in Bosnia,
06:38not only in Bosnia, they are living in Serbia, they are living in Montenegro, in Macedonia. And how
06:43that can be in their interest to be splitted in four states. You don't become the first sitting
06:49head of state to be charged with war crimes for nothing. Milosevic, who served as the president of
06:55Serbia from 1991 to 1997, has been described as an opportunist who took advantage of the bloody
07:01Yugoslav wars with the intention of building up the Serbian empire. This, of course, came at the
07:06expense of the previous Yugoslav republics like Slovenia and Croatia. Milosevic, Slobodan Milosevic,
07:12has in a sense brought these crowds into the streets in the hope that they would serve his
07:17purpose of weakening the resolve of other leaderships, other republican leaderships in
07:23Yugoslavia and thereby strengthen his own position in Serbia. Milosevic's fomenting of Serbian nationalism,
07:30while not a formative tenant of his early political career, could be traced back to his
07:34anti-bureaucratic revolution. This constituted a series of 1988 protests that, per the International
07:41Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, led to the ousting of the respective provincial
07:46and republican governments. The new governments were then supportive of, and indebted to,
07:51Slobodan Milosevic.
07:52And whether or not Yugoslavia's growing protest movement will be satisfied with personnel changes
07:58in the communist party, is the main question for those who fear that the country is sliding
08:03into disintegration. Kim Il-sung.
08:06What is necessary is to ensure the total loyalty of the people. And anyone connected with dissidents,
08:17opposition, rebellion, must be killed to ensure the purity of the people.
08:26Before Kim Jong-un, before Kim Jong-il, there was Kim Il-sung. While his respective grandson and son
08:33played integral roles in building up the North Korea we know and fear today, there would have been no
08:38modern-day North Korea without its first supreme leader.
08:41While we may know the country was devastated and is economically a basket case at this point,
08:49the people of North Korea don't know because of this bureau of propaganda and agitation which
08:57shapes the nation's consciousness.
08:59Although he was unsuccessful in his goal of unifying the North and South following the Korean War,
09:05Kim collectivized all of the nation's industry and built up an ironclad cult of personality around
09:10himself. According to defected North Korean leader Hwang Jung-yap, one of Kim's earliest acts as
09:16dictator was dispensing with students who had gone abroad to the Soviet Union and had become critical
09:22of his rule.
09:23Kim Il-sung told officials of state and economic establishments,
09:28Comrade Kim Jong-il does everything to solve any problem I'm concerned with to please me.
09:36No one can equal him in solving the problems I'm concerned with for the good of the people.
09:41Mao Zedong
09:42The Red Leader's blueprint for conquest, protracted guerrilla war, united front,
09:47elimination of all opposition has accomplished its end.
09:51Widely considered the father of modern-day People's Republic of China, Mao's legacy is
09:55intensely complex. On one hand, his Great Leap Forward initiative was a failure,
10:00and quickly morphed into the Great Chinese Famine, resulting in countless deaths.
10:05Hong Kong, Britain's island colony, clinging to the flank of Red China.
10:08Here, the flow of refugees from the mainland is an indicator of the Chinese people's mood.
10:13The influx of nearly a million in ten years, at an undiminished rate,
10:17points to continuing discontent on the mainland.
10:19On the other hand, he improved China's standing on the world stage,
10:23and is credited with bringing the country into the 20th century.
10:26That said, it should have been clear that Mao's ruthless ambition had the potential for
10:30disastrous ruin from the time of the siege of Changchun, in which the Mao-led People's
10:35Liberation Army forcefully captured the city by starving it, leading to the deaths of 160,000 civilians.
10:42The blockade has produced remarkable results and has caused great famine.
10:48The civilians are living on leaves and grass.
10:50Pol Pot
10:51The head of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia's communist movement, the dictator born Salath Saar, is
11:10responsible for some of history's most disturbing war crimes and human atrocities.
11:14From 1975 to 79, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge carried out the Cambodian genocide, which saw the
11:21systematic killings of as many as 3 million people in a rapid-fire attempt to imitate the Chinese
11:27cultural revolution.
11:28In this Khmer Rouge prison, in the capital, Phnom Penh, some 200,000 people were systematically tortured
11:34to death. The terror has been filed with an almost religious fervor. Each and every prisoner was
11:40photographed. Khan Kel's parents weren't among them. Nevertheless, he never saw them back.
11:46They probably died like so many others, anonymously, somewhere in the countryside.
11:51Shortly before establishing himself as the leader of Cambodia, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge achieved a
11:56major goal by conquering and evacuating Phnom Penh, where nearly 3 million people were evacuated and
12:03forced to relocate. Along the way, some 20,000 people died. A tragic sign of what was to come.
12:09Cambodians who survived will never forgive or forget the genocide planned and committed by Pol Pot.
12:15It's likely that an independent tribunal will try him for the murderous regime he controlled between 1975
12:22and 79. Joseph Stalin. Under Stalin, Russia became the second largest industrial economy in the world.
12:29It was all planned economies, five-year plans, and if you didn't play by his rules, you went off to a
12:34labor camp or you were summarily executed in some fashion.
12:38Here's a name that'll send chills down your spine. The general secretary of the Soviet Union's
12:44Communist Party initially collaborated with Adolf Hitler to allow Germany to invade Poland,
12:50before Hitler betrayed him and Stalin turned to the Allies. However, maybe it shouldn't have been
12:55shocking to the world community that Stalin would work with Hitler.
12:58Just before World War II, Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact.
13:03That fell apart in June of 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
13:09When the Germans turned and began to invade Russia, they underestimated Joe Stalin.
13:17Stalin's attempts to rapidly impose what he called,
13:19Socialism in One Country, engineered the necessary conditions for a devastating famine from 1932 to 1933.
13:28Estimates suggest that as many as 9 million people died as the result of
13:31his actions and policies. This is without even mentioning Stalin's Great Purge of 1936-38,
13:38in which his regime executed up to a million people, who Stalin deemed as subversives.
13:433 million kulaks died as a result of Stalin's policies in the early 1930s. Now, he did increase the
13:52amount of food that was being produced, but at what cost?
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14:12Adolf Hitler
14:12While it's unlikely that we need to bring you up to speed on World War II, the deadliest conflict in
14:26history, it's important to remember one thing about the Führer's totalitarian regime. Hitler didn't
14:32forcibly conquer Germany, he was elected, that is, after a failed coup d'etat of the Weimar Republic in 1923.
14:40He did this by seizing on low German morale in the aftermath of the Great Depression,
14:45specifically attempting to appeal to those affected most by it.
14:48According to the Nazis, the German was a special creature who remained forever German,
14:53to the sixth and seventh generation, and must take his orders from Berlin.
14:58Taking advantage of public fears of the spread of communism, Hitler promised a return to German
15:03greatness and a thriving economy. While the rest is, quite literally, history,
15:08Hitler's fearsome rise to power stands as a stark reminder of how demagoguery is born.
15:14She'll disband all political parties. An emergency law passed the next day after the Reichstag fire
15:20gave him the legal power to do so. Which historical moment in our video shocked you the most?
15:25Be sure to let us know in the comments below!