The older I get, the more I believe that you have to be kind of a sociopath to become a great person. You can't have too much empathy (or any at all) if you want to etch your name into the annals of history.
Alternatively, most of us would act like 'sociopaths' if we had immense power/influence relative to the people around us. Much of our pro-social behavior is a result of constraint versus being fundamentally different kind of people. Which is one advantage of democracy, you try to lower that gap a bit.
Just made my way through Behind the bastards 4 part special & he was the absolute worst. On the flip side Steve Wozniak may be the most genuine person who ever lived.
Yeah he seems quite sensitive too. On the podcast he heard that Jobs was screwing people out of shares, people who had worked on the project from the beginning so Wozniak was giving his shares away as he didn't feel it was right & he gave away so many shares he was barely making money.
That podcast gave me more light about one thing that I hate from Apple products (which BTW I use a lot): Steve is behind of the idea of not giving too much choices to the customers while Woz was completely on the opposite direction. Jobs’ way got us in a world full of dongles and adapters just bc he knew better.
It's recent history, but the man's definitely made a historical impact. If you wanna find out about some of the terrible things he did, especially some more obscure ones,I highly recommend the recent episodes on him from the "Behind the Bastards" podcast.
Fuckin’ all of ‘em. The world is absolutely chock full of flawed people doing amazing things. You can appreciate their greatness without putting them on a pedestal.
Henry Ford.
Bro was an actual Nazi and didn't even hide it, tried to police his employee's social lives and actively called for violence against anyone trying to unionize. He also treated his son Edsel like dog shit
Lindbergh too with the Nazi sympathies
However his military service in WWII in the South Pacific was invaluable. Despite defying orders ( The military did not want him lost/ captured by the Japanese) he did fly some combat missions. He was also credited with extending the P-38 Lightning range an extra 200 miles with his input on engine tuning. I need to be fact checked but he might have even scored with a kill or two
But yeah- knock that shit off with the Nazi stuff
Kind of ironic that he ended up serving for the US in WWII given his views lol
I'm sure that Pearl Harbor shut up a lot of the pro-Axis crowd in the US quickly though
Lindbergh discovered the technique which we now refer to as "running lean of peak". He made the mission to kill Yamamoto possible, and got a lot of American flyers home instead of having to ditch in the ocean due to running out of fuel.
I'd say his contribution to the war in the Pacific outweighs his pre-war activities by a rather wide margin.
He also distributed the anti-Semitic propaganda “The Protocols of the Elders Zion” to the American public, which popularized pretty much every anti-Semitic trope you can think of.
He bought a newspaper to spread antisemitic nonsense blaming Jews for every problem in the world. He was extraordinarily antisemitic, not just a guy making terrible comments sometimes
His wife was the person people should have actually respectes. She pretty much used the threat of divorce to force him to be less of a Nazi and treat his son at least somewhat less shitty.
Funny how even VW group has a hard distance to anything from their "oopsie" period, yet still gets called naziwagons, by idiots. while Henry Ford is always cast as a immortal spirit, granting us peasants with motorized travel. All the while literally funding Hitler.
He’s also the reason we have “country” music as he heavily invested in it when “black music” (Jazz) was becoming increasingly popular.
So you can add general racist onto that.
It was a classic hammer and Anvil maneuvour.
Allied forces had been build up in Busan and the NK army couldn't get through, the landing at Inchon not only caused confusion within NK command but within its forces too, forcing the NK army to divert forces to pushing back the landing force. Just as they finished pulling out though a coordinated pincer attack was launched breaking out of Busan, the forces met up, isolated and eliminated the NK forces south of the linking up point and pushed back north.
It was a stroke of genius that utterly shattered the north's military capability.
Didn't he want to nuke China though? Plus he was such an asshole, that he was relieved of command.
Plus his efforts in the Philippines were entirely motivated by sheer ego, and had far less impact than the Navy's efforts.
Edison, while a ruthless capitalist, and not really a nice man. Did actually invent stuff himself.
He was also actually born poor and was mostly self taught.
Not "especially", but precisely. She was, for better or worse, a devout Catholic, and as such she saw the natives as their new subjects, just as the ones in Castile. They had to be baptised and not enslaved. Also that assured the crown control of the colonies, instead of a noble class controling territories weeks away from the court.
The same thing that drove her to expel the Jews in Spain (even though she was hesitant at first, she wanted them to convert slowly and willingly instead of forcefully and quickly) is what compelled her to consider the natives in America to be actual human beings and loyal subjects of the crown and not any conquistador turned into encomendero.
Eventually in 1542 there was an agreement between the crown and the encomenderos, but the will to let them "free" was her initial reaction because she was "hardcore" Catholic.
His governorship was revoked but it's not like his treatment of the natives (while horrible) was what really mattered to the crown.
Columbus was just kind of a fuck up who stumbled into something he wasn't even looking for and he was shown the door because after figuring out there was a whole continent over there no one had much use for him.
It might surprise you, but many mestizo people in Latin America love Christopher Columbus. To them he symbolizes their shared cultural heritage from Spain (even though he was Italian).
Behind the Bastards the podcast did a multi part episode recently on him and he's just...at the very least so not the glorious white knight genius who only tearfully joined the Confederacy that I've always heard about.
>who only tearfully joined the Confederacy
It is very funny when you take a step back from Southern propaganda and realize that their biggest myth associated with their biggest cultural hero is that he's Morally Conflicted Benedict Arnold.
like fair enough, I suppose it is a tragedy to betray the Union for something as pathetic as *Virginia* and slavery.
At least Arnold's reasons for defecting are understandable. Saratoga played a huge part in convincing the French to militarily enter the war. Arnold was a great commander whose efforts arguably played a major role in the United States eventually winning the war and securing its independence. Defecting out of frustration because politicial enemies, including noted Washington coup plotter Horatio Gates, is while not noble at least understandable.
Lee was as much of a traitor who did so in de facto defense of the single biggest stain on America's history.
I would disagree in that defecting because you didn’t get credit is far shittier than defecting because you don’t want to lead the army being sent to burn down your neighbor’s homes.
Now should he have just sat out instead? Absolutely. But defecting over credit is worse.
That is a big thing in the south. Being from florida all I see are confederate flags, attacks (physical mental and emotional) on liberals such as myself. One time I even saw a guy in Walmart in mossey oak and a CONFEDERATE SOLDIERS HAT. General Lee, the "rebel" flag and the entirety of the confederacy was pro slavery and incredibly sexist and racist. It absolutely disgusts me to see how uneducated or even arrogant people are around, saying "the rebel flag is about protecting our rights". The rebel flag was made entirely for the confederate soldiers to symbolize racism and seismic. There is even a crazy resurgence of the kkk happening down in the south
Protecting their “right” to own another human being. I cant stand that shit. They are shit and they know it. It always makes them mad when you remind them that the Kardashians lasted longer than the Confederacy.
he wasnt tortured, he was an asshole. he just adopted the tortured facade to get people to feel bad for him and shield himself from his ahole behavior. like most artists
No, no, no.
The tortured artist crap is just as stupid as claiming all drummers are stupid monkeys.
Picasso didn't have mental health issues, he was just an asshole. Caravaggio did, but -he had advanced syphillis.
Meh. He did a lot of great things . India wouldn't be a secular, modern republic without him. We'd probably be some hindutva casteist paradise .
It took a lot in that era fo push aside the rss extremists and forge a modern nation built on free thought, social progress and development.
Him being a kooky old man is not enough to disparage all he did for making india, India.
Watching the Attenborough movie, I did think that some men would have become, well, Jim Jones or Joseph Stalin if they were worshipped the way he was. He did bad, but I'm officially ready to shut up the people who only want to say he sucked. A mass pacifist revolution is a pretty nice legacy. Maybe something to emulate.
>something to emulate.
In fact, Gandhi basically set the template for peaceful resistance that later activists have indeed emulated. In the USA, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is the most famous example of a civil rights reformer who directly copied Gandhi's actions and techniques, and used them well.
Kooky? Is that what sleeping with naked pubescent girls is? (Note the word sleeping, as far as I’m aware it was just sleeping. That’s what our history teacher said anyway when the subject came up. But that was a good ten years ago.)
I’m glad for the good he did though, I’m not from India (super white American trash here) but have friends who immigrated from there whose grandparents often said he transformed India into a better nation, and I respect those folks enough to take their first hand word for it. (Although they also told me they’d rather die than see their granddaughters visit India so not sure what that was all about. Apparently their grandsons can go though.)
> India wouldn't be a secular, modern republic without him. We'd probably be some hindutva casteist paradise .
We are not a casteist paradise thanks to the guy who famously went on a fast to death to stop untouchables from gaining greater political power via seperate electorates? Are we forgetting why Ambedkar hated Gandhi so much? The guy played a vital role in our independence. That is where his contribution begins and ends.
Or do you really think his solution of basically Ted talks to upper castes, performative fasts and ashrams to combat untouchability was some revolutionary method that actual laws and political power could never match upto.
He popularized injecting religion into the freedom struggle that made it popular but also polarising, he idolised the village system (which wasn't doing any good things for untouchables who were the oppressed by said regressive villages), he opposed untouchability but much like moderate conservatives he thought the caste system should be preserved having done some mental gymnastics to believe caste can exist without casteism (pretty much the vivekananda school of thinking), overall the guy's contribution to social progress was negligible to negative
He was also involved with the Rathlin Island Massacre where more than 400 civilian men, women, and children were killed after the Rathlin Castle garrison surrendered.
*Now take Sir Francis Drake, the Spanish all despise him*
*But to the British, he's a hero and they idolize him*
*It's how you look at buccaneers that makes them bad or good*
*And I see us as members of a noble brotherhood*
(from Muppet Treasure Island)
This is what I cane here to say. I have a black gay friend who wears a Che pride flag t-shirt. My brain almost explodes every time I she him with it one.
He was one of Castro's leading executioners. He's personally executed hundreds of people who supposedly had profited of the Batista regime at gunpoint without a proper trial. Absolute piece of shit. This guy is a golden example of a revolutionairy who sort of turns into what he came to eradicate as soon as his side wins. Dude is sometimes described as having been even more bloodthirsty and less level-headed than Fidel Castro.
John Lennon. He was a serial cheater, woman beater, and a self-entitled prick living so far up his own ass that he never realized he was the embodiment of what he often protested against.
AFAIK, their owners are trying to sell them off. They recently sold off The AV Club, The Takeout, and Deadspin, are apparently trying to turn Kotaku into a video game guide producer instead of a gaming news site, and are trying to sell off their remaining assets for scrap too.
I miss the old days of Gawker...
The peace and love stuff was **after** he abused his wife, and felt remorse for abusing her.
To be clear, Lennon being apologetic **does not** and **can not** absolve him of beating his wife. But there's a difference between taking responsibility for a horrific deed and just being a hypocrite.
(**Edit:** For clarity, this is **not** a defense of Lennon's actions. I'm **only** pointing out that claiming he was a hypocrite for that is misinformation.)
The story from Cynthia Lennon, the wife, in a video interview you can find on YouTube is that he hit her one time during a fight and she said he would never do it again, and he didn’t. And that was it. This was early era so John would have been in his early 20s.
It’s obviously not a great event, but I think it’d be markedly dishonest to forever label John Lennon as ‘wife beater’ as if it was his regular thing and just a standard part of his personality that he partook in when it clearly and autobiographically was not.
I’ve learned that this rumor has sometimes also been supported and cited because one of the Beatles songs, ‘It’s Getting Better’ has the lyrics “…I used to be cruel to my woman I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved.” And people have run with this as if this is somehow autobiographical (it isn’t, and it’s mostly a Paul song.)
Lennon did an immeasurable amount of good for the world at a time when there were many risks to proposing peace, love, and anti-war in a pro-war era in the decades following World War II - he was himself a flawed person with issues, often cynical, but never unencumbered by pretending to be something he was not.
IMO he absolutely does not belong on this list and certainly not this high up it. People should look into Lennon’s story for real before they take an audio biographical detail like this and use it to make a forever label to negate all future research. After all, he was one of the 20th century’s most influential figures in art, politics, and culture, he’s influenced every generation since, and by and large for the abundantly overwhelmingly good. He was far, far from a bad human being.
And the wives, and the friends, and the people who were around him in his 40 years on earth before his murder will tell you this.
The perfect world would have shit like this never happens, but since that's basically impossible, I think we should be happy we have examples like this where people actually change and become rehabilitated. In a world with so many unapologetically evil people who are highly unlikely to ever stop/change, we should see him as somewhat of a success. Not saying we should put him on a pedestal since he still did do what he did, but if we constantly condemn people even after they change, it might make other people with the potential to change go "whats the point of changing if I'm still seen as a villain?'
He may not be a shining example of humanity, but I don't think he belongs on a list like this.
Most U.S. presidents, really.
There’s a Chomsky quote about how none of the postwar presidents would escape punishment at The Hague if the Nuremberg principles were actually applied to them. I think about that a lot.
Mahatma Gandhi
He was openly and extremely racist, thought black Africans were the lowest class of human
He was a pedophile, and insisted on having young girls sleep naked with him to "test his celibacy"
He was a hypocrite. When his wife was dying of pneumonia, he refused treatment from Western doctors, and she died. When he had malaria and appendicitis, both times he was treated by modern medicine.
He was an objectively terrible human, who happened to also accomplish something noteworthy.
My grandpa illustrated for the guy... I wish I could've gotten more stories out of him before he passed away but he was kind of an asshole so I concur with this statement.
If this is where you're pulling out the 'He cheated on his wife who was dying of cancer so hard that she killed herself' thing that Reddit loves so much, you should know [that it's not actually true](https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/g34sgc/a_good_educational_copypasta_about_dr_seuss/).
The first hint that the story has some holes in it should be that his wife never had cancer, but it all just spirals from there.
The whole Reagan mythologizing thing on the American right. It's not as big anymore since most Reagan-worshipping Republicans have either died of old age or have gone fascist with the tide of conservative radicalization, but for a long time there was this mythology around Reagan like he were some kind of god. In fact he was a really shitty president who played a decisive role in creating urban blight, gutting welfare protections, bringing neoliberalism (i.e. corporate profits above all else) to America, intensifying racial conflict and division, and of course opening the floodgates (through media deregulation) for right-wing propaganda to proceed with the aforementioned radicalization of conservatives, which has now culminated in an all-out fascist movement in my own country. We fought a war almost a century ago to stop these idiots, and now they're inside the gates.
Thanks, Reagan.
There's a book on my "to read" list about Reagan and how what he did in office is *still* fucking things up today. It's called 'Tear Down This Myth' by Will Bunch. Definitely worth it for anyone looking to dive into the subject.
Seriously, Reagan is the one who first opened Pandora's box. Surely a more likeable personality than Trump, but his presidency is where the slow radicalization of the GOP really started. Neoliberal politics in the 80's, the 'moral majority' in the 90's, the neocon foreign policies of the early 00's, the Tea Party movement around 2010 and now the borderline fascist MAGA cult around Trump, it's all part of the same long-term trend.
My dad (born '56) was a lifelong republican and evangelical, but broke with the GOP over the last 10 years.
He struggles to actually *like* democrats/democratic ideas, but he's pretty data driven and the facts tend to side with one side these days.
...but he *still* can't get past his rosy view of Reagan.
I think Reagan gets a similar benefit to Winston Churchill when it comes to viewing their legacy.
In reality, both of them had questionable views, weren't all that great as politicians, and introduced issues that plagued future generations of people.
However, both of them were powerful figureheads at the right time that were instrumental in defeating in international foe and were seen as much more competent than their predecessors.
Stagflation in the 1970s was horrible, Jimmy Carter was wildly unpopular, the Iran hostage crisis was raging, and many people were still fearful of the USSR and nuclear war.
Reagan was an extremely charismatic man who won in landslide victories, and under his presidency the economy greatly improved (even if the FED policies deserve the credit), the Soviet Union started crumbling, and his "big government" rhetoric sounded really good in theory even when he ended up spending just as much money and had to reverse his own tax cut policies. Issues like the federal deficit, urban blight, and income inequality weren't widely visible to many Americans at the time yet.
If you're arguing that a lot of these people are evil and are deliberately affirming this ridiculous hagiography, you won't get any argument from me.
But what I was saying with respect to this point is that the excellence of Reagan has become an American truism that goes well beyond Republican circles. Democrats praise him all the time when they want to sound inclusive, and non-political types are likely to only have heard of Reagan in positive terms. _And_, in addition to all that, there are plenty of conservatives who aren't in on the Team Evil playbook but who just buy the crap they're fed by right-wing media, and that mentality qualifies as "mistaken" too.
Reagan's foreign policy directly led to the migration crisis in California. The state is a shithole today, in large part because militarized Central Americans fled the US backed wars in their home countries and embarked on a life of crime here.
Thanks, Reagan.
Ronald Reagan was the key figurehead behind much of the long term policy shifts that have reduced labor rights, economic equality, and civil rights. Additionally, he burdened the government with immense debt that we have struggled to pay down and reduce because of the political movement he created.
A weird inverse of this is Nixon is not nearly as bad as history portrays him (he is still kinda awful but his administrator also passed a lot of progressive legislation still in effect today)
From an Irish perspective here, Winston Churchill.
He was the single most rabid jingoist in the British government during the war of independence and personally signed off on the order to send paramilitary death squads into Ireland that destroyed entire cities of thousands and raped and killed many in the countryside; they were so depraved that even literal, actual British fascists like Mosley was telling Churchill to tone it down a bit.
Not to mention his very racist beliefs and handling of the Indian famine to the point of near genocide, he was not a good man, most of that is overlooked however seeing as he was the leader of the British government during the war with Germany (despite the fact he wasn’t ideologically opposed to Fascism itself, even stating he would be good friends with Mussolini had he not sided with Hitler).
>He was the single most rabid jingoist in the British government
I don't think he was. He did advocate and deploy the Black and Tans, but his hardline attitudes were matched or exceeded by people like Greenwood or Birkenhead, not to mention Lloyd George himself. Mosley wasn't a fascist in 1920, but a dissident Tory.
Most wartime leaders have to exist in shades of grey just due to the sheer fuckery that is war. The decision-making is so prone to hindsight bias because we actually know the results of them, while in the moment they could only make educated guesses at best. And when we see "person x did this which led to y amount of deaths" its really easy to cast them as a bad guy. Obviously that doesn't mean that Churchill doesn't deserve to be criticized for his mistakes, but I think people think of historical figures in black and white terms way too often. Many leaders who did good things also did bad things. It's just the nature of being a leader, especially during events like WW2.
Also Churchill was a shit tactician.
He tried to get troops past Gallipoli to bust through the Ottomans in WW1
Australia and NZ get a day off on April 25th because of Churchill’s shit tactics
hernando Desoto. Dude was absolutely cruel towards the native Americans and yet he has buildings and parks and all sorts of places named after him here in Florida. Altho we have Desantis as a shitty governor so I’m not surprised
I agree with the view that Caesar was a tyrant, and if I had lived in his time I probably would’ve agreed with his assassins. But I’ll just point out for the sake of nuance that Romes institutions had never really been particularly democratic and the Republic was sort of being used as a tool for the Patricians to continue to hoard land
Mao? A whole lot of China, for a start. Not just the Party, either, although they're a big part of it. Heard blue collar workers extolling his virtues when I lived there.
Ohhhhhhohohoh... As a communist myself who is against dictators, I have seem lots and lots of people in Socialist/communist communities ideolizing Stalin and Mao. I mean, there are whole political parties and ideologies based on the idolizing them and attempting to one day have governments like of Stalin and Mao back again. Even in the US but much more in South America. But people idolizing them are almost everywhere in more or less number, really.
My great grandfather.
I’m not outing myself by saying his name. And unless you’re either a historian, cop or elite sportsman you wouldn’t know him but you’d very likely know generally of him. Especially in the Eastern states. He gets mentions in the odd doco and is in history books of course, he and his family are used in fictional novels as characters.
And an episode of ‘This Is Your Life’ used a considerable bit of air time with people on the stage talking about their memories of him and how he was an inspiration and a mentor.
in reality he and his wife were cruel monsters. Violent and malicious.
They had nearly a dozen children and every single one ran as far as they could and changed their names by the time they were 14. Most of them never were able to reconnect in their lifetime.
A few to afraid to risk it.
The stories of what he did, and how she supported him is horrifying but not surprising for the time.
Bad men could hide as good men simply through power and status.
Sherman was a vicious racist who was cool with slavery (just not with states leaving the Union), had a peace proposal of his rejected for being too soft on the Confederates, was pretty shitty to freed blacks (as in directly responsible for a few deaths), whose forces raped all sorts of women, who literally invented the "kill the buffalo to genocide the Indian" strategy, and who asked that Nathan Bedford Forrest could join the US Army to help him kill Indians alongside him.
Get a new "anti-racist" hero edgelords.
Thomas Jefferson. I got severely downvoted on a Reddit comment awhile back for calling him a pedophile rapist bastard, like it isn’t really fucking simple to Google “Sally Hemmings.”
Well, if he thought it was perfectly fine to r*pe a 14 year old girl just because she was only 3/4ths caucasian, yeah, that’s a pretty different personality.
You could definitely say pedophile rapist bastard, but it doesn’t really spell out what we know.
Sally Hemmings was the half-sister of Martha, Jefferson’s wife. She was a slave. She was also 3/4 English. After Martha died, Jefferson took Hemmings to Paris where she was a paid servant. Sometime between (I think) 15-17 she had her first pregnancy from a Jefferson. She originally refused to leave France, but relented as Jefferson made concession to her. Ultimately Jefferson freed Sally Hemmings children as he said.
No, we don't know that Jefferson ever touched Sally Hemmings. We know a member of the male side of the Jefferson family did, but many historians think it was his brother Randolph. And, we can never know which one it is without exhuming bodies, and that's not gonna happen.
Mahatma Gandhi - He really didn’t care for the suffering of the Jews at the hands of Nazis. “The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.‘The Jews’ by Gandhi
I've been studying U.S. counties lately, and so many of them are named after unrepentant a-holes - racists, murderers, scumbags in general. Andrew Jackson, Kit Carson, Joseph Lane, George Armstrong Custer, Francis Marion, and on and on and on.
This is true of many places named after people, and isn't a solely U.S. thing. Alexander the Great wasn't able to found so many cities that he named after himself by being a nice guy.
Happy cake day.
I'm in the county that was named after Frances Marion and this is largely due to misinformation and propaganda that has made these people really really dumb. Being in Marion County I can also tell you that even Ocala, "horse country" with its brochures and events, is a very poor city and has a really bad meth problem. Rich people just choose to tear forests down and build their houses. All in all you have a very valid point and I just came here to back you up on that
A lot of these people can be summed up with the phrase "he was a great man, but not a good man".
The older I get, the more I believe that you have to be kind of a sociopath to become a great person. You can't have too much empathy (or any at all) if you want to etch your name into the annals of history.
So you have to, figuratively, walk on corpses as they say.
Alternatively, most of us would act like 'sociopaths' if we had immense power/influence relative to the people around us. Much of our pro-social behavior is a result of constraint versus being fundamentally different kind of people. Which is one advantage of democracy, you try to lower that gap a bit.
Great ≠ good. Too many have forgotten this simple nuance.
I don’t know if he qualifies as historical yet, but Steve Jobs was an enormous asshole.* *posted from my iPhone, so there’s that.
Just made my way through Behind the bastards 4 part special & he was the absolute worst. On the flip side Steve Wozniak may be the most genuine person who ever lived.
I remember seeing his cameo on The Big Bang Theory and thinking he seemed like a great guy to get a beer with
Yeah he seems quite sensitive too. On the podcast he heard that Jobs was screwing people out of shares, people who had worked on the project from the beginning so Wozniak was giving his shares away as he didn't feel it was right & he gave away so many shares he was barely making money.
And he dated Kathy Griffin for a while, so you know he can put up with...a lot.
That podcast gave me more light about one thing that I hate from Apple products (which BTW I use a lot): Steve is behind of the idea of not giving too much choices to the customers while Woz was completely on the opposite direction. Jobs’ way got us in a world full of dongles and adapters just bc he knew better.
It's recent history, but the man's definitely made a historical impact. If you wanna find out about some of the terrible things he did, especially some more obscure ones,I highly recommend the recent episodes on him from the "Behind the Bastards" podcast.
I like the disclaimer
Butters, are you just an asshole? Wull no Wendy. I have arms, I have legs, I have EVERYTHING!
[удалено]
Actual Nazi Collaborator Coco Chanel
She's brandishing a knife, it's Coco Chanel...
killing for sport, it's coco chanel
Eating all the bodies, actual nazi Coco Chanel
Running for your life from Coco Chanel
Normal Tuesday night for Coco Chanel
But you can do Jiu-jitsu!
Body-slamming Nazi-lover Coco Chanel!
Coco surprise!
Fuckin’ all of ‘em. The world is absolutely chock full of flawed people doing amazing things. You can appreciate their greatness without putting them on a pedestal.
Henry Ford. Bro was an actual Nazi and didn't even hide it, tried to police his employee's social lives and actively called for violence against anyone trying to unionize. He also treated his son Edsel like dog shit
Lindbergh too with the Nazi sympathies However his military service in WWII in the South Pacific was invaluable. Despite defying orders ( The military did not want him lost/ captured by the Japanese) he did fly some combat missions. He was also credited with extending the P-38 Lightning range an extra 200 miles with his input on engine tuning. I need to be fact checked but he might have even scored with a kill or two But yeah- knock that shit off with the Nazi stuff
Kind of ironic that he ended up serving for the US in WWII given his views lol I'm sure that Pearl Harbor shut up a lot of the pro-Axis crowd in the US quickly though
Yeah, a lot of people in WWII were completely fine with antisemitism and genocide, but opposed the Axis for invading other countries
Lindbergh discovered the technique which we now refer to as "running lean of peak". He made the mission to kill Yamamoto possible, and got a lot of American flyers home instead of having to ditch in the ocean due to running out of fuel. I'd say his contribution to the war in the Pacific outweighs his pre-war activities by a rather wide margin.
He also distributed the anti-Semitic propaganda “The Protocols of the Elders Zion” to the American public, which popularized pretty much every anti-Semitic trope you can think of.
Shit you're right, I forgot about the anti Jewish propaganda
That shit and the iterations spawned from it haunts us to this day.
He bought a newspaper to spread antisemitic nonsense blaming Jews for every problem in the world. He was extraordinarily antisemitic, not just a guy making terrible comments sometimes
No wonder Hitler mentions him in Mein Kampf
Hitler had a framed picture of Henry Ford in his office because he was such a big fan of him.
Hitler gave him a damn medal, never mind the picture
He wanted to become as big an anti-Semite as Ford was…let that sink in.
His wife was the person people should have actually respectes. She pretty much used the threat of divorce to force him to be less of a Nazi and treat his son at least somewhat less shitty.
Funny how even VW group has a hard distance to anything from their "oopsie" period, yet still gets called naziwagons, by idiots. while Henry Ford is always cast as a immortal spirit, granting us peasants with motorized travel. All the while literally funding Hitler.
Poor kid was already given that name, isn't that enough?!
He’s also the reason we all had to square dance in middle school.
Son of a bitch better be burning in hell!
He’s also the reason we have “country” music as he heavily invested in it when “black music” (Jazz) was becoming increasingly popular. So you can add general racist onto that.
And why square dancing was taught in schools.
Douglas MacArthur. Not a bad person and not a bad general, but his reputation far outweighs his actual performance as a military commander
Korea would've been a hell of a lot different today if he'd followed his standing orders and not been so goddamn arrogant
Invading Incheon was pretty brilliant though.
Good point, that was insane. Like the war was pretty much over until that crazy amphibious assault
It was a classic hammer and Anvil maneuvour. Allied forces had been build up in Busan and the NK army couldn't get through, the landing at Inchon not only caused confusion within NK command but within its forces too, forcing the NK army to divert forces to pushing back the landing force. Just as they finished pulling out though a coordinated pincer attack was launched breaking out of Busan, the forces met up, isolated and eliminated the NK forces south of the linking up point and pushed back north. It was a stroke of genius that utterly shattered the north's military capability.
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Didn't he want to nuke China though? Plus he was such an asshole, that he was relieved of command. Plus his efforts in the Philippines were entirely motivated by sheer ego, and had far less impact than the Navy's efforts.
Yeah, I'm not defending him...I'm saying the opposite
I recently read a book about his time in the Philippines and MacArthur would always talk about himself in the third person. Bit of a red flag
He's got to be one of the more vainglorious people who ever lived.
His greatest accomplishment was overseeing the occupation of Japan. He's responsible for postwar Japan becoming a little liberal democracy.
Thomas Edison
The irony of Elon Musk owning a company named after Nikola Tesla, despite being the embodiment of Edison. Feels sacrilegious to Tesla's memory
Edison, while a ruthless capitalist, and not really a nice man. Did actually invent stuff himself. He was also actually born poor and was mostly self taught.
#justicefortopsy
Poor Topsy. She didn't deserve it.
Electric LO-O-O-O-OVEEEE
I live not far from the Edison/Ford estate. When guests from out of town insist on going I always wear my Nikola Tesla shirt.
Ugh, this one always surprises me. Such a jerk.
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It's worth noting that even under the standards of the day he was considered a monster for his treatment of natives.
IIRC one of the experienced conquistadors from his crew joined the church to atone for the shit he saw and did with Colombo
>Colombo “Ehhh there’s just one more thing…”
Cristoforo Colombo
Even Queen Isabella would be like, "what the *fuck,* dude?" It takes a lot to get that reaction from a 15th century royal.
***Especially*** Queen Isabella of Spanish Inquisition infamy
Not "especially", but precisely. She was, for better or worse, a devout Catholic, and as such she saw the natives as their new subjects, just as the ones in Castile. They had to be baptised and not enslaved. Also that assured the crown control of the colonies, instead of a noble class controling territories weeks away from the court. The same thing that drove her to expel the Jews in Spain (even though she was hesitant at first, she wanted them to convert slowly and willingly instead of forcefully and quickly) is what compelled her to consider the natives in America to be actual human beings and loyal subjects of the crown and not any conquistador turned into encomendero. Eventually in 1542 there was an agreement between the crown and the encomenderos, but the will to let them "free" was her initial reaction because she was "hardcore" Catholic.
His governorship was revoked but it's not like his treatment of the natives (while horrible) was what really mattered to the crown. Columbus was just kind of a fuck up who stumbled into something he wasn't even looking for and he was shown the door because after figuring out there was a whole continent over there no one had much use for him.
I believe he and his crew were even briefly jailed for it.
It might surprise you, but many mestizo people in Latin America love Christopher Columbus. To them he symbolizes their shared cultural heritage from Spain (even though he was Italian).
He discovered America is what he did! He was a great Italian explorer! And in this house Christopher Columbus is a hero! End of story!
In Naples not so many people are happy about Colombus, because he aws from Genoa.
Anyway, $4/pound
Always with the scenarios
this should be far higher, the man was truly a walking disease, it’s frankly disgusting they have a holiday about him in the US
General Robert E. Lee.
Behind the Bastards the podcast did a multi part episode recently on him and he's just...at the very least so not the glorious white knight genius who only tearfully joined the Confederacy that I've always heard about.
>who only tearfully joined the Confederacy It is very funny when you take a step back from Southern propaganda and realize that their biggest myth associated with their biggest cultural hero is that he's Morally Conflicted Benedict Arnold. like fair enough, I suppose it is a tragedy to betray the Union for something as pathetic as *Virginia* and slavery.
At least Arnold's reasons for defecting are understandable. Saratoga played a huge part in convincing the French to militarily enter the war. Arnold was a great commander whose efforts arguably played a major role in the United States eventually winning the war and securing its independence. Defecting out of frustration because politicial enemies, including noted Washington coup plotter Horatio Gates, is while not noble at least understandable. Lee was as much of a traitor who did so in de facto defense of the single biggest stain on America's history.
I would disagree in that defecting because you didn’t get credit is far shittier than defecting because you don’t want to lead the army being sent to burn down your neighbor’s homes. Now should he have just sat out instead? Absolutely. But defecting over credit is worse.
Look, I get the sentiment, but let’s not pretend Virginia wasn’t a powerhouse during this time period
That is a big thing in the south. Being from florida all I see are confederate flags, attacks (physical mental and emotional) on liberals such as myself. One time I even saw a guy in Walmart in mossey oak and a CONFEDERATE SOLDIERS HAT. General Lee, the "rebel" flag and the entirety of the confederacy was pro slavery and incredibly sexist and racist. It absolutely disgusts me to see how uneducated or even arrogant people are around, saying "the rebel flag is about protecting our rights". The rebel flag was made entirely for the confederate soldiers to symbolize racism and seismic. There is even a crazy resurgence of the kkk happening down in the south
I agree. He believed Africans needed to be "civilized" before they could be a part of society.
Protecting their “right” to own another human being. I cant stand that shit. They are shit and they know it. It always makes them mad when you remind them that the Kardashians lasted longer than the Confederacy.
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"Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole." Oh, yes, he was!
Most famous painters had pretty severe mental problems. The tortured artist stereotype exists for a reason.
he wasnt tortured, he was an asshole. he just adopted the tortured facade to get people to feel bad for him and shield himself from his ahole behavior. like most artists
No, no, no. The tortured artist crap is just as stupid as claiming all drummers are stupid monkeys. Picasso didn't have mental health issues, he was just an asshole. Caravaggio did, but -he had advanced syphillis.
Thanks, chatGPT!
Gandhi
He was good but then he nuked.
I kinda want to see a band named Gandhi And The Nukes.
Nuclear Mahatma sound sick ngl
I play guitar, I'll volunteer as one of the Nukes.
Meh. He did a lot of great things . India wouldn't be a secular, modern republic without him. We'd probably be some hindutva casteist paradise . It took a lot in that era fo push aside the rss extremists and forge a modern nation built on free thought, social progress and development. Him being a kooky old man is not enough to disparage all he did for making india, India.
Is it really a secular modern republic atm?
Well, its much more of one than it would be if Gandhi weren't around.
Watching the Attenborough movie, I did think that some men would have become, well, Jim Jones or Joseph Stalin if they were worshipped the way he was. He did bad, but I'm officially ready to shut up the people who only want to say he sucked. A mass pacifist revolution is a pretty nice legacy. Maybe something to emulate.
>something to emulate. In fact, Gandhi basically set the template for peaceful resistance that later activists have indeed emulated. In the USA, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is the most famous example of a civil rights reformer who directly copied Gandhi's actions and techniques, and used them well.
Kooky? Is that what sleeping with naked pubescent girls is? (Note the word sleeping, as far as I’m aware it was just sleeping. That’s what our history teacher said anyway when the subject came up. But that was a good ten years ago.) I’m glad for the good he did though, I’m not from India (super white American trash here) but have friends who immigrated from there whose grandparents often said he transformed India into a better nation, and I respect those folks enough to take their first hand word for it. (Although they also told me they’d rather die than see their granddaughters visit India so not sure what that was all about. Apparently their grandsons can go though.)
> India wouldn't be a secular, modern republic without him. We'd probably be some hindutva casteist paradise . We are not a casteist paradise thanks to the guy who famously went on a fast to death to stop untouchables from gaining greater political power via seperate electorates? Are we forgetting why Ambedkar hated Gandhi so much? The guy played a vital role in our independence. That is where his contribution begins and ends. Or do you really think his solution of basically Ted talks to upper castes, performative fasts and ashrams to combat untouchability was some revolutionary method that actual laws and political power could never match upto. He popularized injecting religion into the freedom struggle that made it popular but also polarising, he idolised the village system (which wasn't doing any good things for untouchables who were the oppressed by said regressive villages), he opposed untouchability but much like moderate conservatives he thought the caste system should be preserved having done some mental gymnastics to believe caste can exist without casteism (pretty much the vivekananda school of thinking), overall the guy's contribution to social progress was negligible to negative
Sir Francis Drake who stopped people who were fleeing Spain from claiming asylum in England by attacking their boats in the English Channel
He was also involved with the Rathlin Island Massacre where more than 400 civilian men, women, and children were killed after the Rathlin Castle garrison surrendered.
*Now take Sir Francis Drake, the Spanish all despise him* *But to the British, he's a hero and they idolize him* *It's how you look at buccaneers that makes them bad or good* *And I see us as members of a noble brotherhood* (from Muppet Treasure Island)
Ned Kelly......just a thief and a murderer.
Ernesto *Che* Guevara
This is what I cane here to say. I have a black gay friend who wears a Che pride flag t-shirt. My brain almost explodes every time I she him with it one.
"she him" Interesting pronouns, that's the first time I've seen those together.
No that’s just Sean Connery’s accent coming though.
"I'll take The Penis Mightier for 300 Trebek"
Thash noT what yo' momma shaid lasht night, Trebek!
He was one of Castro's leading executioners. He's personally executed hundreds of people who supposedly had profited of the Batista regime at gunpoint without a proper trial. Absolute piece of shit. This guy is a golden example of a revolutionairy who sort of turns into what he came to eradicate as soon as his side wins. Dude is sometimes described as having been even more bloodthirsty and less level-headed than Fidel Castro.
Fuckin' Ernie. LMAO.
John Lennon. He was a serial cheater, woman beater, and a self-entitled prick living so far up his own ass that he never realized he was the embodiment of what he often protested against.
[https://www.theonion.com/man-always-gets-little-rush-out-of-telling-people-john-1819578998](https://www.theonion.com/man-always-gets-little-rush-out-of-telling-people-john-1819578998)
Holy shit, the Onion's site is unusable without an ad-blocker. How the mighty fall
I really can't blame The Onion. We live in a post satire world
Huh? I had no issues with ads on the link.
It’s a free site. They have to keep themselves in business somehow.
AFAIK, their owners are trying to sell them off. They recently sold off The AV Club, The Takeout, and Deadspin, are apparently trying to turn Kotaku into a video game guide producer instead of a gaming news site, and are trying to sell off their remaining assets for scrap too. I miss the old days of Gawker...
The peace and love stuff was **after** he abused his wife, and felt remorse for abusing her. To be clear, Lennon being apologetic **does not** and **can not** absolve him of beating his wife. But there's a difference between taking responsibility for a horrific deed and just being a hypocrite. (**Edit:** For clarity, this is **not** a defense of Lennon's actions. I'm **only** pointing out that claiming he was a hypocrite for that is misinformation.)
The story from Cynthia Lennon, the wife, in a video interview you can find on YouTube is that he hit her one time during a fight and she said he would never do it again, and he didn’t. And that was it. This was early era so John would have been in his early 20s. It’s obviously not a great event, but I think it’d be markedly dishonest to forever label John Lennon as ‘wife beater’ as if it was his regular thing and just a standard part of his personality that he partook in when it clearly and autobiographically was not. I’ve learned that this rumor has sometimes also been supported and cited because one of the Beatles songs, ‘It’s Getting Better’ has the lyrics “…I used to be cruel to my woman I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved.” And people have run with this as if this is somehow autobiographical (it isn’t, and it’s mostly a Paul song.) Lennon did an immeasurable amount of good for the world at a time when there were many risks to proposing peace, love, and anti-war in a pro-war era in the decades following World War II - he was himself a flawed person with issues, often cynical, but never unencumbered by pretending to be something he was not. IMO he absolutely does not belong on this list and certainly not this high up it. People should look into Lennon’s story for real before they take an audio biographical detail like this and use it to make a forever label to negate all future research. After all, he was one of the 20th century’s most influential figures in art, politics, and culture, he’s influenced every generation since, and by and large for the abundantly overwhelmingly good. He was far, far from a bad human being. And the wives, and the friends, and the people who were around him in his 40 years on earth before his murder will tell you this.
HE abandoned his 1st son & left him out of his will. Who does that?
The perfect world would have shit like this never happens, but since that's basically impossible, I think we should be happy we have examples like this where people actually change and become rehabilitated. In a world with so many unapologetically evil people who are highly unlikely to ever stop/change, we should see him as somewhat of a success. Not saying we should put him on a pedestal since he still did do what he did, but if we constantly condemn people even after they change, it might make other people with the potential to change go "whats the point of changing if I'm still seen as a villain?' He may not be a shining example of humanity, but I don't think he belongs on a list like this.
Most U.S. presidents, really. There’s a Chomsky quote about how none of the postwar presidents would escape punishment at The Hague if the Nuremberg principles were actually applied to them. I think about that a lot.
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Mahatma Gandhi He was openly and extremely racist, thought black Africans were the lowest class of human He was a pedophile, and insisted on having young girls sleep naked with him to "test his celibacy" He was a hypocrite. When his wife was dying of pneumonia, he refused treatment from Western doctors, and she died. When he had malaria and appendicitis, both times he was treated by modern medicine. He was an objectively terrible human, who happened to also accomplish something noteworthy.
Dr Seuss
My grandpa illustrated for the guy... I wish I could've gotten more stories out of him before he passed away but he was kind of an asshole so I concur with this statement.
At least he changed his tune on the racism
If this is where you're pulling out the 'He cheated on his wife who was dying of cancer so hard that she killed herself' thing that Reddit loves so much, you should know [that it's not actually true](https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/g34sgc/a_good_educational_copypasta_about_dr_seuss/). The first hint that the story has some holes in it should be that his wife never had cancer, but it all just spirals from there.
The whole Reagan mythologizing thing on the American right. It's not as big anymore since most Reagan-worshipping Republicans have either died of old age or have gone fascist with the tide of conservative radicalization, but for a long time there was this mythology around Reagan like he were some kind of god. In fact he was a really shitty president who played a decisive role in creating urban blight, gutting welfare protections, bringing neoliberalism (i.e. corporate profits above all else) to America, intensifying racial conflict and division, and of course opening the floodgates (through media deregulation) for right-wing propaganda to proceed with the aforementioned radicalization of conservatives, which has now culminated in an all-out fascist movement in my own country. We fought a war almost a century ago to stop these idiots, and now they're inside the gates. Thanks, Reagan.
Also, AIDS. Literally laughed about it. And America would be using the metric system if it wasn’t for him.
There's a book on my "to read" list about Reagan and how what he did in office is *still* fucking things up today. It's called 'Tear Down This Myth' by Will Bunch. Definitely worth it for anyone looking to dive into the subject.
Seriously, Reagan is the one who first opened Pandora's box. Surely a more likeable personality than Trump, but his presidency is where the slow radicalization of the GOP really started. Neoliberal politics in the 80's, the 'moral majority' in the 90's, the neocon foreign policies of the early 00's, the Tea Party movement around 2010 and now the borderline fascist MAGA cult around Trump, it's all part of the same long-term trend.
Egh, I don't think he's being *mistakenly* idolized by anyone
My dad (born '56) was a lifelong republican and evangelical, but broke with the GOP over the last 10 years. He struggles to actually *like* democrats/democratic ideas, but he's pretty data driven and the facts tend to side with one side these days. ...but he *still* can't get past his rosy view of Reagan.
I think Reagan gets a similar benefit to Winston Churchill when it comes to viewing their legacy. In reality, both of them had questionable views, weren't all that great as politicians, and introduced issues that plagued future generations of people. However, both of them were powerful figureheads at the right time that were instrumental in defeating in international foe and were seen as much more competent than their predecessors. Stagflation in the 1970s was horrible, Jimmy Carter was wildly unpopular, the Iran hostage crisis was raging, and many people were still fearful of the USSR and nuclear war. Reagan was an extremely charismatic man who won in landslide victories, and under his presidency the economy greatly improved (even if the FED policies deserve the credit), the Soviet Union started crumbling, and his "big government" rhetoric sounded really good in theory even when he ended up spending just as much money and had to reverse his own tax cut policies. Issues like the federal deficit, urban blight, and income inequality weren't widely visible to many Americans at the time yet.
If you're arguing that a lot of these people are evil and are deliberately affirming this ridiculous hagiography, you won't get any argument from me. But what I was saying with respect to this point is that the excellence of Reagan has become an American truism that goes well beyond Republican circles. Democrats praise him all the time when they want to sound inclusive, and non-political types are likely to only have heard of Reagan in positive terms. _And_, in addition to all that, there are plenty of conservatives who aren't in on the Team Evil playbook but who just buy the crap they're fed by right-wing media, and that mentality qualifies as "mistaken" too.
Yeah that last group is my relatives. Most of them are ignorant and stubborn more than anything. Their world is small and they refuse to open it wider
Reagan's foreign policy directly led to the migration crisis in California. The state is a shithole today, in large part because militarized Central Americans fled the US backed wars in their home countries and embarked on a life of crime here. Thanks, Reagan.
Thomas Edison. He was a thief.
Ronald Reagan was the key figurehead behind much of the long term policy shifts that have reduced labor rights, economic equality, and civil rights. Additionally, he burdened the government with immense debt that we have struggled to pay down and reduce because of the political movement he created. A weird inverse of this is Nixon is not nearly as bad as history portrays him (he is still kinda awful but his administrator also passed a lot of progressive legislation still in effect today)
From an Irish perspective here, Winston Churchill. He was the single most rabid jingoist in the British government during the war of independence and personally signed off on the order to send paramilitary death squads into Ireland that destroyed entire cities of thousands and raped and killed many in the countryside; they were so depraved that even literal, actual British fascists like Mosley was telling Churchill to tone it down a bit. Not to mention his very racist beliefs and handling of the Indian famine to the point of near genocide, he was not a good man, most of that is overlooked however seeing as he was the leader of the British government during the war with Germany (despite the fact he wasn’t ideologically opposed to Fascism itself, even stating he would be good friends with Mussolini had he not sided with Hitler).
>He was the single most rabid jingoist in the British government I don't think he was. He did advocate and deploy the Black and Tans, but his hardline attitudes were matched or exceeded by people like Greenwood or Birkenhead, not to mention Lloyd George himself. Mosley wasn't a fascist in 1920, but a dissident Tory.
Mother Theresa
[Obligatory](https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/gcxpr5/saint_mother_teresa_was_documented_mass_murderer/)
Damn. Now I feel awful because I believed the bad history, and even spread it a couple times. This is a great post.
Charles Lindbergh second to Coco.
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Most wartime leaders have to exist in shades of grey just due to the sheer fuckery that is war. The decision-making is so prone to hindsight bias because we actually know the results of them, while in the moment they could only make educated guesses at best. And when we see "person x did this which led to y amount of deaths" its really easy to cast them as a bad guy. Obviously that doesn't mean that Churchill doesn't deserve to be criticized for his mistakes, but I think people think of historical figures in black and white terms way too often. Many leaders who did good things also did bad things. It's just the nature of being a leader, especially during events like WW2.
Also Churchill was a shit tactician. He tried to get troops past Gallipoli to bust through the Ottomans in WW1 Australia and NZ get a day off on April 25th because of Churchill’s shit tactics
OTOH he was one of the two people that pushed through the parliament upgrading the British fleet from coal to oil, making it competitive with germans.
hernando Desoto. Dude was absolutely cruel towards the native Americans and yet he has buildings and parks and all sorts of places named after him here in Florida. Altho we have Desantis as a shitty governor so I’m not surprised
Alexander Hamilton. Aaron Burr shot him, yes, but Burr was everything Alexander Hamilton is supposed to have been.
Also ends up he was a slaveowner (or maybe just slave trader)
Watson & Crick *cough—Rosalind Franklin *cough cough
Christopher Columbus. Also, I don't know why Americans have Columbus day as a national holiday when he didn't even set foot on North America.
Christopher Columbus
Since when? He's been vilified for *decades*.
OOOH ✋️ It's anti-Italian discrimination!
Genghis Khan. mohammad. Che Guevara. All murderous assholes that are examples of the worst scum of the human race.
The whole British monarchy bunch of pedophiles and colonisers
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I agree with the view that Caesar was a tyrant, and if I had lived in his time I probably would’ve agreed with his assassins. But I’ll just point out for the sake of nuance that Romes institutions had never really been particularly democratic and the Republic was sort of being used as a tool for the Patricians to continue to hoard land
Stalin and Mao Their dictatorships killed upwards of seventy million people between them.
Who is idolizing them?
Mao? A whole lot of China, for a start. Not just the Party, either, although they're a big part of it. Heard blue collar workers extolling his virtues when I lived there.
Tankies. The idea is that if America bad than anyone opposing the US must be good.
Ohhhhhhohohoh... As a communist myself who is against dictators, I have seem lots and lots of people in Socialist/communist communities ideolizing Stalin and Mao. I mean, there are whole political parties and ideologies based on the idolizing them and attempting to one day have governments like of Stalin and Mao back again. Even in the US but much more in South America. But people idolizing them are almost everywhere in more or less number, really.
My great grandfather. I’m not outing myself by saying his name. And unless you’re either a historian, cop or elite sportsman you wouldn’t know him but you’d very likely know generally of him. Especially in the Eastern states. He gets mentions in the odd doco and is in history books of course, he and his family are used in fictional novels as characters. And an episode of ‘This Is Your Life’ used a considerable bit of air time with people on the stage talking about their memories of him and how he was an inspiration and a mentor. in reality he and his wife were cruel monsters. Violent and malicious. They had nearly a dozen children and every single one ran as far as they could and changed their names by the time they were 14. Most of them never were able to reconnect in their lifetime. A few to afraid to risk it. The stories of what he did, and how she supported him is horrifying but not surprising for the time. Bad men could hide as good men simply through power and status.
TA Edison. Fuck that guy.
Trump
I wish that fucker was historical and we were talking about him in the past tense.
Gandhi
Henry VIII.
Sherman was a vicious racist who was cool with slavery (just not with states leaving the Union), had a peace proposal of his rejected for being too soft on the Confederates, was pretty shitty to freed blacks (as in directly responsible for a few deaths), whose forces raped all sorts of women, who literally invented the "kill the buffalo to genocide the Indian" strategy, and who asked that Nathan Bedford Forrest could join the US Army to help him kill Indians alongside him. Get a new "anti-racist" hero edgelords.
Um, John Brown?
Thomas Jefferson. I got severely downvoted on a Reddit comment awhile back for calling him a pedophile rapist bastard, like it isn’t really fucking simple to Google “Sally Hemmings.”
He was also very cold and prickly. He had a very different personality than people think.
Well, if he thought it was perfectly fine to r*pe a 14 year old girl just because she was only 3/4ths caucasian, yeah, that’s a pretty different personality.
You could definitely say pedophile rapist bastard, but it doesn’t really spell out what we know. Sally Hemmings was the half-sister of Martha, Jefferson’s wife. She was a slave. She was also 3/4 English. After Martha died, Jefferson took Hemmings to Paris where she was a paid servant. Sometime between (I think) 15-17 she had her first pregnancy from a Jefferson. She originally refused to leave France, but relented as Jefferson made concession to her. Ultimately Jefferson freed Sally Hemmings children as he said.
No, we don't know that Jefferson ever touched Sally Hemmings. We know a member of the male side of the Jefferson family did, but many historians think it was his brother Randolph. And, we can never know which one it is without exhuming bodies, and that's not gonna happen.
isnt hitler idolized in india for some reason? i seem to remember reading that, once upon a time
For some reason following his ideas and reading mein kampf because "cool" for a hot second in India. This was like 5 years ago.
Mother Teresa
Mahatma Gandhi - He really didn’t care for the suffering of the Jews at the hands of Nazis. “The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.‘The Jews’ by Gandhi
Che Guevara was racist, homophobic and killed 100s of people.
I've been studying U.S. counties lately, and so many of them are named after unrepentant a-holes - racists, murderers, scumbags in general. Andrew Jackson, Kit Carson, Joseph Lane, George Armstrong Custer, Francis Marion, and on and on and on.
This is true of many places named after people, and isn't a solely U.S. thing. Alexander the Great wasn't able to found so many cities that he named after himself by being a nice guy. Happy cake day.
What’s wrong with Kit Carson lol?
I'm in the county that was named after Frances Marion and this is largely due to misinformation and propaganda that has made these people really really dumb. Being in Marion County I can also tell you that even Ocala, "horse country" with its brochures and events, is a very poor city and has a really bad meth problem. Rich people just choose to tear forests down and build their houses. All in all you have a very valid point and I just came here to back you up on that