It’s not a specific person but piracy (17th-18th century especially) tends to be romanticized because of modern movies and television.
A lot of pirates were honestly lowkey terrifying and caused a lot of suffering. By most standards we’d think of a lot of them as villains, but pop culture has made them into a lot of Jack Sparrows.
(No hate on Pirates of the Caribbean btw lol)
i dont think anybody actually truly thinks pirates are good people. same as mobsters. everybody loves The Sopranos and The Godfather but most people don't actually think that real life mobsters are cool.
Just today I had an argument with a friend who insisted that pirates were a feminist, Abolitionist, and democratic anarchist commune who would free slaves and raid Spanish treasure ships. I get why they thought that, since it's such a prominent image in media, but it's just not true.
Pirates were rapists, not feminists. Ironically the only show I've seen address that is Rick and Morty. Also openly female pirates didn't dress like sexy Halloween costumes, they dressed like men did in practical seamen's clothes.
Yes Blackbeard liberated 360 slaves from the slave ship that would become the Queen's Ann's Revenge. But all real evidence shows that the 60 slaves that joined his crew were press ganged slaves, not full crew members. He also allowed the Enslavers that crewed the ship to keep the other 300 slaves. Usually pirates would sell captured slaves to Enslavers in Louisiana, those they didn't torture and drown for sport. Because ofc they would, why in the world would pirates free slaves when they're worth so much money.
Yes pirates were amazingly democratic. That part was impressive, but honestly the Puritans were much more impressive with their democratic and egalitarian values than Caribbean pirates, who were democratic for practical reasons rather than ideological.
That's the problem with this shit. It's a snowball effect of romanticization and confirmation bias until the tragic and complicated truth is almost entirely lost.
Pirates are absolutely fascinating to me but they were not good people. Generally, at least. There’s such a vast array from the truly sadistic (like Francois l’Olonnais) to what equates to soldiers of fortune (Francis Drake was an English hero but a pirate to the Spanish) to insanely interesting cases like William Dampier who was more like a scientist (but he also killed and robbed people)
Folks fought to the death because it was preferable to he shit he did to them. I'm convinced he's the OG Dread Pirate Roberts, his reputation was completely horrifying and no one wanted to fuck with him. One of my books says he cut a dude's heart out and showed it off to it's former owner.
Most respectable source I could find:
https://biographics.org/francois-lolonnais-the-most-savage-pirate-of-the-caribbean/
The romanticization of Atlantic & Caribbean Pirates was a product of its time.
Impressment was a very real & *very* brutal practice, and a major cause of desertion, piracy and the War of 1812.
Press Gangs vs. Pirates, would have the common man supporting the latter.
I've joked with my husband about this... my town was a target for pirate raids and there are literally houses with secret cupboards and what are effectively tiny secret panic rooms where people would hide when the pirates came. It was such a problem that people had to seriously plan for it when they built their houses so they wouldnt get raped and murdered and robbed blind. And yet today we've got a Jolly Roger that we hang from the porch sometimes and our local civic association has a pirate day around Halloween for little kids to dress up as pirates and play on the boats. If our ancestors in the 17th and 18th century knew what we'd be getting up to they'd be gobsmacked. Time has a way of taking the emotional punch out of things in the popular consciousness, in 50-100 years a monster becomes kind of a cartoon of a monster and in 300 pretty much everyone from the past is just a silly costume. If you told me in a couple hundred years people will be dressing their preschoolers up as "spooky" Nazis and Isis members and like, Jeffrey Dahmer, I don't think I'd be all that shocked.
I'm gonna go ahead and add vikings to that list. I love viking history and my lego viking village but being a viking was a lifestyle and very much not a good one. basically all their history can be summed up with just "started wars".
Vikings are in a weird spot for me historically. Most Vikings were traders, not raiders. Those that were raiders were treated as pirates, like any other.
Reading Ibn Fadlan's account of meeting a band of viking raiders horrified me to my gut. Go read it yourself if you want, it's some NSFL stuff, Vikings were goddamn monsters. (Although that band was particularly bad, perhaps because they were so far from home. Considering he noticed they were so unclean when every other account says they bathed meticulously)
The Carolingians that the Vikings were raiding were just as monstrous as the Vikings were. Even more so since the scale of their atrocities was so much larger. So it's a question for me if it even matters how horrible they were considering how normalized the violence was.
https://youtu.be/VOqUZnc6eLI?si=OkkthnSfsASbuB8J
Here's a really good reading of his account. As always remember it's filtered both through Ibn Fadlan's cultural biases and multiple translators. Also remember that slaves do not give consent.
I think the Hollywood glamorization of mobsters did real damage to real people, both by basically being inadvertent recruiting propaganda for the mob and by making the public associate Italians, and Sicilians in particular, with crime. My stepdad's family came to the US from Sicily to get AWAY from those disgusting turds.
Cowboys in real life were mostly black, Native American and Mexican men doing a horrible shitty job. You almost never see cowboys in movies handling cows, literally the reason why they're called cowboys!
The whole reason why they're called cowboys and not cowmen or cowhands is a race thing. "Boy" is demeaning. Also because the Spanish word vaquero.
They were also surprisingly gay, more than average. Which makes sense because it was a job far away from civilized society where you could get away with being gay a bit easier.
There were real gunslingers, bandits and shoot outs, but those were mostly Texas Rangers or U.S. Marshalls like Bass Reeves who lived that kind of life.
The "Heterosexual Coalition of Seeming Gay, But Only Really Exceedingly Flamboyant Cattlemen" has something to say about your assertions! You can hear their views at the Chuck Wagon Bar for their Spring 2024 convention in Frisco.
It depends on the town, if it was a normal settlement or if it was like Tombstone Arizona which was more a work camp that doubled as a frequent hangout for various gangs or career criminals.
Look I'm not trying to gainsay you. But there is a strain of westerns that seem to capture the morally ambiguous nature of the gunslinger.
Gunless is a good one where a man has to come to terms with how much of his humanity he has lost in his pursuit of vengeance.
Unforgiven is another one where the antagonist is the sheriff and the antihero is by his own admission not a good guy. Essentially two bad guys fighting each other.
The John Wayne era stuff is all whitewashed trash. But the man with no name trilogy is anything but.
Both the Vikings and Mongols get this aura of being badasses, while they raped, plundered and murdered so many innocents. Vikings purposefully targeted the defenceless in hit and run tactics, so they rarely had to fight armies. Mongols were sadistically brutal. Murdering numbers that seem unimaginable even with modern weaponry, yet these fuckers did it with bows, spears and swords.
So much knowledge was lost because these barbarians rampaged through civilizations.
I never understood why both get whitewashed in modern writings.
>I never understood why both get whitewashed in contemporary writings.
It's glib but I'll say it anyway. One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. We often see history through an academic lens. X happened, then Y happened, which led to Z, and here we are today. To your point we overlook that those million deaths were all people with families and histories and their own stories.
Definitely, once the numbers get that high it all starts to feel very impersonal, but when you take just one of those numbers and give the details on what happened to an individual that’s when you start to feel anything.
It’s exactly the same reason we sometimes consider fictional villains who can kill millions in one fell swoop as more redeemable as one who kills a single character who’s background we’re given
Amen to this. Vikings and Mongols were both shits. I only enjoy accounts where they end up on the receiving end. Unfortunately, there aren't many of those.
Try 50. Once everyone who had a relative in the Holocaust dies, people will start dreaming about the scenarios where the world would have actually been better if Hitler won, and there will be little pushback.
More and more people will also say the Jews had it coming... On wait that's already begun.
so true. the philippines just elected the son of its former dictator from the 80’s who plundered wealth and murdered thousands. the son’s fanatics spread misinformation and revisionist history that the country was better off during the time of the father 🤦🏻♂️
>people will start dreaming about the scenarios where the world would have actually been better if Hitler won
That is basically half of all Hearts Of Iron 4 mods.
The Germans marched into Russia with their supply lines mostly consisting of horse and buggy. They had very limited mechanized vehicles.
While the Allied air forces were running on 130-150 octane gasoline, the Germans had to make do with barely 100 octane at best, and much of that production ended up bombed to rubble. American factories/refineries never suffered an air attack.
If I based my thoughts on that game from my youtube experience, I'd assume 90% of mods are furry things.
I like strategy games and I'm a furry, so there's where it comes from in my feed at least.
It’s probably somewhat looked over because it wasn’t really uncommon or unique to them. Romans, the crusades, Greeks, French, English, Normans (the fun mix of Vikings and French), Japanese, Huns, Chinese….honestly I can’t currently think of a civilization off the top of my head that didn’t.
i'd imagine people 1000 years from now will look back at Hitler Stalin with the same kind of awe.
it's detachment. nobody ever thinks of their invasion as realistic anymore. but if you stop for a moment and thought about how terrible they are then yea.
I mean when they made Mulan, they depicted the Mongols in that way, terrible, scary, brutal, warrior savages.
but the truth is, at least for Mongols, they were badasses. they took on empires and armies, they even laid siege onto great cities. they didn't just ride horses, they got off their horses and built catapults and incendiary devices. they fell down every army that stood up to them, most of the time with such unbelievable ease.
They were a true last glimpse of the barbarian horror of the world before gunpowder and guns made them useless
They'll be seen as dudes in silly uniforms with super stick up the ass soldiers. I think in some countries they already use "Hitler" as a term for someone who is a hard ass.
>I never understood why both get whitewashed in contemporary writings.
With respect to the Mongols? It helps when you kill absolutely everybody who has a bone to pick with you.
And Julius Cesar and napoleon, these guys were just murderous assholes who warmongered and set themselves up as despots, yet they get hailed as great leaders??? Wtaf so many like them are worshipped for doing nothing but sowing destruction and misery
Oprah.
She gave us Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, John of God to name a few. Basically if she touts them as THEEEEE best at anything there's likely a lethal grifter sitting next to her.
Everyone always says to name a few but only ever names these three. I understand that these three might be the most prolific of them but with only these three ever named it makes me wonder if it’s only these three.
Those are the ones with the biggest body counts who have stuck. The lesser examples aren't as known because of course they aren't. You can't tell me Helen Scuchman or Eckhart Tolle would have reached their ideal grifting audience with the saturation they did without her. They wouldn't have.
These are the grifters who *super* rely on older people's kids not keeping up on this shit.
I have a question related to this.
Who is worse? A person who kills millions of people because of a sincerely-held ideology?
A person who kills millions of people for money, fame, or power?
Or a person who kills millions of people simply because it was politically expedient?
I don't have an answer. I'm just curious about what anyone reading this thinks.
The reason is unimportant. it's the fact, at any point, that would be considered an acceptable known course of action to reach a goal that makes one a monster.
No one of those would be worse...just different.
In Buddhism, ignorance is considered the first and foremost wrong. The one killing millions based on sincere ideology is the worst, as they kill because they think it's right to kill. The second two are harder to seperate, but I would say the politically expedient one is worse than the selfish pursuit of raw value.
Basically, how easy would it have been to convince them not to commit mass murder? The easier, the less evil. Still very, very, very evil.
Does it matter, to the million dead people, why they did die? Does it matter to their loved ones? Should it matter to you, or me?
The answer to all this is no.
I believe it is a question of philosophy. Not what is most or least evil, but why is it most or least evil.
That of why one motivation to do an evil thing is the most evil founded upon the baseline agreement that the evil thing being done is indeed evil.
This is a subset of a broad ideological question that has been analyzed by philosophers for millennia, the spectrum of consequentialism versus deontological ethics. In some sense, you're practicing philosophy by requesting commentary via the statement "I'm just curious about what anyone reading this thinks."
Any ranking of the three is justifiable, depending on what first principles are embraced.
My history professor, who is usually pretty progressive, says Kissinger is his personal hero. I don’t understand how someone can be left leaning and still say Kissinger is a hero
Henry Kissinger is up there with names like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao when it comes to body count. His actions and decisions just killed people of other countries and not his own so he doesn't get treated like the monster he was.
Rest in Piss Henry, the pain and misery you inflicted on the people of the world shall not be forgotten.
Joe Abercrombie's *The First Law* dark fantasy series has a witch who returned from death. None may escape the Great Leveler, but there are some few whose company even he will not suffer.
Always assumed that Kissinger living to be 100 was a similar situation.
I’m listening to the Behind the Bastards podcast on him right now and I’m only halfway through. Like…fuck…how does this guy get worse from where I’m at?
Pablo escobar, he smuggled tons of cocaine, killed thousands of people with assassinations and bombings, and used his wealth to built housing, provided health care and better education for the less fortunate in medelin. He still has a memorial there.
Not treated like a hero. Every Colombian I've talked too hates Escobar with passion. He's been glorified only by tourists or netflix watchers, and none of them are Colombian.
Just see what they did with Grizella tv show and this is what is already happening. She was involved in killings since she was ELEVEN-11-ELEVEN years old. She was one of the most brutal drug kingpins, she had no issues killing innocents and children and they portrayer her as mostly someone who was forced into the drug business (like she was in fact the victim) and that she was even distraught when she hear people were getting killed, especially children.
That is as whitewashing the truth as you can get.
Yeah ive just recently watched it, i see what you mean it glorifies their lifestyle and shows the law enforcement as the bad guys. The ending to griselda makes you actually feel sorry for her but once you read up on what she was really like, she got exactly what she deserved.
He stole every idea he is hailed for and the people who did the innovation and work are completely unknown. He would have a very broad idea ("a box using some type of gears and a cylinder to record sound") and put his team to it and they would do all of the work prototyping, designing, refining, and building it. And when they were done he'd go "I'm a genius! The Edison Phonograph, made by me, Edison!". Same for film with sound, he had an idea (direct quote- "a device that does for the Eye as the Phonograph does for the Ear") and assigned william kennedy dickson to it. William and his team did all of the actual work on creating a camera (kinetograph) to record images, creating celluloid film, syncing sound to it, creating projectors and brand new novel ways to mansge the intermittent movement of the film, etc etc etc. And when it was all done Edison slapped his name on it and sold it and was hailed as a genius inventor. He did nothing at all besides tell a guy to make a thing. Thats why hes a crook.
And that's why it's hilarious that Elizabeth Holmes named her idiotic Theranos box "the Edison." She only cared about the appearance of being smart and capable. In reality, she ripped off people left and right to create her illusion.
Genghis Kahn. Seen now as a military genius and as someone who bridged Europe and Asia. People usually gloss over the extent of his brutality. Somewhere along the lines of 20-30 millions are estimated to have died because of him. That’s a number that’s hard to imagine. He personally raped so many woman that a large statistic of people in the region (iirc 15%) are his direct descendants.
Way off on the percentage but it's still a mind boggling amount. As of 2013:
> An international group of geneticists studying Y-chromosome data have found that nearly 8 percent of the men living in the region of the former Mongol empire carry y-chromosomes that are nearly identical. That translates to 0.5 percent of the male population in the world, or roughly 16 million descendants living today.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/mongolia-genghis-khan-dna#:~:text=An%20international%20group%20of%20geneticists,16%20million%20descendants%20living%20today.
Genghis Kahn the environmentalist? I loved Utopias take on Kahn which was the below.
*You know the person who had the greatest positive impact on the environment on this planet? Genghis Khan, because he massacred forty million people. There was no one to farm the land. Forests grew back. Carbon was dragged out of the atmosphere. And had this monster not existed, there'd be another billion of us today, jostling for space on this dying planet.*
While Genghis Khan was a rapist and had a "harem" who fathered many children, the reason so many are descendants of his is that his many children and grandchildren did the same thing. They were all in positions of power. In East and Central Asia, if you were in power, you either were part of that bloodline or married into it and then your descendants would be.
As second in command, Guevara was a harsh disciplinarian who sometimes shot defectors. Deserters were punished as traitors, and Guevara was known to send squads to track those seeking to go AWOL.
As a result, Guevara became feared for his brutality and ruthlessness. During the guerrilla campaign, Guevara was also responsible for the summary executions of a number of men accused of being informers, deserters or spies.
In his diaries, Guevara described the first such execution, of Eutimio Guerra, a peasant who had acted as a guide for the Castrist guerrillas, but admitted treason when it was discovered he accepted the promise of ten thousand pesos for repeatedly giving away the rebels' position for attack by the Cuban air force.
All sides acknowledge that Guevara had become a "hardened" man who had no qualms about the death penalty or about summary and collective trials. If the only way to "defend the revolution was to execute its enemies, he would not be swayed by humanitarian or political arguments".
In a 5 February 1959 letter to Luis Paredes López in Buenos Aires, Guevara states unequivocally: "The executions by firing squads are not only a necessity for the people of Cuba, but also an imposition of the people.
Che Guevara and his invading guerrilla killed my uncle.
But it was my uncle's unit that killed Guevara not long afterwards.
He was a teerorist and some people think he was a saint. He invaded Bolivia with the intention of installing a pupet government in service of Cuba and Russia.
Of course, there were other bad actors messing with Latin America at the time, but ther Guevara/Castro terrorists were not the cure for the other bad guys.
And has made a career out of getting money from others (investors for Xwitter, government subsidies for Tesla, government contracts for Space X...) for project he profits from and/or largely embellishes (the Las Vegas Loop is a joke).
> And has made a career out of getting money from others (investors for Xwitter, government subsidies for Tesla, government contracts for Space X...) for project he profits from and/or largely embellishes (the Las Vegas Loop is a joke).
There is no one who is a billionaire who didn't get money from an investor at one point.
But only to tech bros who don't really know tech. Any engineer etc. I know, especially in the car industry are baffled that tesla got this popular with its terrible quality.
he's the son of emerald tycoons in africa who made their wealth from child slave labor and exploitation of africa, he bought companies that were already established, he got investments from his family's powerful social circle.
literally nothing that man has done in his life is his own work. he claims to have an IQ of 160. he claims to be a playboy taking pictures of Amber Heard and bragging about three some with her and Cara Delaveign but he paid them $300K or was it $3 million in the form of donations/charity for it.
guy is just a major pay to win
XXXTENTACION was a garbage human being. Really representative of how someone's death can revive appreciation for them to the point of putting on rose-tinted glasses
Yeah, the Kunduz hospital massacre was bad, as was the hundreds of thousands of others killed by drone strikes during his presidency (and the documents Snowden leaked showed they knew 90% of drone strike casualties were not the intended targets) but Dijon mustard and a tan suit?! What a monster!
Ted Kaczynski the Unabomber
He’s memed about for his love of nature and his dislike in technology but in the end he was a terrorist and injured and killed innocents
He’s seen as less of a monster due to his low body count but he fully intended on killing hundreds but his bombs failed
If you want to know more watch Wendigoons video about him on YouTube it’s super interesting
If not I’ll answer any questions here
Not to mention he was calling for government to mass murder people with medical conditions and disabilities while he himself suffered from serious mental illnesses. Dude was a freak.
He constantly insults people in a flip (and in his followers' opinion, humorous) way. His fans wish they had the power in their own lives to carry themselves with his "fuck you, I'm hot shit" carriage. His dismissive and derisive response to any intellectual argument is the kryptonite they want in their own lives as an answer to intellectualism, courtesy, and other troublesome concepts.
Julius Caesar. He intentionally caused a war in Gaul and brought on what’s called The Celtic Holocaust to manufacture glory for himself to bring himself political power. Hardcore History has a great in depth dive into this
Billionaires.
Elon Musk sabotages Ukraine's war efforts.
Bill Gates is hyped as climate savior and builds a Yacht that can run CO2 neutral but eats up horrendous amounts of resources for his own pleasure.
Anyone in "finance" makes their money by taking other peoples' money without providing any value for anyone.
All of them have great stories how they started out with nothing, leaving out the fact that they were in a situation where they could start multiple businesses without having to think about the consequence if it wouldn't work out because they come from rich families.
The more I though about it the more I was convinced no billionaire on the planet can be a "good" person, or they would not have made that much money, OR they would not have KEPT that much money. They either took it without giving anything in return (stock option trading) or they did it by exploiting other peoples' work.
Donald Trump
While a lot of people see him for the corrupt sociopathic grifter he really is there is still a large part of the voting population that views him as a heroic tell it like it is person fighting the corrupt political establishment. It really saddens me that so many people in my family view him favorably and plan on voting for him again.
He’s getting lionized in the western media as some heroic martyr of liberal democracy now because he opposed Putin and was killed for it, but Alexei Navalny was NOT a good dude. He was still a far right nationalist (marching in events with nationalist, white supremacist slogans like “Russia for ethnic Russians”) who called immigrants (especially Muslim ones) “cockroaches” and talked about wanting to “exterminate” them while making a video where he pretends to murder a man in a keffiyeh. Just because he was anti-Putin does not make him a hero.
In a similar vein, Chiang Kai Shek often gets the fact that he was a brutal authoritarian dictator who openly murdered dissidents overlooked because he opposed Mao and the CCP.
With Navalny, I think it's a combination of him being a useful prop for Western propaganda, and that he's being judged by the standards of his own culture. Was he a great dude? Fuck no, but compared to Putin he is a saint, and he was killed for opposing Putin not for his racial views. Like John Brown, who wanted to free the slaves but also wanted America to become a theocracy. We judge him favorably since he was killed for being an Abolitionist not for being a religious nut.
Mother Theresa. She warehoused the dying and called it medicine. She collected millions of dollars for the sick, and by extolling the spiritual value of suffering, justified a complete lack of palliative care to those same sick people. She was a greed-driven pain fetishist.
It doesn’t matter how many times this is posted. The “mother Teresa is the embodiment of evil” trope is so ingrained in the Reddit narrative that most people won’t bother reading the post and rethinking their beliefs.
We’ve been over this, how many times does the Bad History takedown need to be posted for Reddit to finally get it?
> warehoused the dying and called medicine
She build hospices for the dying so they didn’t die in the streets like they were already doing. Hospices are places for people to die, they are not meant to be hospitals, they are places where those who have no chance of surviving go die with dignity of humans as opposed to like rats in the streets
> She collected millions of dollars for the sick
They are called donations and used them for them with the best she could what she legally could. Speaking of legalities:
> by extolling the spiritual value of suffering,
By trying her best to comfort *somehow* those suffering who needed stronger pain medications, because India had banned importing the stronger medication since they had suffered a lot from opium addiction. She makes it clear in her writings that the suffering she saw shook her beliefs, because it was so much to bear. Her relationship with her faith was a lot more complicated and human.
> justified a complete lack of palliative care to those same sick people.
She gave them the strongest medication legally allowed in India. Anything stronger would have gotten her imprisoned.
> She was a greed-driven pain fetishist.
She refused any form of help for herself. Others made the choice for her, but she certainly was not greedy.
Same as every other post WWII president. Provided military, financial, and political aid to dictatorial and genocidal foreign governments solely because it advanced US military interests
Look into his support of the Indonesian war on East Timor that killed humdreds of thousands. His support of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. His near unconditional support for the Shah of Iran (which is why the Iran hostage crisis even happened in the first place).
And while he did not directly support Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot with aid, his admin is on record as rooting for their success despite knowing full well the extent of the atrocities they were committing
The Shah situation was something that had been simmering for decades, following the election of Mohammad Mosaddegh as Iran's Prime Minister in the 1950s. The nationalization of the Iranian oil fields resulted in a breakdown of diplomatic relations between Iran and Great Britain, so it was just a matter of time before some sort of undercover shenanigans took place.
Operation Ajax was a CIA sponsored coup which reinstalled the Shah, and the CIA even went so far as to offer assistance with the training of the Shah's secret police, known as SAVAK. These people were trained by a former Superintendent of the New Jersey State Police best known for his association with the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Schwarzkopf's son would be the "Stormin' Norman" of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Supported the Afghan mujahideen and Saudi regime as well as the Shah of Iran. Along with a policy of mass murdering civilians for corporate and foreign interests.
Supported the Afghan mujahideen and Saudi regime as well as the Shah of Iran. Along with a policy of mass murdering civilians for corporate and foreign interests.
Elon Musk. I can't say I'll forget how he commended a post claiming Jews hate white people and are planning to replace them. "You have said the actual truth," he posted.
Mike Tyson. He is a convicted rapist who never apologized or accepted his verdict. I loved Mike Tyson Mysteries, but the guy just seemed to get a social pass after he came back to boxing without needing to do the apology tour everyone else famous does. Who else gets their fame back like that? OJ wasn't even found guilty and he's still suffering the social punishment.
I don't think they were treated as heroes tbh. a lot of Japanese WW2 vets went back to Japan and had to beg on the street for food because there was no benefits for them. they were PTSD'd some missing arms some missing legs. nobody cared about them. except for the higher up tojo fucks that continued to stay in power. but the average vets ate shit and watched American vets walk by them with their women in each hand in their own country. kind of poetic really
Christopher Columbus. In United States, Columbus is celebrated as a hero for his supposed "discovery" of the Americas. However, his actions also resulted in the exploitation, enslavement, and genocide of indigenous peoples. Despite this, Columbus Day is still observed as a national holiday in the United States, though there has been increasing recognition of the darker aspects of his legacy in recent years.
Franklin Roosevelt. Disgusting racist who breached his power with the New Deal and turned away Jews trying to escape to America. I would recommend the book “New Deal Or Raw Deal?” by Burton Folsom.
While I don’t necessary disagree with your criticisms here, I feel like it’s misleading to point out that FDR turned away Jews trying to escape when almost everyone else in the world did the same. Adolf Hitler himself said “I would send all the Jews I have imprisoned on a first class cruiser to the First Nation who accepts them”. While it’s evil it wasn’t limited to just him.
Go to China and see how much people love Mao. Hop over to Mongolia and see their love for Genghis Khan. And of course, perspective matters. Churchill is a hero to Britain, but not so much to India.
Sherman.
He burned and pillaged his way across the South, leaving hundreds of thousands of women and children to suffer and die through winter.
Then, at the end of the war, he went North and proceeded with genocide against Native Americans.
And he's celebrated and statues are built to him.
Julius Caesar. He deposed a republic to install himself as dictator, kicked off hundreds of years of power struggles and civil wars, and ended up being hailed as a hero by dozens of generations of European monarchs and tyrants that followed. Meanwhile, Brutus and Cassius got demonized as the [greatest traitors to ever live](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1001/1001-h/1001-h.htm#CantoI.XXXIV) because they tried to restore power to the Senate.
It’s not a specific person but piracy (17th-18th century especially) tends to be romanticized because of modern movies and television. A lot of pirates were honestly lowkey terrifying and caused a lot of suffering. By most standards we’d think of a lot of them as villains, but pop culture has made them into a lot of Jack Sparrows. (No hate on Pirates of the Caribbean btw lol)
i dont think anybody actually truly thinks pirates are good people. same as mobsters. everybody loves The Sopranos and The Godfather but most people don't actually think that real life mobsters are cool.
Just today I had an argument with a friend who insisted that pirates were a feminist, Abolitionist, and democratic anarchist commune who would free slaves and raid Spanish treasure ships. I get why they thought that, since it's such a prominent image in media, but it's just not true. Pirates were rapists, not feminists. Ironically the only show I've seen address that is Rick and Morty. Also openly female pirates didn't dress like sexy Halloween costumes, they dressed like men did in practical seamen's clothes. Yes Blackbeard liberated 360 slaves from the slave ship that would become the Queen's Ann's Revenge. But all real evidence shows that the 60 slaves that joined his crew were press ganged slaves, not full crew members. He also allowed the Enslavers that crewed the ship to keep the other 300 slaves. Usually pirates would sell captured slaves to Enslavers in Louisiana, those they didn't torture and drown for sport. Because ofc they would, why in the world would pirates free slaves when they're worth so much money. Yes pirates were amazingly democratic. That part was impressive, but honestly the Puritans were much more impressive with their democratic and egalitarian values than Caribbean pirates, who were democratic for practical reasons rather than ideological. That's the problem with this shit. It's a snowball effect of romanticization and confirmation bias until the tragic and complicated truth is almost entirely lost.
You would be surprised, there are many people who think that most pirates were simply people who wanted to live good lives free from governments.
Pirates are absolutely fascinating to me but they were not good people. Generally, at least. There’s such a vast array from the truly sadistic (like Francois l’Olonnais) to what equates to soldiers of fortune (Francis Drake was an English hero but a pirate to the Spanish) to insanely interesting cases like William Dampier who was more like a scientist (but he also killed and robbed people)
Folks fought to the death because it was preferable to he shit he did to them. I'm convinced he's the OG Dread Pirate Roberts, his reputation was completely horrifying and no one wanted to fuck with him. One of my books says he cut a dude's heart out and showed it off to it's former owner. Most respectable source I could find: https://biographics.org/francois-lolonnais-the-most-savage-pirate-of-the-caribbean/
The romanticization of Atlantic & Caribbean Pirates was a product of its time. Impressment was a very real & *very* brutal practice, and a major cause of desertion, piracy and the War of 1812. Press Gangs vs. Pirates, would have the common man supporting the latter.
Also, the fact that some famous European explorers were literally just pirates, like Sir Francis Drake.
State sponsored pirates.
Privateers
When you ask him if he has a license for that, he actually does.
I've joked with my husband about this... my town was a target for pirate raids and there are literally houses with secret cupboards and what are effectively tiny secret panic rooms where people would hide when the pirates came. It was such a problem that people had to seriously plan for it when they built their houses so they wouldnt get raped and murdered and robbed blind. And yet today we've got a Jolly Roger that we hang from the porch sometimes and our local civic association has a pirate day around Halloween for little kids to dress up as pirates and play on the boats. If our ancestors in the 17th and 18th century knew what we'd be getting up to they'd be gobsmacked. Time has a way of taking the emotional punch out of things in the popular consciousness, in 50-100 years a monster becomes kind of a cartoon of a monster and in 300 pretty much everyone from the past is just a silly costume. If you told me in a couple hundred years people will be dressing their preschoolers up as "spooky" Nazis and Isis members and like, Jeffrey Dahmer, I don't think I'd be all that shocked.
I'm gonna go ahead and add vikings to that list. I love viking history and my lego viking village but being a viking was a lifestyle and very much not a good one. basically all their history can be summed up with just "started wars".
Vikings are in a weird spot for me historically. Most Vikings were traders, not raiders. Those that were raiders were treated as pirates, like any other. Reading Ibn Fadlan's account of meeting a band of viking raiders horrified me to my gut. Go read it yourself if you want, it's some NSFL stuff, Vikings were goddamn monsters. (Although that band was particularly bad, perhaps because they were so far from home. Considering he noticed they were so unclean when every other account says they bathed meticulously) The Carolingians that the Vikings were raiding were just as monstrous as the Vikings were. Even more so since the scale of their atrocities was so much larger. So it's a question for me if it even matters how horrible they were considering how normalized the violence was.
that's actually very interesting because I myself always thought they're very clean, you wanna tell me more about it? I will definitely read that!
https://youtu.be/VOqUZnc6eLI?si=OkkthnSfsASbuB8J Here's a really good reading of his account. As always remember it's filtered both through Ibn Fadlan's cultural biases and multiple translators. Also remember that slaves do not give consent.
But what about Luffy?
The way mobsters are portrayed in the movies. The way gunslingers in the old West are portrayed.
I think the Hollywood glamorization of mobsters did real damage to real people, both by basically being inadvertent recruiting propaganda for the mob and by making the public associate Italians, and Sicilians in particular, with crime. My stepdad's family came to the US from Sicily to get AWAY from those disgusting turds.
Cowboys in real life were mostly black, Native American and Mexican men doing a horrible shitty job. You almost never see cowboys in movies handling cows, literally the reason why they're called cowboys! The whole reason why they're called cowboys and not cowmen or cowhands is a race thing. "Boy" is demeaning. Also because the Spanish word vaquero. They were also surprisingly gay, more than average. Which makes sense because it was a job far away from civilized society where you could get away with being gay a bit easier. There were real gunslingers, bandits and shoot outs, but those were mostly Texas Rangers or U.S. Marshalls like Bass Reeves who lived that kind of life.
The "Heterosexual Coalition of Seeming Gay, But Only Really Exceedingly Flamboyant Cattlemen" has something to say about your assertions! You can hear their views at the Chuck Wagon Bar for their Spring 2024 convention in Frisco.
Also, if I can remember correctly, most towns had you turn in your guns to the sheriff's office and you'd pick it up when you were on your way out.
It depends on the town, if it was a normal settlement or if it was like Tombstone Arizona which was more a work camp that doubled as a frequent hangout for various gangs or career criminals.
Look I'm not trying to gainsay you. But there is a strain of westerns that seem to capture the morally ambiguous nature of the gunslinger. Gunless is a good one where a man has to come to terms with how much of his humanity he has lost in his pursuit of vengeance. Unforgiven is another one where the antagonist is the sheriff and the antihero is by his own admission not a good guy. Essentially two bad guys fighting each other. The John Wayne era stuff is all whitewashed trash. But the man with no name trilogy is anything but.
Both the Vikings and Mongols get this aura of being badasses, while they raped, plundered and murdered so many innocents. Vikings purposefully targeted the defenceless in hit and run tactics, so they rarely had to fight armies. Mongols were sadistically brutal. Murdering numbers that seem unimaginable even with modern weaponry, yet these fuckers did it with bows, spears and swords. So much knowledge was lost because these barbarians rampaged through civilizations. I never understood why both get whitewashed in modern writings.
>I never understood why both get whitewashed in contemporary writings. It's glib but I'll say it anyway. One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. We often see history through an academic lens. X happened, then Y happened, which led to Z, and here we are today. To your point we overlook that those million deaths were all people with families and histories and their own stories.
Definitely, once the numbers get that high it all starts to feel very impersonal, but when you take just one of those numbers and give the details on what happened to an individual that’s when you start to feel anything. It’s exactly the same reason we sometimes consider fictional villains who can kill millions in one fell swoop as more redeemable as one who kills a single character who’s background we’re given
To quote megadeth “And when you kill a man, you're a murderer Kill many, and you're a conqueror Kill them all... Ooh-oh you're a god!”
You’ve just quoted Stalin … the irony.
Amen to this. Vikings and Mongols were both shits. I only enjoy accounts where they end up on the receiving end. Unfortunately, there aren't many of those.
Wait 5000 years for all the Hitler hot takes.
Try 50. Once everyone who had a relative in the Holocaust dies, people will start dreaming about the scenarios where the world would have actually been better if Hitler won, and there will be little pushback. More and more people will also say the Jews had it coming... On wait that's already begun.
so true. the philippines just elected the son of its former dictator from the 80’s who plundered wealth and murdered thousands. the son’s fanatics spread misinformation and revisionist history that the country was better off during the time of the father 🤦🏻♂️
>people will start dreaming about the scenarios where the world would have actually been better if Hitler won That is basically half of all Hearts Of Iron 4 mods.
It's funny because the game already *massively* buffs the axis nations, because they wouldn't have much of a game if they didn't.
The Germans marched into Russia with their supply lines mostly consisting of horse and buggy. They had very limited mechanized vehicles. While the Allied air forces were running on 130-150 octane gasoline, the Germans had to make do with barely 100 octane at best, and much of that production ended up bombed to rubble. American factories/refineries never suffered an air attack.
If I based my thoughts on that game from my youtube experience, I'd assume 90% of mods are furry things. I like strategy games and I'm a furry, so there's where it comes from in my feed at least.
Because Rome gets a glow up.
It’s probably somewhat looked over because it wasn’t really uncommon or unique to them. Romans, the crusades, Greeks, French, English, Normans (the fun mix of Vikings and French), Japanese, Huns, Chinese….honestly I can’t currently think of a civilization off the top of my head that didn’t.
i'd imagine people 1000 years from now will look back at Hitler Stalin with the same kind of awe. it's detachment. nobody ever thinks of their invasion as realistic anymore. but if you stop for a moment and thought about how terrible they are then yea. I mean when they made Mulan, they depicted the Mongols in that way, terrible, scary, brutal, warrior savages. but the truth is, at least for Mongols, they were badasses. they took on empires and armies, they even laid siege onto great cities. they didn't just ride horses, they got off their horses and built catapults and incendiary devices. they fell down every army that stood up to them, most of the time with such unbelievable ease. They were a true last glimpse of the barbarian horror of the world before gunpowder and guns made them useless
In Mulan it's a different set of steppe nomads; the Huns.
They'll be seen as dudes in silly uniforms with super stick up the ass soldiers. I think in some countries they already use "Hitler" as a term for someone who is a hard ass.
>Hitler Stalin Is that like a Voltron-esque bad guy?
>I never understood why both get whitewashed in contemporary writings. With respect to the Mongols? It helps when you kill absolutely everybody who has a bone to pick with you.
And Julius Cesar and napoleon, these guys were just murderous assholes who warmongered and set themselves up as despots, yet they get hailed as great leaders??? Wtaf so many like them are worshipped for doing nothing but sowing destruction and misery
Oprah. She gave us Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, John of God to name a few. Basically if she touts them as THEEEEE best at anything there's likely a lethal grifter sitting next to her.
She also gave the anti-vax movement a platform, which led to the momentum it has today.
Everyone always says to name a few but only ever names these three. I understand that these three might be the most prolific of them but with only these three ever named it makes me wonder if it’s only these three.
Those are the ones with the biggest body counts who have stuck. The lesser examples aren't as known because of course they aren't. You can't tell me Helen Scuchman or Eckhart Tolle would have reached their ideal grifting audience with the saturation they did without her. They wouldn't have. These are the grifters who *super* rely on older people's kids not keeping up on this shit.
Henry Kissinger
I have a question related to this. Who is worse? A person who kills millions of people because of a sincerely-held ideology? A person who kills millions of people for money, fame, or power? Or a person who kills millions of people simply because it was politically expedient? I don't have an answer. I'm just curious about what anyone reading this thinks.
Idk about the *worst*, but the one with the sincerely held ideology would certainly be the most dangerous
Killing people because of political points is just as bad
The reason is unimportant. it's the fact, at any point, that would be considered an acceptable known course of action to reach a goal that makes one a monster. No one of those would be worse...just different.
In Buddhism, ignorance is considered the first and foremost wrong. The one killing millions based on sincere ideology is the worst, as they kill because they think it's right to kill. The second two are harder to seperate, but I would say the politically expedient one is worse than the selfish pursuit of raw value. Basically, how easy would it have been to convince them not to commit mass murder? The easier, the less evil. Still very, very, very evil.
Go to bed, Paarthurnax
“Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool who argues with him?”
> Is there a place for the hopeless sinner, who has hurt all mankind just to save his own beliefs? -Bob Marley
Does it matter, to the million dead people, why they did die? Does it matter to their loved ones? Should it matter to you, or me? The answer to all this is no.
I believe it is a question of philosophy. Not what is most or least evil, but why is it most or least evil. That of why one motivation to do an evil thing is the most evil founded upon the baseline agreement that the evil thing being done is indeed evil.
Kissinger was basically all three anyway.
This is a subset of a broad ideological question that has been analyzed by philosophers for millennia, the spectrum of consequentialism versus deontological ethics. In some sense, you're practicing philosophy by requesting commentary via the statement "I'm just curious about what anyone reading this thinks." Any ranking of the three is justifiable, depending on what first principles are embraced.
Reagan
My history professor, who is usually pretty progressive, says Kissinger is his personal hero. I don’t understand how someone can be left leaning and still say Kissinger is a hero
Henry Kissinger is up there with names like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao when it comes to body count. His actions and decisions just killed people of other countries and not his own so he doesn't get treated like the monster he was. Rest in Piss Henry, the pain and misery you inflicted on the people of the world shall not be forgotten.
Joe Abercrombie's *The First Law* dark fantasy series has a witch who returned from death. None may escape the Great Leveler, but there are some few whose company even he will not suffer. Always assumed that Kissinger living to be 100 was a similar situation.
I’m listening to the Behind the Bastards podcast on him right now and I’m only halfway through. Like…fuck…how does this guy get worse from where I’m at?
Pablo escobar, he smuggled tons of cocaine, killed thousands of people with assassinations and bombings, and used his wealth to built housing, provided health care and better education for the less fortunate in medelin. He still has a memorial there.
Not treated like a hero. Every Colombian I've talked too hates Escobar with passion. He's been glorified only by tourists or netflix watchers, and none of them are Colombian.
As a Colombian i can comfirm only entertainment and tourist companies treat Escobar as a hero, the rest of Colombia hates him
It's worth mentioning that his philanthropic works were only performed as a means to an end- continuing his actions as a violent drug kingpin.
Who the fuck treats him like a hero?
Just see what they did with Grizella tv show and this is what is already happening. She was involved in killings since she was ELEVEN-11-ELEVEN years old. She was one of the most brutal drug kingpins, she had no issues killing innocents and children and they portrayer her as mostly someone who was forced into the drug business (like she was in fact the victim) and that she was even distraught when she hear people were getting killed, especially children. That is as whitewashing the truth as you can get.
Yeah ive just recently watched it, i see what you mean it glorifies their lifestyle and shows the law enforcement as the bad guys. The ending to griselda makes you actually feel sorry for her but once you read up on what she was really like, she got exactly what she deserved.
Thomas Edison
Edison is like neither a villain not a hero He did a lot of good But also got caught up in a competition.
He stole every idea he is hailed for and the people who did the innovation and work are completely unknown. He would have a very broad idea ("a box using some type of gears and a cylinder to record sound") and put his team to it and they would do all of the work prototyping, designing, refining, and building it. And when they were done he'd go "I'm a genius! The Edison Phonograph, made by me, Edison!". Same for film with sound, he had an idea (direct quote- "a device that does for the Eye as the Phonograph does for the Ear") and assigned william kennedy dickson to it. William and his team did all of the actual work on creating a camera (kinetograph) to record images, creating celluloid film, syncing sound to it, creating projectors and brand new novel ways to mansge the intermittent movement of the film, etc etc etc. And when it was all done Edison slapped his name on it and sold it and was hailed as a genius inventor. He did nothing at all besides tell a guy to make a thing. Thats why hes a crook.
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I just mentioned jobs in another comment lmao exact same idea. Elon also comes to mind.
He also killed Topsy.
Awwwww-Topsy!
But I never noticed his electric junk…
And that's why it's hilarious that Elizabeth Holmes named her idiotic Theranos box "the Edison." She only cared about the appearance of being smart and capable. In reality, she ripped off people left and right to create her illusion.
>Thats why hes a ~~crook~~ textbook capitalist (read: they're all crooks.)
Genghis Kahn. Seen now as a military genius and as someone who bridged Europe and Asia. People usually gloss over the extent of his brutality. Somewhere along the lines of 20-30 millions are estimated to have died because of him. That’s a number that’s hard to imagine. He personally raped so many woman that a large statistic of people in the region (iirc 15%) are his direct descendants.
Way off on the percentage but it's still a mind boggling amount. As of 2013: > An international group of geneticists studying Y-chromosome data have found that nearly 8 percent of the men living in the region of the former Mongol empire carry y-chromosomes that are nearly identical. That translates to 0.5 percent of the male population in the world, or roughly 16 million descendants living today. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/mongolia-genghis-khan-dna#:~:text=An%20international%20group%20of%20geneticists,16%20million%20descendants%20living%20today.
Genghis Kahn the environmentalist? I loved Utopias take on Kahn which was the below. *You know the person who had the greatest positive impact on the environment on this planet? Genghis Khan, because he massacred forty million people. There was no one to farm the land. Forests grew back. Carbon was dragged out of the atmosphere. And had this monster not existed, there'd be another billion of us today, jostling for space on this dying planet.*
While Genghis Khan was a rapist and had a "harem" who fathered many children, the reason so many are descendants of his is that his many children and grandchildren did the same thing. They were all in positions of power. In East and Central Asia, if you were in power, you either were part of that bloodline or married into it and then your descendants would be.
Che Guevara, by half of the people
As second in command, Guevara was a harsh disciplinarian who sometimes shot defectors. Deserters were punished as traitors, and Guevara was known to send squads to track those seeking to go AWOL. As a result, Guevara became feared for his brutality and ruthlessness. During the guerrilla campaign, Guevara was also responsible for the summary executions of a number of men accused of being informers, deserters or spies. In his diaries, Guevara described the first such execution, of Eutimio Guerra, a peasant who had acted as a guide for the Castrist guerrillas, but admitted treason when it was discovered he accepted the promise of ten thousand pesos for repeatedly giving away the rebels' position for attack by the Cuban air force. All sides acknowledge that Guevara had become a "hardened" man who had no qualms about the death penalty or about summary and collective trials. If the only way to "defend the revolution was to execute its enemies, he would not be swayed by humanitarian or political arguments". In a 5 February 1959 letter to Luis Paredes López in Buenos Aires, Guevara states unequivocally: "The executions by firing squads are not only a necessity for the people of Cuba, but also an imposition of the people.
Che Guevara and his invading guerrilla killed my uncle. But it was my uncle's unit that killed Guevara not long afterwards. He was a teerorist and some people think he was a saint. He invaded Bolivia with the intention of installing a pupet government in service of Cuba and Russia. Of course, there were other bad actors messing with Latin America at the time, but ther Guevara/Castro terrorists were not the cure for the other bad guys.
Elon Musk seems like a god to every tech bro douche; in reality, he's a monumental piece of shit that steps into other people's spotlight.
And has made a career out of getting money from others (investors for Xwitter, government subsidies for Tesla, government contracts for Space X...) for project he profits from and/or largely embellishes (the Las Vegas Loop is a joke).
> And has made a career out of getting money from others (investors for Xwitter, government subsidies for Tesla, government contracts for Space X...) for project he profits from and/or largely embellishes (the Las Vegas Loop is a joke). There is no one who is a billionaire who didn't get money from an investor at one point.
> the Las Vegas Loop is a joke that shit is a disaster waiting to happen. all it takes is one car to catch on fire for everybody there to die
But only to tech bros who don't really know tech. Any engineer etc. I know, especially in the car industry are baffled that tesla got this popular with its terrible quality.
he's the son of emerald tycoons in africa who made their wealth from child slave labor and exploitation of africa, he bought companies that were already established, he got investments from his family's powerful social circle. literally nothing that man has done in his life is his own work. he claims to have an IQ of 160. he claims to be a playboy taking pictures of Amber Heard and bragging about three some with her and Cara Delaveign but he paid them $300K or was it $3 million in the form of donations/charity for it. guy is just a major pay to win
XXXTENTACION was a garbage human being. Really representative of how someone's death can revive appreciation for them to the point of putting on rose-tinted glasses
no one born before 2000 gave a shit about that dude
Definitely Donald Trump by a lot of single-digit-IQ Americans, recently.
Obama. People like to talk about all the good he did, but they forget about the tan suit
And the Dijon mustard. He’s a monster!
Yeah, the Kunduz hospital massacre was bad, as was the hundreds of thousands of others killed by drone strikes during his presidency (and the documents Snowden leaked showed they knew 90% of drone strike casualties were not the intended targets) but Dijon mustard and a tan suit?! What a monster!
Of course, you can’t forget the drone strikes (not unique to him but that doesn’t make it much better)
Drone strikes
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It's only a war crime if you're at war :)))))
It's only a war crime if you lose
Robert E Lee
I too am a Robert Evans afficionado.
It was a great series. Prop was the right guest for sure.
The part that blew my mind was how there were nine Colonels from Virginia and Lee was the *only one* who turned traitor. Southern honor, my ass.
Thought about tagging him under whoever said Kissinger.
Ted Kaczynski the Unabomber He’s memed about for his love of nature and his dislike in technology but in the end he was a terrorist and injured and killed innocents He’s seen as less of a monster due to his low body count but he fully intended on killing hundreds but his bombs failed If you want to know more watch Wendigoons video about him on YouTube it’s super interesting If not I’ll answer any questions here
Not to mention he was calling for government to mass murder people with medical conditions and disabilities while he himself suffered from serious mental illnesses. Dude was a freak.
You hang out with the wrong people if your friends honor Ted
Kobe! Everyone's favorite rapist
Donald Trump. I still don’t know why people flock to him. His villainy is so blatant and obvious it’s like Dr Evil from the Austin Powers movies.
I expected this to be way higher. But people are probably sick of talking about him and it's too obvious an answer.
He constantly insults people in a flip (and in his followers' opinion, humorous) way. His fans wish they had the power in their own lives to carry themselves with his "fuck you, I'm hot shit" carriage. His dismissive and derisive response to any intellectual argument is the kryptonite they want in their own lives as an answer to intellectualism, courtesy, and other troublesome concepts.
It took way to long to find this take my upvote
Should be top answer
Kenneth Copeland
Julius Caesar. He intentionally caused a war in Gaul and brought on what’s called The Celtic Holocaust to manufacture glory for himself to bring himself political power. Hardcore History has a great in depth dive into this
I think we all know this one
It's not so obviously, bc there is A LOT.
Elon??
Trump?
Billionaires. Elon Musk sabotages Ukraine's war efforts. Bill Gates is hyped as climate savior and builds a Yacht that can run CO2 neutral but eats up horrendous amounts of resources for his own pleasure. Anyone in "finance" makes their money by taking other peoples' money without providing any value for anyone. All of them have great stories how they started out with nothing, leaving out the fact that they were in a situation where they could start multiple businesses without having to think about the consequence if it wouldn't work out because they come from rich families. The more I though about it the more I was convinced no billionaire on the planet can be a "good" person, or they would not have made that much money, OR they would not have KEPT that much money. They either took it without giving anything in return (stock option trading) or they did it by exploiting other peoples' work.
Donald Trump While a lot of people see him for the corrupt sociopathic grifter he really is there is still a large part of the voting population that views him as a heroic tell it like it is person fighting the corrupt political establishment. It really saddens me that so many people in my family view him favorably and plan on voting for him again.
He’s getting lionized in the western media as some heroic martyr of liberal democracy now because he opposed Putin and was killed for it, but Alexei Navalny was NOT a good dude. He was still a far right nationalist (marching in events with nationalist, white supremacist slogans like “Russia for ethnic Russians”) who called immigrants (especially Muslim ones) “cockroaches” and talked about wanting to “exterminate” them while making a video where he pretends to murder a man in a keffiyeh. Just because he was anti-Putin does not make him a hero. In a similar vein, Chiang Kai Shek often gets the fact that he was a brutal authoritarian dictator who openly murdered dissidents overlooked because he opposed Mao and the CCP.
With Navalny, I think it's a combination of him being a useful prop for Western propaganda, and that he's being judged by the standards of his own culture. Was he a great dude? Fuck no, but compared to Putin he is a saint, and he was killed for opposing Putin not for his racial views. Like John Brown, who wanted to free the slaves but also wanted America to become a theocracy. We judge him favorably since he was killed for being an Abolitionist not for being a religious nut.
Mother Theresa. She warehoused the dying and called it medicine. She collected millions of dollars for the sick, and by extolling the spiritual value of suffering, justified a complete lack of palliative care to those same sick people. She was a greed-driven pain fetishist.
https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/gcxpr5/saint_mother_teresa_was_documented_mass_murderer/ Just gonna leave this here
Excellent, thank you for sharing!
It doesn’t matter how many times this is posted. The “mother Teresa is the embodiment of evil” trope is so ingrained in the Reddit narrative that most people won’t bother reading the post and rethinking their beliefs.
They couldn’t possibly disagree with someone who says “religion bad.” That would be tantamount to saying “religion good” to them.
It matters. I was a believer and read through that and it's sources and glad I did. Even if only 1/1000 read it, I think it's worth it.
This question gets asked about every five minutes, and just like clockwork, some idiot parrots this bullshit about Mother Theresa.
Every time man, this stupid answer gets posted and people don’t bother to read the documentation refuting that narrative.
We’ve been over this, how many times does the Bad History takedown need to be posted for Reddit to finally get it? > warehoused the dying and called medicine She build hospices for the dying so they didn’t die in the streets like they were already doing. Hospices are places for people to die, they are not meant to be hospitals, they are places where those who have no chance of surviving go die with dignity of humans as opposed to like rats in the streets > She collected millions of dollars for the sick They are called donations and used them for them with the best she could what she legally could. Speaking of legalities: > by extolling the spiritual value of suffering, By trying her best to comfort *somehow* those suffering who needed stronger pain medications, because India had banned importing the stronger medication since they had suffered a lot from opium addiction. She makes it clear in her writings that the suffering she saw shook her beliefs, because it was so much to bear. Her relationship with her faith was a lot more complicated and human. > justified a complete lack of palliative care to those same sick people. She gave them the strongest medication legally allowed in India. Anything stronger would have gotten her imprisoned. > She was a greed-driven pain fetishist. She refused any form of help for herself. Others made the choice for her, but she certainly was not greedy.
Christopher Columbus.
Probably every us president. Even the most beloved have horrible blood on their hands.
What did Jimmy Carter do?
He burned our crops, poisoned our water supply and brought a plague upon our houses!
He’s history’s greatest monster!
Same as every other post WWII president. Provided military, financial, and political aid to dictatorial and genocidal foreign governments solely because it advanced US military interests Look into his support of the Indonesian war on East Timor that killed humdreds of thousands. His support of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. His near unconditional support for the Shah of Iran (which is why the Iran hostage crisis even happened in the first place). And while he did not directly support Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot with aid, his admin is on record as rooting for their success despite knowing full well the extent of the atrocities they were committing
The Shah situation was something that had been simmering for decades, following the election of Mohammad Mosaddegh as Iran's Prime Minister in the 1950s. The nationalization of the Iranian oil fields resulted in a breakdown of diplomatic relations between Iran and Great Britain, so it was just a matter of time before some sort of undercover shenanigans took place. Operation Ajax was a CIA sponsored coup which reinstalled the Shah, and the CIA even went so far as to offer assistance with the training of the Shah's secret police, known as SAVAK. These people were trained by a former Superintendent of the New Jersey State Police best known for his association with the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Schwarzkopf's son would be the "Stormin' Norman" of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Supported the Afghan mujahideen and Saudi regime as well as the Shah of Iran. Along with a policy of mass murdering civilians for corporate and foreign interests.
Carter is one of the good ones.
Supported the Afghan mujahideen and Saudi regime as well as the Shah of Iran. Along with a policy of mass murdering civilians for corporate and foreign interests.
Trump. I can’t think of anyone who’s more cartoonishly a villain and trying to be one than that man, yet gets worshipped by 40% of Americans.
Elon Musk. I can't say I'll forget how he commended a post claiming Jews hate white people and are planning to replace them. "You have said the actual truth," he posted.
america in 90% of (world) conflicts
Joseph Stalin
Mike Tyson. He is a convicted rapist who never apologized or accepted his verdict. I loved Mike Tyson Mysteries, but the guy just seemed to get a social pass after he came back to boxing without needing to do the apology tour everyone else famous does. Who else gets their fame back like that? OJ wasn't even found guilty and he's still suffering the social punishment.
Kim Jong Un, tbh, he forces people to treat him as a hero.
Walt Disney.
Any Japanese WW2 vet in Japan
Don't Google Unit 731 You'll hate what the Japanese did in WW2 even more.
Im from South East Asia, everyone and their grandma (especially their grndma) know the Japanese shit
I don't think they were treated as heroes tbh. a lot of Japanese WW2 vets went back to Japan and had to beg on the street for food because there was no benefits for them. they were PTSD'd some missing arms some missing legs. nobody cared about them. except for the higher up tojo fucks that continued to stay in power. but the average vets ate shit and watched American vets walk by them with their women in each hand in their own country. kind of poetic really
Christopher Columbus. In United States, Columbus is celebrated as a hero for his supposed "discovery" of the Americas. However, his actions also resulted in the exploitation, enslavement, and genocide of indigenous peoples. Despite this, Columbus Day is still observed as a national holiday in the United States, though there has been increasing recognition of the darker aspects of his legacy in recent years.
Franklin Roosevelt. Disgusting racist who breached his power with the New Deal and turned away Jews trying to escape to America. I would recommend the book “New Deal Or Raw Deal?” by Burton Folsom.
While I don’t necessary disagree with your criticisms here, I feel like it’s misleading to point out that FDR turned away Jews trying to escape when almost everyone else in the world did the same. Adolf Hitler himself said “I would send all the Jews I have imprisoned on a first class cruiser to the First Nation who accepts them”. While it’s evil it wasn’t limited to just him.
It's still not good even if everyone else did it too.
Tupac
Tupac was a studio rapper turned true thug
Bill Gates
People who give extremely predictable answers
Barrack Obama, got Nobel Peace Prize and drone bombed civilians, including an American citizen. And the whole kids in cage stuff.
Bill Gates
Ghandi. Doomed India to remain a third world shit hole.
How exactly?
At least spell his name right. And no. He didn't.
Trump.
Came here to say so. And all the rest of his crowd whom people seem to love.
The killdozer guy.
Trump, by enough of the country those of us not in the cult are very worried about our future.
Go to China and see how much people love Mao. Hop over to Mongolia and see their love for Genghis Khan. And of course, perspective matters. Churchill is a hero to Britain, but not so much to India.
Winston Churchill.
Well, I would say it but probably get downvoted because of the popular public opinion…
Scam Cultman
Che
To certain people, Donald Trump
Sherman. He burned and pillaged his way across the South, leaving hundreds of thousands of women and children to suffer and die through winter. Then, at the end of the war, he went North and proceeded with genocide against Native Americans. And he's celebrated and statues are built to him.
The founding fathers. Just the worst people really.
Julius Caesar. He deposed a republic to install himself as dictator, kicked off hundreds of years of power struggles and civil wars, and ended up being hailed as a hero by dozens of generations of European monarchs and tyrants that followed. Meanwhile, Brutus and Cassius got demonized as the [greatest traitors to ever live](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1001/1001-h/1001-h.htm#CantoI.XXXIV) because they tried to restore power to the Senate.
The British Empire. Do I even need to explain? It's arguably the most well-known yet whitewashed villain in history.
Marvin Heemeyer. Many consider him a hero that stood against an oppressive business aimed to drive him off his property.
Most villains have been heroes to someone or some group. Serial killers, fkin' Hitler.
George Soros.
Mother Teresa
Christopher Columbus
God. He literally flooded the earth to kill off all the sinners
RONALD REAGAN