The Twentieth Century’s most benign leaders

Most people would agree on the Twentieth Century’s most evil leaders with relative ease. Up there would be Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and Adolf Hitler, all of whom murdered millions. Two were Communists and one was a National Socialist. Pol Pot murdered 1.7-2 million, a quarter of Cambodia’s population, in an attempt to impose a classless Communist society. In the second rank might come Idi Amin, Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein, all of whom were disasters for their countries.

The benign ones are harder to agree upon. Nelson Mandela was certainly on the list, leading his country out from the nightmare of Apartheid. Mahatma Gandhi might well have been there, had his time in office not been so abruptly cut short.

Winston Churchill’s resolve led the world to reject the evils of Nazism, and Konrad Adenauer took Germany from the ruins of WWII into the German economic miracle that rapidly made his country the most prosperous in Europe.

More controversial was Lee Kwan Yu, whose rule in Singapore might be described as a benign autocracy. He turned a tiny country with no resources into one of the world’s most prosperous. Ronald Reagan took a divided and demoralized America beset by stagnation and inflation into one that restored prosperity and the nation’s belief in itself.

Even more controversial would be Deng Xiaoping, the Paramount Leader who introduced capitalism into China. After the appalling horrors of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution had led to millions being killed or starved to death, Deng abolished the collective farms and introduced private ownership, private business and the profit motive. This took hundreds of millions of Chinese from subsistence and starvation into food security and comparative prosperity. Chinese living standards soared as the Chinese economy boomed.

Yet Deng Xiaoping retained the firm grip on political power even while loosening the Chinese economy. He was in power when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place, and did not prevent it. There was still political repression alongside economic freedom.

Also among the benign leaders we would have to include the various East Europeans who took their countries out of Communist tyranny. Figures such as Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, Lech Walesa in Poland, Vytautas Landsbergis in Lithuania and Mart Laar in Estonia all deserve an honoured place in the list.

There do not yet seem to be any benign leaders in the 21st Century, but there is still time…

Madsen Pirie