Who to Invite to a Halloween Dinner Party

Can you imagine the dinner conversation and etiquette if you invited history's five most murderous characters to your Halloween Dinner Party?

Who do you think are history's five most murderous men?

I have compiled a list of five people who would meet all the criteria for a gruesome, blood-curdling, spine-chilling Halloween evening. The combination of eras, costumes, personalities, egos and past horrors would however make for a memorable Halloween.

Attila ruled and acquired the vast Hun Empire, which stretched through Germany, Russia, Poland, the Balkans and much of south-Eastern Europe, from 434 until his death in 453.

The Huns were Eurasian nomads and Attila is described as "short of stature, with a broad chest and a large head; his eyes were small, his beard thin and sprinkled with grey; and he had a flat nose and tanned skin, showing evidence of his origin." (1)

Attila created a formidable army, which struck terror across Europe, plundering and devastating the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, Germany, Austria, Italy and the Balkans. He forced those that he overcame to join his powerful army. His ferocity is unparalleled in the records of barbarian invasions.

He was known throughout Europe as the "scourge of God". (2)

Source (1) - http://www.en.wikipedia.org

Source (2) - http://www.britannica.com

King Henry VIII was King of England from 1509 until his death in 1547.

He was considered to be one of the most charismatic English monarchs, but his desperation for a male heir records him in history as an evil despot.

King Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon was annulled based on their inability to produce a male heir, and so that he could marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn. The annulment was not agreed to by the Pope, which led King Henry to seek parliamentary approval, and ultimately propose parliamentary acts which reduced Papal influence over England, and culminated in the English Protestant Reformation. The requirement to choose allegiance to the Catholic Pope or Church of England King, and subsequent uprisings, led to the execution of many throughout England and Ireland.

Anne Boleyn was executed at the Tower of London on accusations of adultery, incest and high treason, after the marriage failed to produce a male heir. The King's third wife, Jane Seymour, gave birth to Prince Edward VI in 1537, but she died soon afterwards. King Henry remained anxious to secure the Tudor line with male heirs and married Anne of Cleves, but did not consummate the marriage based upon her appearance. This marriage was annulled to allow the marriage of King Henry and Catherine Howard, who was beheaded soon afterwards, following her confessed adultery. King Henry married Catherine Parr in 1543 and remained married to her until his death in 1547.

King Henry's six marriages produced only one male heir - Prince Edward VI, and Henry was buried beside his third wife, Jane Seymour, in recognition of the fruit of their marriage.

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 1941 until his death in 1953.

He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the Russian Revolution in 1917. His power grew following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, and he eventually built the Soviet Union economy into the world's second largest after the Second World War. This rapid growth came at the expense of millions of Russians, who were sent to correctional labour camps in remote areas of the Soviet Union, and hundreds of thousands who were executed as accused enemies of the Soviet and Stalinist regimes.

Historians suggest that up to 20 million Russians died during Stalin's rule from executions, labour camps, deportations, famine and other causes.

Stalin fostered relationships with Mao Zedong in China and Kim Il-sung in North Korea, and both used his governing style as models in their own fledgling communist countries.

Adolf Hitler was Chancellor and dictator of Germany from 1934 to 1945. He was pivotal in the development of Nazism, the start of World War II, and the Holocaust.

Hitler's supremacist policies ruled over the murder of 11 million people, including an estimated six million Jews (which represented two-thirds of the European Jewish population), and in the deaths of between 50 and 70 million people during the Second World War.

People died in concentration and extermination camps, ghettos, and through mass executions. Hitler's policies also resulted in the killings of Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, communists, homosexuals, physically and mentally disabled, Jehovah's Witnesses, Adventists and trade unionists.

Osama Bin Laden was the founder and leader of al-Qaeda, the organisation responsible for the September 11 2001 attacks on the United States, until his death in 2011.

Osama Bin Laden was on the American Federal Bureau of Investigation's lists of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives and Most Wanted Terrorists for his involvement in the 1998 United States embassy bombings and masterminding of the September 11 2001 attacks. A US$25 million bounty was the reward for his capture.

"God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the Towers, but after the situation became unbearable—and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon—I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed—when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the U.S. Sixth Fleet. As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way: to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women." - Osama Bin Laden 2004 (3)

Source (3) - http://www.en.wikipedia.org