Let's put it to the vote!

I saw this call for a debate on a website and it reminded me of the English love of concensus, which inspired a little skit...

In the voice of comedian John Fortune:

"Well of course all three were dreadful. But we still haven't worked out which one was worse, so its important we should have a debate to clear that up. Once we've got that done, we can move on and get on with other stuff. So the best way, I think, to settle this is to have a range of experts stand up and argue whichever position they feel most strongly about. We'll then let the audience decide who's argued their point more convincingly by having a show of hands at the end. Whoever gets the most votes - wins. And then we'll know. 

But it'll be no easy contest. Of course Hitler is the classic one and in many ways you can't get worse than that. But we now know that Stalin killed far more people and was around for a lot longer, so I'd say there'll be alot of people backing him over Hitler for the top spot. But then you'll get those who'll be wanting to put Mao up there because really, he was a very nasty piece of work and the Chinese aren't properly owning up to it. 

In any case it's not really about who's worse than the other, because they were all completely rotten, but it's important not to forget that. Certainly if you were to take all 3 and put them on one side and then take, say, us and put us on the other side, then there'd really be no contest. Of course we're not perfect, nobody ever said that. But it's important to remember that fundamentally, we're pretty fair and decent and alot of people are forgetting that these days. So its good to have these debates because they do remind us that when it comes to feeling good about ourselves we really have no more reliable, more solid and more unshakeable partners than Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Especially Hitler, without whom we would certainly never have Won the War. 

I mean, after both Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein kind of fizzled out, we know that these chaps can really be counted on in our hour of need. Of course there's the fact that they've been dead a while, but that doesn't mean we can't keep them alive for a little longer. Anyway, after that we can find out who was the greatest leader of the 20th century, Churchill or Thatcher, or tackle the thorny issue of who was responsible for the collapse of British naval power after World War 2."