It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man should not give himself a nickname. Especially if he’s going to call himself “the Man of Steel.” But one idealistic young man [ed: Not Superman. That was someone else] did this. And he was handsome enough to pull it off:

That is Joseph Stalin in 1902, when he was 23 and not only “absurdly bangable” but also “going to kill as many as 60 million people over the next fifty years”. This photo has been a bit of a meme for a few years and When I first became aware of it, I was living with one of the most stylish men I’ve ever met, who looked EXACTLY like this photo. And he hasn’t killed yet.

But look into some more of history’s greatest monsters and a worrying pattern emerges. A significant amount of them were totally gorgeous.

Colonel Gaddaffi

Look at that chiselled face. That smile, those eyes. He started out as handsomely iconic as Che Guevara, before aging terribly, wearing clothes covered in maps of Libya, and ruling as a tyrant for five decades. Fans of brutality will be familiar with the video of him being violently assassinated. Some powerful emotions at play, all round.

Nicolae Ceaușescu

If you’re going to base your authoritarian regime on a cult of personality, you’re going to need a great face to put on the flags, stamps and tattooed across the inside of people’s eyelids. Ceaucescu had the beautiful soft face and gentle features of a New Romantic pop sensation, and a ruthless mind which saw him supress any opposition and export the majority of Romania’s agricultural produce and medicine while his people starved.

Richard Nixon

Looking handsome, tall and athletic, and with THAT curl of hair running down his forehead, Nixon is that asshole jock who occasionally fronts like he has a heart of gold. Former US President and future President of Earth Richard Nixon spied on his rivals in the Democratic Party, enraged Michael Sheen and tested my ability to tell fact from fiction to its very limits. He also never actually made the American football team at his college, due to not being big enough, but he was a substitute who was “noted for his enthusiasm,” in a damning piece of patronisation. Nixon has to remain on the substitute’s bench of evil too, but he does provide me with a nice break from trying to make quips about mass murder on a jaw-droppingly enormous scale.

Henry Lee Lucas

America’s most notorious serial killer (who never done it, he only said he done it because of Police brutality and his compulsion to say he done it) may have been missing an eye, and he may have confessed to killing 350 people, but he started out with James-Dean-esque good looks. His count of murders may have been falsely swelled by the fact that he falsely confessed to any killing the Police asked him about – including several which they completely made up to see if he was just confessing to everything put in front of him – but the swelling in our loins is real.

Reinhard Heydrich

When Adolf Hilter calls you “the man with the iron heart” you know you’re too evil for words. The man who looks like little more than a boy in his sailor suit went on to create the plans for the systematic killing of all Jewish people in Nazi-occupied territories. The soft features and butter-wouldn’t-melt smile suggest an innocence which Heydrich quite emphatically failed to live up to. The fact that he died a long, painful death following injuries sustained in an assassination attempt brings absolutely no comfort – two villages in which the assassins were wrongly believed to be hiding were destroyed, and almost every single one of their 1,300 inhabitants were killed in a revenge attack at Hitler’s personal request. And it’s really, really hard to be irreverant about all of that.

Henry VIII

To execute one wife may be regarded as misfortune, to execute two looks like being the worst kind of cunt. I know we’ve all become a bit inured to Henry’s antics, but have you ever actually thought about JUST how bad it is to have your wife executed?

But in his youth, Henry was the most eligible bachelor in Europe. A highly skilled swordsman, talented musician (he composed “Greensleeves.” Yes, that “Greensleeves”) and a master of several languages, he was essentially the James Franco of his day. He had four sons called Henry (three of whom did not survive infancy, one of which was illegitimate), making him also very much the George Foreman of his day. Bizarrely, the vast majority of his wives came long after he’d lost these looks, and four came after he’d had Anne Boleyn killed.

But still, look at the gorgeous bastard.

(Artist’s Impression)

Osama Bin Laden

One of the most recognisable men of our times, and almost certainly the most notorious, young Osama Bin Laden is a very different looking man to the grey-bearded poster-child for hate that we all remember. There’s an air of physical-embodiment-of-sex Bruce Springsteen about him, if instead of recording some of the greatest records of all time and dancing with Courtney Cox, The Boss spent his time developing plans to commit atrocities to bring about the complete collapse of Western civilization. Also worthy of note: Bin Laden was an Arsenal fan, and if I ever find any more evil people who share this sick obsession, you can be sure I’ll create a list of them too.

So there you have it, history’s greatest monsters were frequently absurdly handsome when they were young men. I, for one, am not calling for all handsome men to be killed just in case, but can it be long before someone tries to do this? One thing’s for sure; if anyone is going to be evil enough to want to commit genocide against the good looking, it’s going to be someone who spent their 20’s at peak handsome.

Huge thanks to Emma for digging some of these up, and DVB for the inventing the phrase “peak handsome”.

So which of these unspeakable bastards most floats your boat, sex-wise? Or are there more examples of handsome evil that we’ve missed? Let us know in the comments, or over on Twitter.