A musing on the "guilty"

There was a book written by three journalists in 1940 under the pseudonym "Cato" which accused fifteen prominent men of the appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the failure of British government to rearm in between wars.

The "guilty men" identified as drawing Britain into the Second World War were: Neville Chamberlain, Sir John Simon, Sir Samuel Hoare, Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, Lord Halifax, Sir Kingsley Wood, Ernest Brown, David Margesson, Sir Horace Wilson, Sir Thomas Inskip, Leslie Burgin, James Earl Stanhope, W. S. Morrison, and Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith.

If one were to lay the blame for where the world stands right now who would we decide to blame for the retreat of democracy, increased social & economic inequality, widespread environmental degradation, global pandemics, endless small wars, a rogue banking & finance industry, an untrustworthy fourth estate, world-wide climate change and a plethora of crazy conspiracy theories on any subject imaginable?

There is a cast of thousands to chose from across these categories.

My own list of "guilty" individuals would be much longer than Cato's and from a personal perspective begin but not end with: Queen Elizabeth II, Sir John Kerr, John Malcolm Fraser, John Winston Howard, Richard Milhous Nixon, François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand, William Jefferson 'Bill' Clinton, George Herbert Walker Bush, George Walker Bush, Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, Anthony Charles Lynton 'Tony' Blair, Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Keith Rupert Murdoch, Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer, Johannes Bejlke Petersen, Anthony John 'Tony' Abbott, George Pell, David & Charles Koch, Mark Zuckerberg, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Donald John Trump, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Scott John Morrison, Liberal Party of Australia, U.S. Republican Party and the U.K. Conservative Party.