However, to be fair, this panel is from a What If? story that ends with Ben Grimm now a legitimate menace as a rampaging maniac with the equivalent strength of the Hulk.
"Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win."
— General Thomas S. Power, Commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Command (1957-1964)
A hard, grizzled military man, promoted to the highest echelons of power because of his exemplary record. At some point, however, something changed.
Maybe the war he'd been fighting for his whole life ended abruptly. Maybe he's haunted by his past in the field, or by real ghosts. Maybe he's just flipped under the strain of command. At any rate, he's obsessed with a specific enemy, and will take any means to rally the troops to battle against this foe, "Enemy X".
Monster attack? It was Enemy X. Terrorist attack? Gotta be Enemy X. Local superhero? Obvious spy for Enemy X. Everything quiet on the front? Enemy X is just lulling us into complacency so he can strike when our guard is down. Does it look like Enemy X is trying to surrender? It's a trick! Shoot em' while they're distracted! Wait, you say Enemy X was defeated last year? Sure, that's just what they want you to think!
If they even bother trying to explain their attack objectively, they will likely characterize the enemy as an inherently evil and eternal foe, and follow it up with Do Unto Others Before They Do Unto Us. After the fact, you'll be lucky if you get any more than a smug I Did What I Had to Do.
Enemy X comes in a host of forms. Nazis, Commies (once common but now dead)*
Marines which, it should be noted, have absolutely no chance of contributing anything to the battle except their own casualty numbers due to the ridiculous power levels involved. We're talking Mooks in a battle that involves pretty much every single one of the highest power level characters we've ever met or heard of... in a ShōnenManga.
And when someone tries to call him out on this fact? Yep, that person needs to die, too. This is the guy that defines his enemies as "evil". Not "evil" as in "bad people", but "evil" as in the concept itself. He's downright insane.
In Brotherhood and the manga, we have Lt. General Raven, who tries to lure in Major General Olivier Armstrong (a heroic example of one of these) into joining the Government Conspiracy. He's killed for his efforts, as Olivier had already learned about the conspiracy from the Elric brothers and has decided she's not really intersted in sacrificing her men's lives just so that she can achieve immortality.
Lt. General Regius of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, who sees Hayate as one of the criminals they should be persecuting due to her connection to the incident in the second season. Considering his not so clean connections with Jail Scaglietti which led to the death of his friend, Zest, it may be his way of projecting his guilt.
Colonel Hopkins from Sora No Woto. He's obsessed with defeating Roma, Helvetia's neighbour country, to the point of using biological warfare and trying purposely to ruin peace talks. He also believes war advances civilization.
Patrick Zala, Chairman of the ZAFT Supreme Council in Gundam SEED. He's out to wipe out all of the Naturals due to personal hatred and paranoia. This culminates in him using a Wave Motion Gun to try and kill every Natural on Earth, after attempting to have his own son, Athrun, executed for failing to comply with his crazed orders.
It should also be noted that he has his old friend Siegel Clyne gunned down because Siegel was a moderate and therefore opposed a war of annihilation. He then goes to great lengths to silence the entire moderate faction. During the final battle, he is perfectly willing to destroy his own forces with GENESIS, while trying to end all life on Earth.
On the Earth Forces' side, we have Captain William Sutherland, who despite what sounds like a relatively low-ranking title, is a member of the General Staff, and thus in a position to influence the outcome of the war. He's also the closest thing that Muruta Azrael has to a Dragon, and is more than willing to consent to the very worst of the latter's plans, using the Cyclops system on his own men and ordering the launching of nuclear weapons at ZAFT in a bid to exterminate all of the Coordinators. He doesn't get as much screentime as Patrick (due to being overshadowed by Azrael) but is every bit as mad.
Comic Books
In Marvel Comics, and various Incredible Hulk adaptions, General "Thunderbolt" Ross (the picture provider) is obsessed with stopping the Hulk at any cost, often interfering with Bruce Banner's attempts to cure himself in the process. Which one he actually hates can get blurry — he once tried to shoot a de-Hulked Bruce Banner on the day Bruce married his daughter. He's even willing to Hulkify himself (and his daughter, in addition to brainwashing her) if it means stopping the Hulk (he became the Red one).
The Red Hulk has his own General Ripper nemesis in General Fortean, Ross's former apprentice, who blames him for Ross's death. Of course, Red Hulk is Ross.
This seems to be how the Knights of the Old Republic prequel comics is going to explain the Face Heel Turn of Admiral Saul Karath, one of the major antagonists of the first video game of the franchise. He's certainly been increasingly obsessed by Zayne, the comics' protagonist, thinking him a spy and blaming him for much of the collapse of the Republic.
Superman tends to come across one or two occasionally, who see him as an alien threat, but it got worse with hundreds of Kryptonians alive and powered. One of the main ones was none other than General Sam Lane, Superman's father-in-law!
What's even more unusual is that Lane, who had been thought dead since Our Worlds At War, had apparently been planning this since he escaped death. Project 7734, Lane's anti-Superman organization, is the culmination of such anti-Kryptonian hate, Lex Luthor himself is only a minor "flunky".
insane. If you were to watch a dubbed version in a language you didn't understand, you could easily be excused for thinking he's the one rational person in the film. Turgidson (also mentioned above), on the other hand, is clearly channeling his inner three-year-old and having a great time playing soldiers (watch him explaining how the bomber could avoid radar if you doubt this).
Note he wiped the city out by letting the Alien Ghosts inside a bit in a bid to scare his superiors into thinking the orbital bombardment was necessary. He thought the aliens were just aliens. He didn't know that they were ghosts, or that they would be able to phase through the walls and invade the city with such ease.
On the other hand, his attempts to fight back prove entirely useless.
Captain Skroeder in Short Circuit, whose pursuit of wayward military robot prototype Number 5 encompassed defying the orders of the CO of the company he was head of security for and setting up one of the robot's designers as bait for an ambush when said designer was having a meeting with the robot's female companion (a meeting that could've easily landed the robot in their hands had he not interfered), mostly due to his high level of technophobia (though, given that the robot's primary laser weapon was armed and combat-ready when it went AWOL, even the movie's crew admitted he was technically in the right for dogging it as he did, despite his questionable methods).
Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, a highly decorated officer (one scene has Captain Willard going over his dossier and marveling at Kurtz's accomplishments) who one day just snapped and went native, becoming as much a cult leader as a soldier, taking his orders from only the jungle as Willard says.
The (unnamed) General in Z is a somewhat restrained version of this. He can almost seem normal — and then he throws in a bizarre metaphor about sun spots into a speech that's already slightly off-kilter, or goes into an antisemitic tirade. Of course, it's his tendency towards dramatic pronouncements that gives him away in the end.
General Midwinter (Ed Begley Sr.) in Ken Russell's Billion Dollar Brain is a textbook example.
An argument could be named for General Leland Zevo in Toys, who converted his dead brother's toy factory into a preschool-ish weapons facility.
In the first movie by Brazilian comedy group Casseta & Planeta, General Manso (an ironic name, it means "calm"), an enemy of the leftists with phrases such as: "Surrender with your hands up and suicide! Not necessarily In That Order!". A stark contrast with General Mirandinha, who entered the army for calmer things such as the Independence Day parades.
Stryker: I was pilotin' Black Ops missions in the jungles of North Vietnam while you were suckin' on your mama's tit at Woodstock, Kelly. Don't lecture me about war. This already is a war.
In the Wolverine prequel, he is a Major, with anti-Mutant sentiment still in formation.
General Chang from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. He even joins a conspiracy to sabotage the peace treaty between the Klingon Empire and the Federation. Chang is that afraid of a peaceful future that has no place for someone like him.
Literature
Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness,, although not a general, is an agent for an ivory trader, turns himself into a demigod amongst the natives and is unable to pull himself away from the jungle where he can carry on hunting his worshippers, was the direct inspiration of all the other Kurtz's in this list (and was himself based on real life man 'Klein'), making this trope Older Than Radio.
The alternate history novel Resurrection Day takes place in a United States where the Cuban Missile Crisis turned into World War III. The US is a military dictatorship ruled by General Ramsey "Rammer" Curtis, obviously based on Curtis LeMay. At one point, Curtis even jokes about himself being 'the mad general'. Although President Kennedy is popularly blamed for starting WWIII, it later turns out that Curtis launched an air raid on Cuba against his orders, triggering the war. The book centers around efforts by an American reporter, British Intelligence, and the military government to find a cache of documents that prove this.
General Stanis Metzov in The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold. None too stable to start with, and with dark secrets in his past, he becomes fixated on a certain Ensign Miles Vorkosigan after Miles repeatedly crosses him... pretty much by accident.
Be fair now, someone who leads a mutiny that costs an officer his career (never mind that Metzov was about to begin a massacre of support staff using green trainees as triggermen) would earn the ire of most. Stanis just went a bit... overboard.
Green trainees that Metzov had no authority to issue orders to at all, mind you. Metzov was only in command of the base facilities, not the personnel cycled through the base for training purposes.
In Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain novel For The Emperor, Amberley Vail includes excerpts from Stententious Logan's Purge the Guilty!: An impartial account of the liberation of Gravalax, and apologizes not for its Stylistic Suck but for the author's single-minded obsession with rogue traders as the source of all evil (even though, from her point of view, it's fortunate, as it means he won't guess at the truth).
Alloran-Semitur-Corass in Animorphs behaves like this in The Andalite Chronicles (he's disgraced because he released the quantum virus onto the Hork-Bajir homeworld, literally breaking nearly all Hork-Bajir into molecules) and he demands that Elfangor slaughter an entire pool of Yeerk prisoners. In a cruel twist of fate, Elfangor's defiance and insistence on not becoming the monster directly leads to Alloran becoming Visser Three, the only Andalite-Controller.
In R.A. Salvatore's Pirate King, Hralien the elf fully believes that Tos'un Armgo, a drow, is lending the orcs some tactics, refusing to believe that they could be intelligent enough to discover new tactics themselves. Of course, he might just be right.
Senator Arnos in the Codex Alera, particularly Captain's Fury, is absolutely convinced that the Canim are primitive savages, the army of former slaves working with them are all traitors who need to die, and the fact that the Legions stationed nearby haven't exterminated them yet (despite being outnumbered something like 10 to 1) just shows a lack of moral fiber. And he treats the whole thing as an excuse to advance his political career. Needless to say, Arnos doesn't really get along well with CaptainTaviRufusScipio.
In the Dale Brown novel Battle Born, General Park will do anything to protect United Korea from Chinese aggression, even Nuke 'Em and having the president killed to get the necessary codes. Fortunately, he is stopped before he can carry out the attacks.
By the Great War, the version of George Armstrong Custer in Harry Turtledove's timeline-191 series had become one of these, with a virulent disgust toward all things Confederate, ordering thousands of troops forward in reckless charges in an effort to allow his cavalry to massacre the foe. His opinion of Canadians was rather lower.
General Patton could also fit the bill in the Settling Accounts series. When the United States started pushing the Confederates back, Patton would order suicidal counter-attacks instead of defending, which meant high casualties and not a very strong defense. This trope shows best when he almost shoots one of his soldiers suffering from shellshock during an attack.
Colonel Kurtz from Stephen King's Dreamcatcher also fits here. Even when the landed aliens show no sign of hostility, he insists in killing every single one of them, as he thinks it's just a trick. He's right.
Think, Romulans, of our colony worlds. Think of the honest, hardworking, loyal men and women who ask nothing but to serve the Empire. Now picture foreigners imperiling those Romulan men, women, yes, Romulan children. And such invaders do threaten, brutish creatures who know nothing of honour, nothing of glory: Klingons! Klingons who know nothing but blood lust! You ask, how can this be? Have we not dealt peacefully with the Klingons, even purchased warships from them? Yes! We made that mistake! We let them sell us faulty ships — but no more! That was all part of their plan to weaken us, then overwhelm us.
Captain Joak Drysso from the X-Wing Series becomes this right at the end of The Bacta War. The Lusankya, his Super Star Destroyer, is badly damaged, is rapidly losing offensive capability, and has run out of fighter cover, a problem compounded by the arrival of a second Star Destroyer captained by Booster with three squadrons of A-wings on board. Wedge asks the guy to surrender. Drysso responds by promoting himself to Admiral, saying that he will never surrender. He responds to the beginning of another plea by screaming "How dare you insult me!" when Wedge calls him "Captain". Eventually he orders the Lusankya to be rammed into Thyferra, though none of the crew follows the order, and almost immediately after giving it, the guy's first mate shoots him.
French Sci Fi novel Malevil briefly mentions this. World War III occurs and nobody is certain why it happened, they lived through it and yet the lack of information and details turns it into the Great Off Screen War. One of the possible, never to be confirmed, theories as to why the world ended was a General Ripper.
In Harry Turtledove's Second World War alternate history, Jake Featherstone is convinced that every problem with the Confederacy is caused by the blacks (he'd use a stronger word). Admittedly, he only attains the rank of Sergeant by the end of the First World War (though he ultimately becomes President of the Confederacy), probably because he's an Expy of Hitler.
Live-Action TV
Admiral Helena Cain, commanding officer of the battlestar Pegasus in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, may be a rare female example — a hotshot young military commander who cracked under pressure after the Cylon attack, leading her to abandon civilians to die after "requisitioning" all their supplies and fuel, use torture, allow her troops to keep their morale up by raping female Cylons, and punish any disobedience with summary execution, all in the name of her suicidal quest to obliterate the Cylon fleet.
Helena Cain is the new series' take on Admiral Cain (played by Lloyd Bridges) from the original Battlestar Galactica. The original Admiral Cain was apparently based in turn on George S. Patton. Ron Moore notes this in the Razor DVD commentary.
Arguably Sisko becomes a full blown General Ripper in "In the Pale Moonlight" when he authorizes the creation of a fake Dominion plot to attack Romulus in order to get the Romulans to come into the war and then covers up the murder of the Romulan Senator who discovers the hoax and threatens to expose it. To quote: "So: I lied... I cheated... I bribed men to cover the crimes of other men. I am an accessory to murder. But the most damning thing of all: I think I can live with it, and if I had to do it all over again, I would."
There was also Admiral Satie, renowned for her expertise in sniffing out conspiracies, going loco in the Next Generation episode "The Drumhead". Apparently, being famous as a conspiracy-uncoverer makes one pretty paranoid in one's old age...
And Admiral Leyton, who tried to overthrow the Federation government and install a Starfleet-run military regime because he believed it was necessary to combat the Dominion.
And Admiral Pressman, who as a captain violated an interstellar treaty and started developing a Federation cloaking device, and only got more fanatical about Starfleet being "held back" by the treaty with age and promotions...
Lampshaded by Ronald D. Moore after creating Admiral Pressman: "I am proud to say that I've written another insane Admiral. They must put something in the water at Federation Headquarters."
Don't forget Commodore Decker in TOS episode "The Doomsday Machine." To be fair, Decker's goal was actually fine, but his methods were suicidal... literally, as it turned out.
In the TNG episode "The Wounded", the Enterprise is sent to intercept a rogue starship whose captain is about to start a war with Cardassia because he believed the Cardassians was preparing to launch a surprise attack on the Federation. The trope is played with, since while the rogue captain is shown as being a paranoid wreck who never recovered from the murder of his family by the Cardassians, as it turns out, his suspicious were right even though his methods were wrong. Also, unlike most Rippers, he knows when to fold them, at least after a trusted former crewmember confirms that his situation is unwinnable.
General "Bull" Fulbright from Season 4 of The A-Team. If you replace "Enemy X" in the example above with "The A-Team," and you get his general approach to catching the A-Team.
General Slade Wilson on Smallville is firmly convinced all heroes need to be under government control, else they threaten the stability of the government. And if he has to use Cold-Blooded Torture, murder, and corruption by Darkseid to get his way, so be it.
In Doctor Who, the Doctor has become this towards the Daleks after fighting them for centuries, eventually even counting their narrow escape as complete and utter failure and defeat on his part. In fact, his entire race became this to the point where they were preparing to destroy reality to stop the Daleks for good.
It is rather flanderized in fan depictions, though generally because its Played for Laughs. The quotes page for General Failure tells you that such aggressiveness without cause is naturally discouraged - the Imperium has more than enough actual problems requiring billions to be thrown in the meat grinder without creating new ones, thank you very much.
FASA's Star Trek: The Roleplaying Game adventure Decision at Midnight. Captain Vellacora of the U.S.S. Arkadelphia has become obsessed with the Klingons and feels that only he can perceive their threat and save the Federation from Klingon domination.
Paranoia. The Computer is obsessed with traitors (Communists, mutants, secret society members) as enemies of Alpha Complex.
Video Games
Legate Lanius of Caesar's Legion in Fallout: New Vegas. The rank of Legate is equivocal to General, and Lanius literally means butcher... so his translated name is General Butcher. An interesting example, as he was elevated to his rank because of his Blood Knight tendencies, not despite them.
The NCR are not exempt from this. Most notable are Colonel Cassandra Moore, whose answer to the various tribes of Vegas seem to just be to try and wipe them out (especially the Brotherhood of Steel, to the point that she'll be pissed at you for managing to come to a diplomatic solution between the two) and General Oliver, a Glory HoundGeneral Failure whose main strategy is just to bide his time until he can Zerg Rush the Legion.
And of course, there's Lanius' predecessor, Joshua Graham. Even after becoming The Atoner after his failed execution, Graham instead shifted gears from becoming a Complete Monster to a Knight Templar.
In the PC game No One Lives Forever 2, American General Hawkins favors attacking the Russians first using trained sharks with nukes attached to them that would swim up the Volga to Moscow. When he gets to push the red button at the end of the game, he comments with glee, "I wish I had some popcorn!"
The unnamed General in the PC First-Person ShooterVivisector: Beast Within is obsessed with the Biological Mash Ups that are the enemies in the game, first as a source of disposable uber-soldiers, then as a force to control and exterminate after they rebel against his cruel treatment. He goes as far as to nuke the rebelling hybrids' village and allow a train-full of them to be destroyed to keep them in line, and even kills the protagonist's friend to ensure he helps him corral the beasts.
Shades of this with Garrosh Hellscream in World of Warcraft. High Overlord Saurfang, remembering the multiple Kick the Dog acts the demon-controlled Horde committed in the past, is trying to keep Hellscream's bloodlust in check.
While Garithos in Warcraft 3 appears to be one, this is not the case, since it turns out he was mind-controlled by Detheroc all-along.
He was only controlled for the last half of his appearance, but either way he wasn't so much a Ripper as just a straight up racist Jerk Ass that hated everyone who wasn't human.
Jaina's father, Daelin Proudmoore, due to some unfortunate... situation, ends up and dies as this.
And don't forget Varian Wrynn, the "leader" of the Alliance, that hates the Horde so much he would rather let an Eldritch Abomination of Lovecraftian proportion destroy the planet, than help the neutral faction battling it because they also asked the Horde to help too. (Of course, the fact that Garrosh Hellscream had picked a fight with him moments earlier probably didn't help.)
Arthas himself becomes something like this during his campaign against the undead. There's Stratholme to consider. The only reason he doesn't command every last soldier to this undertaking is because Uther is very much opposed to the notion. Medivh points out to him that his course of aggression against the undead only makes life easier for the Scourge. Even Muradin, Arthas' lifelong friend and teacher, calls out the prince's new qualities after he burns his own ships to force his army forwards.
Admiral Greyfield from Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (Dark Conflict). Originally a high-ranking Rubinelle leader, he became obsessed with destroying the Lazurians, believing them to be mostly responsible for the world's current state. Since he feels that the Rubinellians aren't doing enough to wipe out Lazuria, he heads the New Rubinelle Army and decides to finish the job himself... except now he has the old Rubinellians gunning for him as well, after he shoots and kills both Forsythe and Brenner in cold blood.
To be more accurate, he shoots Forsythe after he surrenders and takes on all responsibility for the actions of his soldiers. Then he imprisons the surviving Lazurians, planning to execute them later, but Brenner won't have any of that and helps them escape. Greyfield's response? He nukes Brenner, as well as ALL the New Rubinelle forces that had his position surrounded. General Ripper indeed.
Tasen Elite Krotera from Iji. His response to Iji's plea to get the Tasen to leave Earth is to refuse and then attempt to kill her, even if she hasn't killed a single Tasen up to this. If you're playing on the Pacifist route, this attitude causes him to get killed by one of his own troops. However, he does have a very good reason to refuse Iji: Enemy X is actually here, and the Komato are quite capable of exterminating every last Tasen if they find out where they are. No one ever thought of both species peacefully staying on Earth.
General Randall from Prototype has been fighting the infection for forty years and is willing to burn Manhattan to the ground to win. In the Wildstorm comic, we see that he was "poached" from 'Nam by a General Stilwell, who coldly executes Randall's then-squad.
Your first clue that Modern Warfare 2's General Shepherd is a bit off the hook is when he inserts an undercover man in villain Makarov's organization, allowing him to mow down innocent Russians at an airport in hopes of destroying the organization from within. But he goes from Well-Intentioned Extremist to Magnificent Bastard when you discover that he was behind everything, including framing the US for the airport attack and allowing Russia to invade Washington, DC. After losing 30,000 of his men in Call of Duty 4's nuclear explosion, Shepherd needed an excuse to exercise the might of the US military, and essentially started World War III to do it. Protagonists "Soap" MacTavish and Captain Price take Shepherd down at the end of the game, but by then Shepherd's plot has essentially succeeded, just without him at the helm, while Price and Soap even before his death are international fugitives wanted for "treason, global terror, violent acts against the government."
Doesn't help that Shepherd doesn't seem to have the concept of "danger close" down pat...
Loghain Mac Tir in Dragon Age: Origins is a wonderful example of this trope. Having fought against the Orlesian Empire his entire life and only recently seeing his country freed from them, he is paranoid that they are using the Blight as an excuse to take over again. In fact, thinking the Grey Wardens (the only people who can stop the Blight) are under Orlesian influence, he frames them for the murder of King Cailin, then seizes the reins of power from his daughter (who was married to King Cailin) and refuses to let Orlesian reinforcements inside the nation despite the fact that they are desperately needed.
It is in fact an opening statement you can make in the Landsmeet, reminding everyone that the threat is the Blight, not Orlais. Loghain allowed an accomplice to murder one of his peers (another Teyrn), attempted to poison Arl Eamon to death by means of an apostate mage he spirited out of the Templars' custody, allowed Tevinter slavers to operate in the city and sell the nation's elven citizens into slavery, and plunged the nation into civil war by ham-handedly consolidating power through bullying while the Blight is on their doorstep... All so he can keep the Orlesians from helping with the problem.
The sequel, Dragon Age II, introduces Knight Commander Meredith. Her Enemy X is blood mages.
Admiral Geoffrey Tolwyn from the Wing Commander series became this by the time of the fourth installment of the games. The Kilrathi war was over, peace had been re-established, and Tolwyn was already hard at work committing treason by staging fake terrorist attacks and breeding a new army of unstoppable killers and biological weapons to combat the next big threat. The irony of the next big threat arriving after his death was not lost.
Commander Dominic Lockhart from Crysis 2 is utterly obsessed with destroying the Nanosuit and "Prophet". A brief line of Enemy Chatter early on mentions that he lost a nephew who was prototyping the Nanosuit.
Web Original
Sarge always ties everything back to the Blues. Or at least, he believes the Red/Blue conflict is the most important thing he could possibly deal with.
The SCP Foundation has General Bowe. Not obsessed with a particular enemy, but with the idea of weaponising any SCP he can, even the doves of Peace and the pufferkittens. Even Dr. Bright thinks he's a nut.
John Canmore, aka John Castaway, in the last season of Gargoyles. After he accidentally shoots his brother while trying to kill Goliath, he starts "What have I..." only to correct himself with "What have they done?!" From then on, he fits this trope well.
Castaway is a callback to Demona's Start of Darkness. A scheme to drive humans away from her clan ends up in said clan getting massacred, prompting the same "What have they done?!" correction and leading to a hatred of humanity.
A hatred which led to the scarring of a certain man's face and the birth of The Hunter, whose traditions and descendants lead us right back to...guess who. It's a vicious cycle.
Demona's Ripper tendencies go all the way back to when she helped some Vikings sack Castle Wyvern (her clan's home) and was then surprised when they betrayed her by killing the gargoyles along with the humans. Canmore's "What have I... What have they done?" was even an Ironic Echo to Demona's own reaction to the Wyvern massacre.
Pretty much every American military officer in Justice League Unlimited is either one of these or "Just Following Orders" in order to destroy the menace that is also their only hope against a universe full of baddies.
To be fair, they have a lot to fear. After all, the League has a Binary Fusion Generator positioned overhead and nobody seemed to know about it. Given the trouble they had the last time a superhero went rogue (in Superman:TAS), I'd say their fears are justified. Even Batman and Green Arrow agree. "Look, I'm the only guy here without powers, and you guys scare me."
Although, it's subverted in the very first story arc. Nuclear disarmament has been completed to the horror of one general who argues that they are essential for defense, obviously seeming to fit this trope. However, it turns out that the Senator responsible actually manipulated the world into it as without nukes, the normal defense forces were completely helpless against the alien invasion. Because he was secretly an alien. And stuff. But in any case, the general favoring nukes was right. The world just got lucky.
General Hardcastle from Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League. His feelings about the Man of Steel slowly grew from mild xenophobia (can't trust'im, he's not from Earth) to becoming a key player in a governmental conspiracy against him and pretty much all the other JL members. By Justice League, he still harbors immense distrust of all Kryptonians, even threatening Supergirl with a kryptonite-loaded gun, explaining that "YOUR kind can be, fickle...".
General Eiling, from Justice League, is worth noting for how he turned himself into a variant of the Shaggy Man (a creature that is almost completely invicible & monstrous) in order to protect America from the League and metahumans in general... and ends up only fighting members of the League without metahuman powers (though the heroes in question have some cool gear). He who fights monsters... Eiling started out simply mistrusting the League, but eventually went to conspiracy-joining levels just like Hardcastle.
It's worth noting that Eiling is voiced by (and physically resembles) J.K. Simmons, who has played another hero-hater: J. Jonah Jameson.
Parodied on South Park in the episode "ManBearPig", wherein Al Gore has dedicated his post-political career to tracking down and destroying the titular ManBearPig, a hybrid monster which he blames for all of his personal and political failures.
Also the "Robot Friend" episode where the government think the Awesom-O disguise Cartman uses to fool Butters is a real robot.
Taken to humorous extremes in a late episode of Megas XLR: the characters encounter a giant robot built by the US military in the '50s, which was built to fight "the enemy". When asked who that was, it found that piece of data missing — therefore, "EVERYTHING is the enemy!"
"I was designed to defend this land, and I will do it by destroying everyone!"
General Rogard in The Iron Giant is an inversion. He acts reasonably and cautiously, leaving the ranting and recklessness to Kent Mansley, a minor government agent. Who still manages to almost get everybody killed. Also, when it seemingly becomes apparent that the Iron Giant was a hoax due to Hogarth warning Dean beforehand about the military's arrival, Rogard makes it quite clear that he did not like how Mansley got them involved for what was apparently nothing, shouting at the top of his lungs to Mansley outside, in his words: "Do you realize how much hardware I've brought down here? YOU JUST BLEW MILLIONS OF UNCLE SAM'S DOLLARS OUT OF YOUR BUTT!" and heavily implies that he's going to fire Mansley for the seeming blunder when they return to Washington DC.
Possibly Admiral Donald Hayes, Lisa Hayes's father, in Robotech (Admiral Takashi Hayase in the original Macross series), and most prominently Supreme Commander Leonard in The Robotech Masters.
General Mandible of Antz who deliberately sends thousands of soldiers loyal to the queen to their deaths in an attack on the termites, so that he can then wipe out the rest of the colony, and start his own colony that consists of nothing but soldiers in it.
The Simpsons episode G.I. (Annoyed Grunt) had a parody of this trope, where the Colonel ended up leading the Army unit to invade Springfield due to Homer Simpson and his (retarded) unit going AWOL, going from trying to get the civilians to capture Homer's Unit (although they didn't capture Homer), and eventually locking up all of those who were either fat, bald, and/or were ever amused by the antics of Homer Simpson. His second in command also tried to convince him to call off the invasion, feeling it's gone far enough, especially seeing how the entire operation cost the military $15 billion just to continue. Eventually, he did end up surrendering due to a hangover. Also, the reason why Homer's unit went AWOL in the first place was due to their being in COMPNOR, which meant they were to be tested with weapons. Unfortunately for Homer and his unit, the Colonel in question seemed to think that they should test them with live weapons rather than simulations.
Subverted in Monsters Versus Aliens with General Warren R. Monger. He comes across as this trope, but proves in the crunch to be reasonable and decent.
Shen from Kung Fu Panda 2, who is an Evil Albino peacock warlord who hates kung fu and wants to destroy it forever using an army of wolves and giant cannons. He almost even wiped out the entire Panda race.
General Steel from Sym-Bionic Titan. Steel's violent obsession to stop any aliens tends to endanger his men and everyone around him. During his mecha's first battle, his fighting style is far more agressive than the Titan's and tends to cause a great deal of damage.
Real Life
General Ripper was modeled on Thomas S. Power, General of the U.S. Strategic Air Command. General Curtis LeMay — himself noted for being a bit crazy, though he was more Noble Demon than this trope — described Tommy Power as a "sadistic fascist" and "not mentally stable". Power's enemies were less complimentary about him. One of Power's more infamous quotes, listed above, demonstrates this trope perfectly.
Cato the Elder, a Roman statesman who ended every speech he made, regardless of topic, with "Carthago delenda est," or "Carthage Must be Destroyed". Carthage being The Enemy at that time, kind of, despite a gap in the Punic Wars.
Hideki Tojo, the Japanese military dictator who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor. A deeply unsympathetic character, he went from being the head of the Secret Police to the unofficial leader of Imperial Japan. He and the other militarists pushed for a war between China and Japan, which they got. The Second Sino-Japanese War, which killed 30 million Chinese people, became a terrible drain on Japan in the end. Since they desperately needed resources, they decided to invade Indochina. And when that wasn't enough, they attacked...America! Yes, he (and many others, to be fair) honestly believed that Japan could take on just about the entire world and win.
Although it is slightly more feasible when considering the Japanese plan were expecting a different reaction from the US in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor. They hoped it would demoralize the US and force them out of the Pacific Theater. Slight miscalculation on their part.
More like the entire leadership of Imperial Japan. Blaming the whole ordeal on Tojo meant that the Emperor could be cleared of all charges, thus diffusing a potentially volatile situation.
George S. Patton is often seen as a Real Life example. There are records that he wanted to re-arm the Germans and send them right back to war with Russia.
This was pretty much what the people behind the failed July 20 Plot wanted. Kill Hitler, imprison a lot of Nazis, dissolve the SS, get peace from the Allies (sans Soviet), move the soldiers from the Western Front to the Eastern Front, and start kicking Soviet arse.
As portrayed in the film Patton, he was strongly in favor of taking all he trained German troops who weren't complicit in the death camps (at a time when popular opinion and the politicians would rather have executed everyone associated with the Nazi Party) and fighting a war against the Soviets then and there, when they were already prepared for it, rather than sitting around and waiting while tensions mounted until an even bloodier and more gruesome war would have to be fought anyway.
Given conditions on the Eastern Front and the Soviet military force, sending anyone to fight against the Red Army would have been an effective death sentence anyway.
Sadly, General Douglas MacArthur's military career and reputation ended with him marked as a General Ripper. During the Korean War, MacArthur successfully routed the North Korean military. Not heeding warnings by China (whose concerns were, at least in part, based on the fact that the man in charge of the army marching towards their border was talking of marching into and liberating China while he was at it), MacArthur continued to pursue the North Koreans up to China's border at the Yalu river. This prompted China to retaliate - a scenario he had previously bragged was impossible - and MacArthur requested to begin bombing Chinese bases, with nuclear weapons as an option. President Truman was forced to fire MacArthur for trying to subvert the chain of command (MacArthur tried to go over Truman's head - to the people), escalating the war further and possibly pulling the Soviet Union into the conflict which of course would have meant World War III.
Sadly, because MacArthur was anything but. His casualties for the entire Pacific Theater were fewer than those posted during the Battle of the Bulge alone, and he was quoted at the end of his life as saying that he was "a one-hundred percent disbeliever in war." Oh, and he warned John F. Kennedy against sending American troops to Vietnam on the grounds that it would be a costly war that the United States could not win.
Not... exactly. MacArthur may have been anti-war in a moralistic sense, but he was also a raving megalomaniac in the true General Ripper tradition. His relatively lower casualties merely reflected that he faced lower resistance (many of the Japanese fortress islands were captured by forces under Admiral Nimitz) instead of tactical or strategic skill.
Of course, he faced lower resistance because he deliberately avoided Japanese fortresses (like Rabaul) and preferred to encircle and neutralize them. It wasn't tactical skill that kept the casualties low, but a LOT of strategy.
One could argue that his successes went to his head for a few years before he came back down to earth.
Mac Arthur is a perfect example of a idiotic General Ripper, he lost the Phillipines due to incompetence and then gave himself a medal of honor when he recaptured it.
General Jacob H. "Monster" Smith, an American leader in the Philippine campaigns who is notable as one of the few prominent Americans to condone genocide. After his push to have every Filipino over the age of ten executed on sight, even his home nation turned against him, branding him with the "Monster" moniker and decommissioning him from the military. In the end, he did the only thing there was left to do: he ran away as fast as he could.
Josef Stalin deliberately sacrificed millions upon millions of Russians for his goals. In the defense of Russia to the capture of Berlin, millions of soldiers died fighting for Stalin's ends. He could have prevented this, if he knew how to lead an army, let alone a country as big as USSR. Stalin sucked hard at the beginning of the war, where many were sacrificed during the Nazi invasion in 1941, but by the end things got better, as he let his generals do their job.
A much-ignored fact is that Stalin was Georgian, not Russian; and a majority of his inner circle, too, were Georgian, Armenian, Jewish, etc. - anything but Russian, really. Oppressed-feeling minority guerrilla fighters and radical political activists (sorta terrorists, too) who suddenly end up in control of their country tend to care about lots of things, from a firm grasp on power to personal vanity projects. See compulsively naming all sorts of shit from tanks to cities after oneself during one's own lifetime for prime examples and note how Stalin's inner circle did the exact same thing, only on a smaller scale (factories, collective farms, smaller cities, etc.). Also note how Stalin systematically inflicted forced relocations, genocide, and other major abuses on any and all ALSO republic nationalities neighboring his own republic, apparently in retribution for perceived historical injury to his own people.
Imagine US politicians all taking their own respective "Kansas doesn't give a shit about Pearl Harbor or the Japanese, we're too far inland to be bothered, and if a bunch of Hawaiians or Californians die, well who cares, it's not like they're from Kansas plus we never liked them anyway!" or "Let's sack (and imprison or execute) all our officers cause the military supported the other candidate in the last elections" approach to WWII and what impact that might have had on the outcome... Well, that's how Russia was managed in 1941.
One now-agreed upon "cause" (besides paranoia) for the Red Army's officer purge was a belated effort to purge the remaining elements sympathetic to German fascism (resulting from years of German-Soviet cooperation, extending back to even before Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany) in the army. In this regard, it was somewhat successful (though not entirely, as the partisan war and "liberation armies" demonstrated). The same war also purged the Red Army of many of its most competent and radical—but almost entirely untested—minds, such as Mikhail Tuchachevsky. Stalin was more successful in the area of industry—his brutal enforcement of industrialization produced, among other things, one of the largest aircraft and vehicle industries in the world, essentially from scratch.
Many of the "officers" purged were in fact Party bureaucrats who held military rank as a formality. Quite a few of the "fighting" officers were imprisoned instead of shot, so they could be (and were) called back during the war with Germany.
One of the reasons for the purge was a brilliantly successful spy operation by the Nazis which convinced Stalin there were plots against him.
Many Soviet generals during WWII were this - Marshal Zhukov ordered retreating troops shot and had shtraf ("punishment") battalions march through minefields.
Field Marshal Ferdinand Schoerner "the Bloody" of the Wehrmacht's Army Group Centre in the final months of WWII. He ordered summary executions of his own men, looted the civillian population of his battle zone and his motto was "Strength through fear." His was the only German Army group still holding out at the end of the war, around Prague. However, at the end of the war, he abandoned his men to Soviet POW camps and flew to Austria, where he was arrested dressed as a Bavarian non-combatant, behaviour he had recently had his own men shot for. Historian Ian Kershaw called him "extraordinarily brutal".
Fear of this trope was the reason the two most successful generals of the Union Army, Grant and Sherman, spent so much of the American Civil War in a secondary theatre with little authority. Lincoln was led to believe that Grant was a reckless drunk and Sherman an unhinged loon because the various political groups had their own generals they were trying to get the post for.
To be fair, Grant was a reckless drunk and Sherman was an unhinged loon. It's just that those were exactly the sort of generals Lincoln needed. More troops were dying of disease in the camps than ever died during the battles, and cautiously fighting the war was proving a huge mistake, especially as the general who was infamous for timidity (George Mc Clellan) now planned a presidential race.
In Grant's defence, he did not drink on duty.
Lincoln, on Grant's alcoholism, once said "If he drinks, find out what brand, and I'll have a barrel of it shipped to every one of my generals."
And also, Grant's alcoholism was grossly exaggerated by his opponents who wanted him out of the army. His drinking started lightly when he was stationed at Cairo, where he basically spent all his time doing nothing because he was never ordered to do anything until a good few months into the war. History simply remembers him as a drunk because his heaviest drinking occurred during his presidency...
The leaders of The Process of National Reorganisation in Argentina, 1976-83, especially Army General Jorge Rafael Videla, and Admiral Emilio E. Massera. Believing that Argentina was being infiltrated by thousands of Dirty Communists, they launched a coup against the government, and massacred 30,000 of their own people in an effort to "purge" Argentine society. The resulting butchery created Sociopathic Soldiers and Shell Shocked Veterans by the truckload, turned "disappeared" into something that happened to you, and left scars on Argentina's national psyche that have yet to fully heal. Many Argentines, twenty-seven years after the junta fell, still view the Armed Forces with fear, loathing, and distrust. Almost as many are still looking for their relatives who were "disappeared".
Francisco Solano López, dictator of Paraguay in the 19th century. Lopez tried to play off Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay off against each other, but ended up at war with all three (viz. the War of the Triple Alliance), and suffered a devastating loss of about half of its territory and as much as 70% of its population.
General Enver Pasha, one of the generals of the Ottoman Empire during World War One, was this. After foolishly leading the Ottoman army to invade Russia in the winter and consequently get pummeled because of his delusions of creating a Pan-Turkish state that stretched into Turkmenistan, he took the opportunity to pin all the blame for the loss on Armenians, thus becoming one of the main orchestrators of the Armenian genocide. While true that small fringe groups of Armenian rebels and spies did exist, there were actually a higher number of Turkish and Kurdish spies, none of whom did more to wreak havoc on the war effort than Enver's own blundering. At that point though, the weakening empire's Christian minorities had been scapegoated since the mid-1800's, when Greece broke away, so it wasn't anything new.
Marshal Sir Arthur "Bomber/Butcher" Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command in WWII. Here are some of his sayings:
Bomber Harris: Personally, I do not regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of a single British grenadier.
Bomber Harris: The Germans entered this war with the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, but nobody was going to bomb them... They sowed the wind, and now they will reap the whirlwind.
In fact, pretty much the whole Bomber Command was this trope - part of the reason the British bombed at night and the Americans during the day was because American bomber doctrine called for precision strikes during daytime on industrial targets, whereas British called for widespread carpet-bombing of civilian structures and causing terror, which was best achieved at night - Bomber Harris outright stated:
Bomber Harris: The aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive...should be unambiguously stated as the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany...the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale and the breakdown of morale at home and on the battle fronts by fears of extended and intesified bombing are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.
When he heard that Joseph Goebbels was calling Allied air attacks "terror attacks", he shrugged his shoulders and said: "The man's at least half right."
Augusto Pinochet, military dictator of Chile during the 1970s and 1980s. As in the example of the Argentine Process, above, Pinochet was a conservative general on a witchhunt for Dirty Commies. Overthrowing the democratically elected left-wing government of Salvador Allende, Pinochet installed himself as leader of the ensuing junta, gradually concentrating more and more power in his own person. He killed at least 3000 people and possibly as many as 10000, and imprisoned thousands more, subjecting them to horrific torture, which included having women raped by dogs and having rats inserted into the victims' anuses. Some of his supporters still argue the coup was necessary, but there is little doubt that he went way overboard when it came to the actual stamping out of the "communist threat."
The military regime that controlled Uruguay between 1973 and 1985 only killed 180 of its own civillians. That's because they believed torture was a better punishment that death and/or imprisonment. Throughout the seventies and eighties, Uruguay's leaders practised a "catch and release" program, wherein suspected "enemies of the state" would be arrested, tortured for days, and let go. If they hadn't learned their lesson, the process would be repeated infinitely.
The military regime that controlled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 killed quite a few civilians, disappeared countless others, and tortured many more. Brazil went so far as to export torture technology to similar regimes.
