This month’s Vanity Fair has a cartoon of a cafeteria line in hell with Osama Bin Laden standing between Mao Ze Dong and Adolf Hitler. On Hitler’s left is Joseph Stalin.

On seeing this picture, my left brain clicked into gear and starting calculating the number of people killed through policies and pogroms of Mao, Hitler and Stalin versus the terrorism of Osama bin Laden.

According to this site on 20^th century genocides, in terms of total number of casualties, Mao is top dog. Silver and bronze medal runners up are Stalin and Hitler. As a percent of total population under each man’s control, I suspect Hitler might pass Stalin. Hitler might even pass Mao, but I don’t have the information to do the math.

Where is Osama bin Laden? Way down at the bottom of the list with only 3,500 casualties directly attributed to his evil deeds. He’s definitely not Dancing with the Genociders. He’s not a Genocide Idol. Maybe he wants to be in hell with Mao, Hitler and Stalin but is really in hell with lesser Men of Evil. bin Laden is just average.

The sun signs of the top genocide dogs are:

Mao                                       Capricorn

Hitler                                     Taurus

Stalin                                     Sagittarius [correction]

Capricorn and Taurus are both earth signs. In a very crude way, earth signs are practical, able to ground ideas in reality. Unfortunately, with Mao & Hitler the ideas were evil ones. I thought Stalin was a Capricorn but it appears he changed his own birthdate to be near Capricorn. He was born in earlier December as a Sagittarius.

Some other current or recently-passed earth sign dictators are:

Pol Pot                                Taurus

Saddam Hussein               Taurus

Hosni Mubarak                 Taurus

Bashar al Assad                 Virgo

Zine El Abidine Ban Ali    Virgo

What’s Osama bin Laden? He’s a Pisces. Pisces is a mutable water sign. It’s said about terrorism that the number of people killed may be few, but the drama of the killings sends fear through many. Terrorism isn’t about the actual number of people killed, but the uniqueness of the killing, the message of the killing.

Bin Laden spread mostly fear, not death, and initiated a negative image of his people to other parts of the world. While bin Laden did plan deadly attacks, his ability to create plans of mass destruction pale in comparison to his cafeteria-line mates in hell. Maybe it’s because Mao, Hitler and Stalin stuck to killing their own people in their own hunting grounds and bin Laden planned his attacks in far-away places.

The moral of the story is that earth signs make things happen. While bin Laden was the mastermind of a few attacks and killings, his image was great in proportion to his actual level of damage. But he did accomplish something Piscean – he convinced people to sacrifice themselves (very, very Piscean) for a cause, kill others for a cause and created anxiety amongst people all over the world.

In summary, bin Laden was able to spread a (negative) feeling throughout the world. bin Laden transformed Piscean spiritual feelings into killing instincts. bin Laden created a cloud of anxiety and sent it into a jet stream to drop toxic rain all over the globe.

The American press purported surprise that bin Laden lived modestly. (If he’d lived like a king, they would have criticized that too). It makes sense –his goal was spiritual, not material. He had only a TV set, a device that transfers images. Neptune, ruler of Pisces, rules film. Film is image. Image is powerful.

Mao and Hitler were earth signs and included material gain in their efforts (food, land, property). Hitler’s devoted killers even took the gold fillings from people’s teeth after killing them. It’s awful to think about.

In terms of actual numbers, bin Laden is a nothing of history. In terms of emotional impact, he may very well have earned his place in hell with the genociders.