The Measure of a Life

Sunday Reflections

I was born in 1965. This fact alone makes me witness to something staggering. I have lived through genocide, gulags, mass famine, propaganda masquerading as freedom and violence dressed in the robes of patriotism. Never as a victim, mind you, and certainly not as hero. I only claim to be someone awake.

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A Flicker in the Frame

In the year 1965 televisions flickered in black and white across most American living rooms, as the Beatles played Shea Stadium just down the road from where I was born. A rocket lifted off toward the moon and somewhere in the background, a man in military fatigues climbed the marble steps of a parliament he had just overthrown. His name was Mobutu Sese Seko, and he would rule the Congo for more than three decades. As a baby I was certainly not in a position to know his name. Yet most of us didn’t or wouldn’t because we were actually just learning how to change the channel.

By the time I was ten, I had lived through the rule of Mao Zedong, the Cuban revolution of Fidel Castro, the final years of Francisco Franco’s Spain, and the iron-fisted isolation of Enver Hoxha in Albania. These were not bedtime stories, but regimes in real-time, quietly accepted, sometimes even praised by nations who knew better. Often the New York Times stepped in to put their two cents, helping the wrong guy as in the case of Castro. The Cold War offered many of these tyrants cover as ideology blurred their crimes. Still, they remained in power.

As I grew, so did the list. Augusto Pinochet was in Chile, and Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia. Hissène Habré was in Chad. The names stretched across continents and languages, yet they spoke the same grammar of fear. Dissent was always a death sentence. Truth was contraband.

Glimpses from a Long Shadow

I imagine a family in rural China, their crops seized in the name of progress. The father looks out at his starving children, told by party officials to sing songs of harvest while their fields turn to dust and they are forced to eat their pets. In this instance, it was no joke, nor a political manipulation. It was really happening. Between 1958 and 1962, under Chairman Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, the government demanded impossible grain quotas, diverted food to cities and as exports to other countries rather than feed his own, then punished those who spoke of hunger. The result was a man-made famine so vast it defies comprehension: An estimated 30 to 45 million people died of starvation, disease or execution. Some families resorted to eating tree bark and clay. Others buried their children before the child had died, unable to bear the wait. The state called it progress, and the survivors called it silence.

Somewhere else, in a prison near Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, a poet was carving verses into a wall he may never leave. His crime was not violence, but language—spoken too freely in the wrong place. Under the rule of Francisco Macías Nguema, who seized power in 1968 and declared himself president for life, words became treason. Schools were shuttered. Books were burned. Entire villages vanished without record. It is estimated that between 20,000 and 80,000 people were executed or disappeared in a country of fewer than half a million. The prisons overflowed with teachers, artists, and civil servants—those who had once imagined a better nation. In silence and darkness, some still wrote.

In Santiago, a student vanishes on the way to class. His name is never spoken again. Under General Augusto Pinochet, who seized power in a military coup in 1973, Chile became a place where daylight could not guarantee safety. Thousands were detained without charge—many taken from university steps, café tables, or family dinners. Stadiums became prisons. Torture centers operated in suburban homes. Officially, more than 3,000 people were killed or disappeared, but the number of those scarred by silence is far greater. Some names are remembered on plaques. Others remain missing, erased by fear and bureaucracy. Still, mothers walk the streets with photographs, refusing to forget.

These are not metaphors nor exaggerations. They are fragments of a global story, one unfolding while most of us were busy building lives, going to school, buying coffee, raising children. The scale of it is almost unbearable.

The Uncounted

We do not like to count the dead because it feels crude and cold, as if numbers could ever stand in for their absence. Yet when we do not count, the silence expands until even memory is erased.

So here are the numbers:

Total despots who ruled during my lifetime (1965–2025): 13

Estimated deaths due to internal repression: 60 million to 100 million

Estimated deaths from foreign wars and external interventions: 1 to 2 million

Mao alone is believed to be responsible for over 40 million deaths through starvation, forced labor and purges. Mengistu’s “Red Terror” claimed hundreds of thousands. Habré’s secret police murdered tens of thousands with American support. Pinochet filled Chilean stadiums not with fans, but with detainees. What happened to them from there? The math is rough, the suffering? Precise.

What We Normalize

Do we believe for one moment this is not still happening today somewhere in the world? If we do, we are purposefully ignorant.

Some of these men died in exile, while some died rich. Some had state funerals and their statues still stand. Their grandchildren still live in their palaces. We, the West, made deals with them, smiled for photographs and made the mistake of calling them “strongmen,” as if tyranny were just another ‘masculine’ trait.

We tell ourselves they were part of a different world. Yet they lived and continue to live in ours! We funded them even though we feared them. Then, we conveniently forget or ignore them. We still conveniently forget them.

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Current Despots & Repressive Regimes

The following regimes maintain systematic repression—not through combat or war casualties, but through ongoing internal control, political imprisonment, forced labor, mass detention and the erasure of entire communities. This is not distant history; it is happening right now.

North Korea – Kim Jong Un

• Presides over a vast network of political prison camps where torture, forced labor, executions, starvation and indoctrination are routine.

• A UN report from June 2025 confirms the regime still commits crimes against humanity, noting enhanced “post‑COVID controls,” tightened internal fencing, and continued renovation of Gulag‑style camps.

China – Xi Jinping

• Enforces the mass internment of over a million Uyghur and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang“re‑education” camps involving forced labor, surveillance, torture, sterilization, and religious suppression.

• UN and U.S. agencies have classified these abuses as crimes against humanity, with credible genocide claims.

Russia – Vladimir Putin

• Under recent laws and wartime decree, dissidents are branded “foreign agents,” “extremists,” or “undesirables.” Thousands (incl. teens) are arrested, lawyers and journalists prosecuted, some face imprisonment in Gulag‑style penal colonies.

• Invasion of Ukraine has intensified internal propaganda and crackdown—even toddlers are indoctrinated via state-run cartoons used during pre-schooling. These children will grow up as wards of their oppressor.

Eritrea – Isaias Afwerki

• Ruled as a one‑man dictatorship since 1993 with no elections, no press, no civil society. Uses indefinite military conscription, arbitrary detention, torture and extrajudicial campaigns—extending into involvement in Tigray with mass violence, rape and forced displacement.

Belarus – Alexander Lukashenko

• Since 2020, Lukashenko has presided over mass political arrests, imprisoning over 1,100 activists and journalists, with ongoing crackdowns despite occasional pardons.

Iran – Supreme Leader regime (Post‑Evin Airstrike Crackdown)

• Following a June 2025 attack on Evin Prison, political prisoners face mass transfers, death sentences, mass arrests, torture and harsher conditions still under the radar today.

Ethnic Cleansing & Forced Displacement

Myanmar – Rohingya (and more)

• Since 2017, the Tatmadaw (Myanmar military) has pursued a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”and genocide against the Rohingya—featuring mass killings (25,000–43,000), widespread rape, village burnings and forced displacement of over 700,000 into Bangladesh—creating the world’s largest refugee camp.

• Violence has recently surged again: Drone strikes, shelling, beheadings and gang rape have returned to Rakhine and border zones .

• In early 2024, the Arakan Army has also attacked Rohingya villages killing approximately 2,500 and forcing some 40,000 to flee.

Ethiopia – Tigrayans (and the Amhara conflict)

• During the 2020–22 war, federal, Eritrean and Amhara forces engaged in ethnic cleansing of Tigrayans: Whole villages destroyed, mass rape, torture, forced expulsions and up to 800,000 deaths from violence and starvation.

• Even after truce, ethnic violence and expulsions continue in Western Tigray, while the broader Amhara conflict sees extrajudicial killings, drone strikes and summary executions. Hundreds of thousands remain displaced.

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The Naming of Evil

This weekend I came across a document unexpectedly, yet timely. It is chilling, almost elegant in its bluntness with a project titled The Hall of Evil 2024, listing the world’s most egregious violators of human dignity. Here there are no euphemisms or excuses, just the stories of six of the most heinous despots of the 20^th century, their names, faces, dates and some accountability for lives destroyed beneath their regimes. The question is now less about how these men were able to rule. It is more about how we continue to forget to remember.

In a world choosing comfort over clarity, this list struck me as an act of moral courage. To name evil is to resist it. To recognize it is to keep it from slipping through the cracks of convenience and amnesia. We truly have lived through an Axis of Evil—It’s not necessarily the one many would have liked us to point our fingers at. From here forward, let us see clearly what we do not want happening, before our own eyes.

This reflection was inspired by the written introductions for The Hall of Evil 2024, a visual archive curated to document and confront abuses of power in the modern era. It is also the source of the Thumbnail image.

If you have found value in this Sunday Reflections consider fueling the next!

Resources—

General Overviews of Despotism & Authoritarianism

Applebaum, Anne. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. New York: Doubleday, 2020. A personal and global account of how democracies slide into autocracy.

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017. A compact and accessible guide to recognizing and resisting authoritarianism.

Rummel, R.J. Death by Government. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994. A statistical analysis of state-sponsored mass killings (democide) in the 20th century.

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Country-Specific Histories of Repression

China

Dikötter, Frank. Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962. New York: Walker & Co., 2010. Groundbreaking research on the deaths caused by Mao’s agricultural policies.

Zenz, Adrian. “Sterilizations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birthrates in Xinjiang.” The Jamestown Foundation, 2020. A key source on the modern-day Uyghur repression in Xinjiang.

North Korea

Kang, Chol-hwan. The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag. New York: Basic Books, 2001. A firsthand memoir of surviving the regime’s notorious labor camps.

United Nations Human Rights Council. Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK, 2014. Landmark investigation documenting crimes against humanity in North Korea.

Russia

Gessen, Masha. The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. New York: Riverhead Books, 2017. A National Book Award winner chronicling the return of repression under Putin.

Ethiopia & Eritrea

Human Rights Watch. “We Will Erase You from This Land”: Crimes Against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing in Ethiopia’s Western Tigray Zone, 2022. Extensive report on forced expulsions, mass killings, and abuses.

The Guardian. “Rusted Screws, Metal Spikes, and Plastic Rubbish: The Horrific Sexual Violence Used Against Tigray’s Women.” The Guardian, June 30, 2025.

Myanmar

United Nations. Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, 2018. Found evidence of genocidal intent in the military’s campaign against the Rohingya.

Ibrahim, Azeem. The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide. London: Hurst & Co., 2016.

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Contemporary Watchdog Reports & Visual Resources

Freedom House. Freedom in the World 2024: The Mounting Costs of Autocracy. Annual global rankings of political rights and civil liberties.

2024 Hall of Evil by Goodby Silverstein & Partners. A provocative illustrated archive of modern despots.

Human Rights Watch. World Report 2025. Detailed country-by-country breakdown of current abuses worldwide.

Amnesty International. Annual Report 2025/26: The State of the World’s Human Rights.

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Contextual Understanding of Genocide & Ethnic Cleansing

Totten, Samuel, and Paul R. Bartrop. The Genocide Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2009. A comprehensive anthology of genocide case studies and theory.

Power, Samantha. "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Pulitzer-winning account of the U.S. government's failure to stop genocides.