I intend to begin a big Survivor this September (I’ll wait for the end of World Leaders Survivor):
“20th Century History Makers Survivor”.
To begin with, it will have 300 leaders in 6 groups, then 120 in 4 groups, then 40 in 2 groups, then 20 for the final list.
Granted, 300 are a lot (this Survivor will take almost 3 months), but I first picked about 240-250 leaders who weren’t debatable from my viewpoint, but the list was too “political”. So, I added leaders, one by one, to reach 270-280, and then decided to have a round count.
Another reason is that English is not my native language (as you may have guessed !
), so it’s difficult for me to contribute to Atlasia beyond voting and discussing (I mean, I can’t write laws, despite the fact I use and apply laws and write judgements all the time in my job). So, what big project is left for us, bad-writing aliens ?
As I haven’t the patience of fantastic mappers of this site (especially the best of them, Hashemite), I just make polls, what ifs and survivors.
During this survivor, there will be some weird rules in almost every 3 rounds: immunity, split votes, double votes, votes to bring back a leader, etc. But not during the final rounds.
In case of a tie, the first criteria will be the total of votes received in previous rounds; if there’s still a tie, I’ll decide alone like the worst of dictators (hem, not exactly, see below).
As for the lists themselves:
1) Preliminary note:
I first wanted that everyone would vote considering one’s influence, good or bad, on history.
But it would have been, of course, impossible to implement, as it’s a subjective concept.
And that may have entailed a high score (or even victory) for Hitler, to take the most obvious example. And how acknowledging easily that Reagan should win over Clinton or Trotski over Reagan ?
So, even though I intend to give this title of “XXth Century History Makers”, everybody will be free to vote as he wants. It’s only when there will be ties that I’ll try to pick the one that had the most influence on XXth century history, whatever his political leaning and even if he’s a dictator.
What I just want to say (and what I will repeat) is that I ask everybody to try to be at least a bit objective, to try to take a historical viewpoint and not to judge through a PRESENT view and only with this RIGHT-LEFT divide.
Gorbachev was a communist and is still a left socialist but everybody can acknowledge he let East European countries go and Soviet Republics also without big bloodbath. Adenauer was a conservative but he rebuilt and smoothered Germany after WW2. Mossadegh was on the left but he acted above all in his country’s interest. De Gaulle was a conservative but he allowed some French not to have only a government which was an awful puppet of Germany.
I hope each of us can acknowledge these facts.
As for me, I tried to control my right-leaning and was not afraid to pick leftists like Sartre (OMG) or Gramsci (and even an anarchist with Nestor Makhno) or guys used by leftists like Tobin, or to pick many leftist African leaders, or to pick Muslim thinkers or leaders (al-Banna, Qutb, Maududi, Tourabi, whereas there is only one pope in my list !).
I hope everyone will try to control his leaning, just to make things be more intesresting and less “simple”.
2) The criteria of “history making” is of course the most important in the list I’ve built. And you can “make history” even when you fail (Chamberlain) or when you do nothing at all except frozing everything (Brezhnev). To do nothing is still doing something in History, is still shaping or making History or letting others make History.
First of all, I obviously and mostly picked political leaders.
“Great” leaders (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, FDR, Churchill, etc), even of middle or small countries (Atatürk, Salazar, Pol Pot, Walesa, etc.),
leaders of “great” countries, even if they weren’t Nr.1 (Béria, Lin Biao, Himmler, etc.),
“great” leaders on the national scene, if not on the global one (Yuan Shikaï, Vargas, Trudeau, Giolitti, etc),
leaders who are “great” because of their influence on the global scene or because they are symbols (Mossadegh, Nkrumah, Peron, Jan Masaryk, Idi Amin Dada, each in one different way, etc).
From this viewpoint, maybe the Third World (and especially African, Arab and Muslim leaders) is a bit over-represented. Of course, the XXth century is the century of WWs, of the Soivet Union, of the United States global power, of the EU, but it’s also the century of Cold War -and Cold War in the Third World (hence Savimbi, Nujoma, etc)- and of rebellions, revolts, guerilla wars and end of colonization (hence symbols as Amilcar Cabral, Lumumba, Abd El-Krim, Modibo Keita, etc).
I’ve included leaders in international organizations, especially within the UN and the EU (“makers” or “fathers”: Spaak, Monnet, Robert Schuman, etc), but also within “ideological” organizations (Zinoviev, e.g.). I especially checked inside the UN, the EU, NATO, IMF, World Bank.
I’ve also included military leaders (with a priority with military leaders with a direct political dimension: Ike, McArthur, Tojo, Zhukov; but also with indirect political dimension through strategic evolutions or symbolism: Tirpitz, Giap, e.g.).
I’ve also included other leaders, provided they have an influence on political history (I picked some among Nobel prizes lists, but also far beyond them, of course):
- leaders of non-political organizations but with political dimension (Samaranch, e.g.),
- economists with influence on public policies (Keynes, Friedman, Tobin, etc),
- businessmen who were symbols of some great trends of capitalism and consuming society (Ford, Rockefeller, Sam Walton, Bill Gates, etc)
- philosophers and writers with direct political influence or even having acted themselves (Gramsci, Arendt, Sartre, Qutb, Orwell, etc),
- scientists and technicians with political influence or who were symbols of political rivalries (Oppenheimer, von Braun, Gagarin, etc),
- religious men with political influence (Dalaï Lama, John Paul II, Hassan al-Banna, Billy Graham, etc),
- humanitarian and social leaders with political or international influence, or who were symbols (MLK, Mother Teresa, Sean McBride, etc),
- wives of political leaders (no Eleanor Rossevelt, but 2 famous Chinese...),
- pure symbols (“Che” Guevara, Stauffenberg, Landsbergis as a symbol of “nationalities” inside the USSR, Gavrilo Princip because WWI shaped the whole XXth century, even Kim Philby as symbol of the Spy War).