YMMV / King Leopold's Soliloquy

• Complete Monster: King Leopold II of Belgium presents himself as a vicious hypocrite and sanctimonious tyrant who subjects the Congo Free State to horrific depravity. Having countless people killed and entire regions depopulated, Leopold demands high taxes and production rates from his supposed subjects, cutting off limbs or even castrating others who cannot meet them. Having people tortured and murdered in huge numbers, Leopold notes one of his mistakes was to have sixty innocents crucified and remarks fewer people would care if he'd had them skinned. Uncaring of anything but lining his pockets, Leopold shows his only sympathy is to himself, indifferent to the half-million corpses he has left in his rush for money.
• Harsher in Hindsight: While one wouldn't have thought the story could possibly get any harsher, at one point Leopold remarks on how his critics are saying that the ten million deaths produced by his Congo rule has no parallels in history: no disaster, manmade or natural, has ever come close to this number of deaths. Since the story was written, this death toll has been exceeded by at least three dictators: Adolf Hitler (at least 17 million), Josef Stalin (10-12 million) and Mao Zedong (40–80 million)^note Albeit in Mao's case many of these were due to famine and underdevelopment caused by his economic incompetence rather than being intentionally killed, although there was a lot of that too.