You don't know any actual history, do you? (Quote edited to the most hilariously faulty statements) Most notably that you think any society in the 20th century was more horrific than any society in the 14th century. Or the 8th. Or pretty much every single one before the 20th. Higher bodycount from higher population amounts to squat.
You realize that the upper end estimates on Mao's body count alone are like 100 million people, right? Stalin's run anywhere from 10 to 20 million. The Khmer Rouge, for their own part, killed more than 2 million people, in a country that only had a population of roughly 6 million, in less than a decade.
All told, between the death tolls, the crimes against humanity, and the economic damage, Red Communism was likely the single most destructive ideology humanity has ever seen.
It all started, because a bunch of starry eyed fools got the idea into their heads that they were capable of fundamentally rewriting human nature and building "utopia," if they were simply willing to make the necessary "sacrifices" involved. That was exactly my point.
Unchecked "progressivism" can actually be quite dangerous in the wrong hands.
Vlad the Impaler or Genghis Khan, some very traditional guys, were far worse than Stalin, Hitler, and Mao combined. Not to mention centuries of Roman brutality. And for any progressive rhetoric those three espoused, their methods were rooted in tradition. Especially Hitler. The whole "Third Reich" thing was specifically to invoke traditions of the past.
To the contrary, Hitler was a radical revolutionary, if anything. What he was attempting to do was basically set himself up as a new "Muhammad" looking to oversee an unprecedented military, cultural, and political conquest akin to that which swept the Arabs into power in the 7th Century.
In that vein, his ideas were really quite radical. He was essentially seeking to "weaponize" an entire nation and ethnic group, by collectively regimenting their lives, spiritual beliefs, ideology, and industry to the direction of a single man's twisted will.
There wasn't a single thing "traditional" about it. The old Prussian aristocracy
hated Hitler, by and large, for that exact reason.
Likewise, Napoleon and Ghengis Khan were quite radical in their own times as well.
Napoleon sought to unite Europe under a single empire, governed by Liberal rule of law, scientific reason, and meritocracy rather than aristocratic privilege or religious fiat. His ideas
terrified the Monarchs of Europe for good reason.
Where Ghengis Khan is concerned, the very notion of uniting the various tribes of the steppes under a single banner, and using them to take, and hold, non-nomadic empires was more than "radical" enough at the time to land him on any list. :lol:
Your mistake here is that you are subconsciously buying into the absurd idea of the "end of history," and defining "progress" as being linear movement only towards forms of human development which you happen to agree with as such. I'm sorry, but that simply doesn't work.
"Progress" takes many forms, many of them moving humanity forward in completely the wrong direction.