Deadly Dictators

One hundred million people died in twentieth century wars, but during the same period, more than a quarter of a billion people were murdered by their own governments. This human catastrophe is the subject of Deadly Dictators: Masterminds of Twentieth Century Genocides. This thought-provoking chronology explores the lives and crimes of Joseph Stalin, father of the Soviet Gulag; Dominican dictator Raphael Trujillo, who committed serial sexual violation of his nation's women; Adolf Hitler, the Nazi fanatic who unleashed the Holocaust; the Kims of North Korea, who imposed a savage slavery on their people; Mao Zedong, the last emperor of China, who starved tens of millions; the Duvaliers of Haiti, who used Voudou hit squads in their vicious repression; Idi Amin, who launched a tribally-based genocide in Uganda; Pol Pot, the Cambodian ideologue who cultivated the "Killing Fields;" Saddam Hussein, who exterminated Iraqi citizens with nerve agents and Théoneste Bagosora, the architect of the apocalypse in Rwanda that slaughtered 800,000 people in only one hundred days.