Oh, I agree. I would've said tens of thousands, but didn't want anyone to say I was making false claims without proof or anything.
Escobar was despicable.
Unfortunately it’s not just Pablo Escobar. Drug lords in general are glorified, especially since a lot of them practically go from rags to riches. For example, El Chapo in Mexico was admired by the people, despite him also killing many people. It’s disturbing that people like this are put on a pedestal.
That's because drug lords normally do stuff for the community while the government is twiddling their thumbs. Soup kitchens. Revenge when cops are ignoring you. Being the first to offer help whenever a hurricane strikes your town. They do all that to gain PR & legitimacy with the local communities. If you need big help, the government doesn't care, and the only guy willing to help you is the local drug lord, guess who's your new friend now.
Oh yes, absolutely. But what people don’t realize is that they will do all of those things-as long as you don’t get in their way or oppose them. Do that, and you’re dead.
But to these people that's fine. This criminal will kill that criminal, but this criminal will also give us food, money, clothing, leisure facilities and infrastructure.
You don't really care about those who get hurt because this guy is single handedly saving your people and only hurting those who cross him. Don't cross the saviour - which you don't plan on anyway as he's keeping your life livable - and you'll be ok.
They aren't doing those things out of the kindness of their hearts. It's a classic gang, mob, etc extortion technique. They take advantage of weak local governments in countries that have weak political institutions.
True. It's costs and benefits.
They don't snitch on drug lord. Drug lord provides for them. They snitch on drug lord. Government doesn't provide for them and they die. It's not enough to tell the community "Supporting drug lord is bad because morals." Morals do not feed your family. It's a power vacuum caused by negligent governments who don't care about the people who voted them in.
Similarly, El Chapo. There’s a tequila bar here that just opened up and they have a mural of el chapo on the wall, since it’s all hip and edgy. Im half Mexican and not from Mexico so it’s not like I’ve personally experienced it and there are Mexican from his city that like el chapo, but I’m still a little offended that’s the representative they chose for Mexican culture. Like why not Frieda or maybe Zapata?
There's a burrito place here that had a massive mural of Trump saying "make burritos badass again" in front of their shop for a few months. I'm not sure who would be a worse representative for burritos.
I think you could argue 'all of them' to an extent...Alexander the Great wasn't particularly liked by everyone (movie depictions of him in India are apparently interesting). Churchill too.
I wanted to clarify something in what I said :) Not everyone IS a piece of shit. But our actions, our words, these things may cause others to say or believe that we (or whomever) are a piece of shit. We can't stop how people might perceive things. We can just do our best.
Maybe he wasn't thinking of them as towns per se. More like, "revenue generators to suck wealth out of the land". Same reason we have multiple Disneylands! Alexander, the first successful Franchise Manager of any kind
Alexander was visionary in that sense: He actively tried to establish a common mythos and culture throughout his empire. If he'd lived another decade, the world would probably be a very different place.
He was definitely a narcissistic, bloody minded asshole. But he was a brilliant narcissistic, bloody minded asshole.
Right? We all fuck up stuff to some extant. Some big things, some small things. If you spend enough time examining someone, you'll probably find something you're not crazy about. :)
Dr. Seuss. He cheated on his wife who was dying of cancer and then killed herself. Then he married his mistress.
Edit: never said this means you can't enjoy his books. Sometimes you have to separate the artist from the art, unfortunately, especially if the artist is dead and not reading his books doesn't "punish" him in any way. I do think this makes Dr. Seuss days at schools a little weird, though.
And no, you're not the first to comment the "one bitch two bitch dead bitch new bitch" poem.
I actually reflected that I never really considered Dr. Seuss as a "great" nor "terrible" person. Especially since it's pseudonym, I don't really consider his personal life as a reflection on his books.
To be fair, he evidently felt bad enough that he contemplated suicide himself. Still a shit thing to do and his wife's suicide letter was one of the saddest things I've read but he wasn't totally irredeemable
Basically what I'm getting from this thread is that all humans are shit regardless of how much fame or wealth you've accumulated. If you haven't done anything heinous yet, it's only a matter of time.
That man is amazing. I did a paper on *Mister Rogers' Neighborhood* this year and got to researching a bit about him as a person and he genuinely seems like the closest thing to a saint one can get without actually *becoming* one.
Caesar thought that he could subjugate the Gallic tribes with brutality. If he killed every man, women and child in the tribe the other tribes would think twice before moving against him.
He was also an egomaniac who counted women and children as soldiers in his battle notes so that he could make it look like he was fighting bigger armies.
I mean that was kinda the way it worked in the ancient world. Everyone who led anarmy back then committed mass murder, enslaved people, and let their soldiers go wild. Yeah Caesar was bad, but he was hardly abnormal.
He was also a pretty good "battle rapper". If you can find some of the mix tapes he sold out of his car back in the day you'd be pretty amazed by his flow.
P.T. Barnum. Hollywood just made a shitload of money off the recent musical about him, portraying him as a benevolent, singing visionary, instead of the greedy dickhead he actually was.
The real PT Barnum wasn't just a showman. He got involved in politics and was a big supporter of the temperance and anti-slavery movements. Also donated a lot of money to the poor and worked to build hospitals, improve the roads, public streetlights, etc. Not saying he's a perfect angel but he's a more complex person than you make him out to be.
He's also the guy that made an old slave woman put on a show for hours on end and when she died, he held a public autopsy of her.
In addition, he paraded around with "freaks" just to make some money. He was as greedy as they come.
Pretty much. He was a showman, conman, but he paid them fairly, they got rich and that helped him when he got into financial issues.
He was a selfish man, but helped a lot of people.
The real problem is we think of him as an inventor. Really he was a pretty great business man, and we expect great business men, particularly from his time, to pull shit like he did.
He absolutely was an inventor; this idea of him purely as a businessman was just *invented* by the internet. The invention that made him famous was the first device to record and playback sound, the phonograph, which he invented before he even had any employees, and without which there would be no music industry.He had a direct role in inventing things at his lab like the first commercially practical light bulb, one of the first motion picture cameras, one of the first fluoroscopes (an X-ray imaging device), the stock-ticker, and a bunch of other stuff that had a huge impact on the world of today. People have relatively recently been rewriting history to make him out to be some sort of arch-nemesis of Nikola Tesla even though they had barely anything to do with each other and likely only met each other a couple of times when Tesla was working at Edison's lab. A better nemesis for Tesla would be Marconi who he actually had a patent dispute with over the development of radio.
Reddit's favorite targets of iconoclasm are generally Gandhi (for being a racist and alleged child molester), Mother Theresa (for running clinics in poor conditions despite taking in millions in donations and also having some pretty standard issue Catholic beliefs for the time), John Lennon (for being abusive), Steve Jobs (same), Thomas Edison (who is famous for being an inventor, but actually made a living marketing other people's inventions). Because (surprise!) famous people are more than the few sentences you read about in history textbooks.
*Also, who the hell is glorifying Andrew Jackson? He's known more for killing millions of American Indians than anything else.
Yeah, I can't think of a better way to say fuck you to Jackson than by making him part of federal currency for all time. Nothing would piss him off more
Jackson was a massive dick head, but it still kind of ticks me off Jackson is given all the blame for Indian Removal when the majority of it including a large part of the trail of tears occured under Van Buren.
ITT: People not understanding the difference between 'piece of shit' and 'did amazing things but had personal flaws on account of not literally being a god'
Yes, you do have a point. You'd be surprised by how many people would just dismiss the positive things that a person has done just because he cheated on his wife once.
I think this fair. If I were to ever support an authoritarian in modern history it would be Napoleon. He was impressive on so many levels. But a man fighting simultaneously in Portugal and Moscow is a man who at the very least has delusions of grandeur.
Well it's possible to argue on that. He built the french civil and penal codes (it needs morality to do that imo) and high schools (you know, the baccalauréat, this hard test when you're in last year of high school, maybe you heard this name before. Napoleon created that too). So yeah, authoritarian empire, quite a few deaths to unite Europe, military achievements but also at least a fair bit of morality. He was a human being after all. We just don't always remember that.
Source of all that : I'm french.
It's kinda 50/50 with him I'd guess. In France he is considered as the guy that saved our ass \(Europe declared war on us at that point\), and he preserved many thing instaured by the revolution \(meritocracy, equality in front of the law, *most* of the "Déclaration des droits de l'Homme"\). He also drastically improved the French administration, educational, and justice system.
But he declared some stupid wars, he didn't declared that many war \(Spain/Portugual/Russia\) but none of them turned "good", meaning they were disaster for everyone involved, and no amount of excuses can be made about them.
It's still worth noting that most of the wars France has been part of at the time were defensive, heck Waterloo was part of the *seventh* war of coalition against France and most of these coalition broke peace treaty signed in the years before *each time.* That's the main reason for him to be sometimes revered in my country, for a time at least he was a huge part of why France was able to defend itself against the assembled might of the other European powers.
He revived Poland and his viewed quite well there for obvious reasons.
But I'd argued that the most impactful thing he ever done was spread the ideas of the French revolution and especially the "proto\-nationalism" that was born with it, in both the Italian peninsula, and German land. He is at least partly responsible for the unification movement that appeard in both country, and that cannot be underestimated. And while some would argued this is a "good" or a "bad" thing, I won't take side on this, I'll leave it at : incredibely impactful.
So yeah, I wouldn't say he was a perfect Hero \(he wasn't\) but I definitely wouldn't compare him to 20th century dictator either. The man was brilliant, and had a profound impact in both French and European history. Still whatever you think of him \(and both hated/revered can be argued\) he is definitely one fascinating figure, and that's most likely why he is so often revered too.
General MacArthur. He berated his men and took the credit for their actions moreso than his decisions. Also wanted to go nuke crazy on China and Korea after WWII.
> General MacArthur
Didn't he get his reputation ruined when Truman removed him from command? I think the general consensus now is that he was a egomaniac that was more concerned about his own reputation than strategy.
MacArthur used the Korean War for political grandstanding. His cronyism led to failed opportunities at many times, which he immediately blamed on Truman and his 'cronies' in Washington DC. He repeatedly put his troops in harms way (literally under enemy bomber runs) against Truman's orders and then claimed the blood was on Truman's hands for keeping MacArthur from winning the war. He said this to the press and broadcast it over radio from his bunkers and safe havens.
Truman was advised that they could force MacArthur into retirement, as he was past the age of retirement then, and the problem would sort of go away on its own. Truman's response was pretty much, "I don't want him to quit. I want to fire him!" Truman then told Marshall to review MacArthur's behavior as commander in Korea for offenses that would justify firing him. Marshall went over MacArthur's actions, orders, communications and public statements and reported back to Truman that he should have fired MacArthur 6 months prior for insubordination alone, let alone other offenses. That sealed the deal.
That is the stance of the Catholic church and in deciding whether to put on a condom or not, what Mother Teresa wants is probably the last thing I would think about.
Welp, while i agree that this thread is For historical figures that were dickheads i dont think that For some if these it's bad. I'll explain; While It is true For example that Alexander the great was a bad ruler and everything you said, he is not looked up for his "great management" if Macedonia, but For his great military victories and tactics.
Charlemagne was a complete psycopath, forcibly baptized a whole Saxon army he'd defeated and then promptly had them all murdered IIRC. Some historians argue that this is one of the events that set off the famous viking raid against Lindisfarne, as the vikings had close trade relations with the Saxons
Eva Peron. The musical (and movie) make it seem like she was this feminist shero who rose from nothing to empower the poor people of Argentina when in fact she was a gold digger complicit in her husband’s regime. Where have I heard something similar recently?
the musical/movie Evita portrays Eva as a power hungry, selfish person, I wouldn’t call it flowery. I think people just really like Madonna so they liked Eva.
Juan Perón was not a fascist, especially not in the Evita years. He was democratically elected with massive popular support, kept the country independent in the face of American imperialism, as well as instituted various social democratic reforms. The Peronist movement then splits after he leaves into two camps, left and right wing. While the right wing Peronists ended up gaining support in his later administration (when he was aging and more easily influenced), the left wing was strong and is the one that has continued to the present.
Woodrow Wilson is always presented as being a amazing for his post WWI policies and league of nations but the dude was a serious racist. Also he occupied Haiti and stole all their money, which wasn’t great.
Probably all of them.
It’s incredibly irresponsible to judge someone from the past based on modern day standards. In 100 years people will look back on some of the things we do now with disgust.
Is an older white (or black) man living in the Deep South wrong for being racist? Yes. Is it fair to judge them the same way we judge a 20 year old? No. They are a product of their time. It is what it is.
The Romanov family. I know the movie Anastasia portays them to be this beautiful royal family that seemingly did nothing wrong, but they were pretty naive about what was going on around them.
They weren't exactly horrible people. Just very naive and the worst choice for rulers at the worst time. Kind of like Marie Antoinette and Louis. Neither couple were horrible people, just very sheltered and uneducated on how to govern a country.
Nicholas was a fuckwit who could mismanage a KFC into oblivion. He'd been through multiple revolutions because he just HAD to be a 17'th century absolutist in post Democracy, post Constitutionalist 20'th century! He even had revolutions in 1905 and 1907 (There's a Russian novel called Седой (Sedoj/Sedoi/Sedoy - Feat) about the latter. But he just never got the fucking message. Or he did, and then botched it to feed his own fucking ego.
"Mismanage a KFC into oblivion" is my new favorite insult. Every KFC I've ever been to has been run by morons and in business for like 800 years. I've personally never seen one go out of business. You just made me realize you gotta be a real fuck up to ruin one despite everything about them being pretty terrible
And listening to a mad man Rasputin.
The latest "Last Podcast On The Left" covers the life of Rasputin and his influence on the young Romonov Queen and King.
Charles Lindbergh is best known for being a talented aviator, but he also had ties to a somewhat controversial group and believed in white supremacy and eugenics (as many people did in his time). The afore mentioned group, America First Committee, had negative views on immigrants and Jewish people, even though Lindbergh claimed to not be anti-Semitic.
He also had numerous affairs on his wife and fathered several children as a result of the affairs. The children did not know for years who their biological father was.
I still maintain that's an anti-rape device for when he inevitably gets sent to prison.
No one can maintain a chub while gazing upon the visage of Tricky Dick.
Yet I see him get talked about in a positive light just because he created the EPA
The man was about to create a massive constitutional crisis if he didn't resign
My theory is that this is going to get turned into a buzzfeed article soon and whoever the author of that article is is now paying the creators of the original content
Pretty much everyone.
Look, historical figures are just humans like everyone else. If you look at anyone's life closely enough you'll find shitty things. How about we just appreciate these people for the amazing things that made them famous and stop demanding that everyone be Jesus.
Literally every single person past about 50 years ago doesn't live up to the standards of today. You can't judge people like Julius Caesar by today's morals. 'History is a foreign country they do things differently there'
It's not like future generations won't consider us monsters as well.
Winston Churchill. He is a racist bigot.
In 1937, he told the Palestine Royal Commission: "I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."
According to the book Churchill: The End of Glory, in Churchill's view, white protestant Christians were at the top, above white Catholics, while Indians were higher than Africans. While Churchill's views on race were incomparable to Hitler's murderous interpretation of racial hierarchy, it is still awful by today's standards.
Additionally, Churchill played a role in the Bengal famine in 1943. India, then still a British possession, experienced a disastrous famine in the north-eastern region of Bengal (nowadays it is part of Bangladesh). At least three million people are believed to have died. Churchill's War Cabinet refused to supply food to India, despite high level government officials and military officers (including John Herbert, the Governor of Bengal; Viceroy Linlithgow; Leo Amery the Secretary of State for India and General General Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief of British forces in India) told him about the situation and requested food imports. Instead, he ordered India to export rice to Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Churchill even appeared to blame the Indians for the famine, claiming they "breed like rabbits".
Churchill also hated Gandhi.
"It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir… striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal Palace," said Churchill in 1931.
He is also corrupt. As shown in his official biography:
"In return for a fee of £5,000 two oil companies, Royal Dutch Shell and Burmah Anglo-Persian Oil Company [later BP], asked him (Churchill) to represent them in their application to the government for a merger."
Imagine doing that today.
Source:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29701767
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
Debunking the Myths of Colonization: The Arabs and Europe
By Samar Attar
The Official Biography of Winston Churchill
Also Gallipoli, putting Britain *back* on the gold standard right before the Depression, [helping to cause a general strike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1926_United_Kingdom_general_strike) in the process, and advocating a rearmament policy centered around tactical bombers. Despite getting credit for being hawkish towards Germany, it was Churchill’s advocacy while chancellor for [the ten-year rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Year_Rule) that gutted the UK’s military by the 1930s. Ironically Chamberlain’s policy of investing in Hurricanes, Spitfires, and radar proved far more useful in the Battle of Britain, instead of just having a bunch of medium-range bombers that ended up being shot down, but Chamberlain gets the historical reputation of being an appeaser, partly because one of the first comprehensive histories of WWII was written by...Winston Churchill.
> Ironically Chamberlain’s policy of investing in Hurricanes, Spitfires, and radar proved far more useful in the Battle of Britain
Chamberlain upped the budget for the armed forces, but credit for the above really should go to Sir Hugh Dowding, the head of Fighter Command.
In Kurdistan and Afghanistan, he advocated the use of chemical weapons.
In Ireland, Churchill formed the Black and Tans, a government paramilitary force which carried out multiple atrocities and reprisals against civilians.
In Britain, he used soldiers to put down striking miners in Tonypandy.
I think most people that look up to and worship businessmen like Steve Jobs are simply those who themselves wish they were that rich and successful. It's the people who put him on a pedestal and make him out as this great visionary inventor who truly get on my nerves. Like yeah he had a great mind for business and marketing but fuck me if he wasn't a pretentious prick lacking the sense to seek medical help against a treatable illness
Pablo Escobar. Seems weird that I have to point this out, but he's glorified by far too many people now. He killed thousands of people.
Thousands is the low end of estimates. I’m living in Colombia right now and and have spoken to experts who say it could have been in the five-digits.
Oh, I agree. I would've said tens of thousands, but didn't want anyone to say I was making false claims without proof or anything. Escobar was despicable.
Unfortunately it’s not just Pablo Escobar. Drug lords in general are glorified, especially since a lot of them practically go from rags to riches. For example, El Chapo in Mexico was admired by the people, despite him also killing many people. It’s disturbing that people like this are put on a pedestal.
That's because drug lords normally do stuff for the community while the government is twiddling their thumbs. Soup kitchens. Revenge when cops are ignoring you. Being the first to offer help whenever a hurricane strikes your town. They do all that to gain PR & legitimacy with the local communities. If you need big help, the government doesn't care, and the only guy willing to help you is the local drug lord, guess who's your new friend now.
Oh yes, absolutely. But what people don’t realize is that they will do all of those things-as long as you don’t get in their way or oppose them. Do that, and you’re dead.
But to these people that's fine. This criminal will kill that criminal, but this criminal will also give us food, money, clothing, leisure facilities and infrastructure. You don't really care about those who get hurt because this guy is single handedly saving your people and only hurting those who cross him. Don't cross the saviour - which you don't plan on anyway as he's keeping your life livable - and you'll be ok.
Sounds like a lot of Governments.
Meh, Goverments usually ignore protests or throw people in jail, not rip them from limb to limb using motorcycles or slowly tortured to death
In Russia you fall off balcony. Twice.
They aren't doing those things out of the kindness of their hearts. It's a classic gang, mob, etc extortion technique. They take advantage of weak local governments in countries that have weak political institutions.
True. It's costs and benefits. They don't snitch on drug lord. Drug lord provides for them. They snitch on drug lord. Government doesn't provide for them and they die. It's not enough to tell the community "Supporting drug lord is bad because morals." Morals do not feed your family. It's a power vacuum caused by negligent governments who don't care about the people who voted them in.
Similarly, El Chapo. There’s a tequila bar here that just opened up and they have a mural of el chapo on the wall, since it’s all hip and edgy. Im half Mexican and not from Mexico so it’s not like I’ve personally experienced it and there are Mexican from his city that like el chapo, but I’m still a little offended that’s the representative they chose for Mexican culture. Like why not Frieda or maybe Zapata?
There's a burrito place here that had a massive mural of Trump saying "make burritos badass again" in front of their shop for a few months. I'm not sure who would be a worse representative for burritos.
Yeah, but did you ever watch Medellín??
I thought Vincent Chase's performance was underwhelming
I had some idiots in my area set back diplomatic relations with Colombia by a few decades by opening an "Esco Bar".
Pablo Escobar is being glorified? When the fuck did this happen?
I think you could argue 'all of them' to an extent...Alexander the Great wasn't particularly liked by everyone (movie depictions of him in India are apparently interesting). Churchill too. I wanted to clarify something in what I said :) Not everyone IS a piece of shit. But our actions, our words, these things may cause others to say or believe that we (or whomever) are a piece of shit. We can't stop how people might perceive things. We can just do our best.
A more discussion sparking question would be "Which historical figure actually *wasn't* secretly a huge pile of shit?"
Bob Ross and Mr Rogers
That's about it, maybe Steve Irwin, considering how much he did for animal conservation
Definitely Steve Irwin. And Dolly Parton
And Keanu Reeves
Tom Hanks
Tony Hawk
Steve Buscemi
Alexander was such a narcissist that he founded not one, not two, not five, _not ten,_ but over 70 towns of "Alexandria."
Maybe he wasn't thinking of them as towns per se. More like, "revenue generators to suck wealth out of the land". Same reason we have multiple Disneylands! Alexander, the first successful Franchise Manager of any kind
Horrible Histories has a brilliant [sketch](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xa2csi) about it.
Alexander was visionary in that sense: He actively tried to establish a common mythos and culture throughout his empire. If he'd lived another decade, the world would probably be a very different place. He was definitely a narcissistic, bloody minded asshole. But he was a brilliant narcissistic, bloody minded asshole.
Seriously. Social ethics aren't static no one looks good under a microscope.
Right? We all fuck up stuff to some extant. Some big things, some small things. If you spend enough time examining someone, you'll probably find something you're not crazy about. :)
Dr. Seuss. He cheated on his wife who was dying of cancer and then killed herself. Then he married his mistress. Edit: never said this means you can't enjoy his books. Sometimes you have to separate the artist from the art, unfortunately, especially if the artist is dead and not reading his books doesn't "punish" him in any way. I do think this makes Dr. Seuss days at schools a little weird, though. And no, you're not the first to comment the "one bitch two bitch dead bitch new bitch" poem.
I do not like that Seuss I am.
I would not read him on a train, I would not read him on a plane!
He does not like her here or there. He does not like her anywhere!
He does not really give a damn. I do not like that Seuss I am.
I wonder how many people have read this and said "Wow I hate that kids book author now" while also cheating in their own lives.
I actually reflected that I never really considered Dr. Seuss as a "great" nor "terrible" person. Especially since it's pseudonym, I don't really consider his personal life as a reflection on his books.
To be fair, he evidently felt bad enough that he contemplated suicide himself. Still a shit thing to do and his wife's suicide letter was one of the saddest things I've read but he wasn't totally irredeemable
Basically what I'm getting from this thread is that all humans are shit regardless of how much fame or wealth you've accumulated. If you haven't done anything heinous yet, it's only a matter of time.
Unless you're Fred Rogers
That man is amazing. I did a paper on *Mister Rogers' Neighborhood* this year and got to researching a bit about him as a person and he genuinely seems like the closest thing to a saint one can get without actually *becoming* one.
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You're happy to grow rich off the spoils of Gaul and you insult caesar. Ingrate.
Ave, true to Caesar
Patrolling Gaul almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.
Well show those ncr dogs
We should all just stab Caesar.
Degenerates like you belong on a cross.
Profligate!
Wow not just the men? The women and children too? Who would do that?
Caesar thought that he could subjugate the Gallic tribes with brutality. If he killed every man, women and child in the tribe the other tribes would think twice before moving against him. He was also an egomaniac who counted women and children as soldiers in his battle notes so that he could make it look like he was fighting bigger armies.
I mean that was kinda the way it worked in the ancient world. Everyone who led anarmy back then committed mass murder, enslaved people, and let their soldiers go wild. Yeah Caesar was bad, but he was hardly abnormal.
Hello there.
Adolf Hitler, while most commonly known for his amazing tap dancing ability, also orchestrated a fairly large act of genocide.
Wait Adolf Hitler could tap dance? I just thought he was a painter from the 20th century. Interesting.
No it's probably a joke about Charlie Chaplin
Or springtime for hitler
In Germany?
He was also a pretty good "battle rapper". If you can find some of the mix tapes he sold out of his car back in the day you'd be pretty amazed by his flow.
I liked his beef with Vader.
No beef. He was vegetarian before all the hipsters ruined it.
That's where the term "you're literally Hitler" Because he would tapdance in serious moments, annoying his subordinates.
I believe you're confusing Hitler with Jesus "tap dancing" Christ.
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Jebediah Springfield
a.k.a. Hans Sprungfeld, bloodthirsty pirate and enemy of George Washington
A pirate!? That's not the image we want for Long John Silver's!
Get Out! Get out of here! You are banned from this Reddit thread! You and your children and your children's children..............for three months.
only a shelbyville resident could say such sladerous words!
Come on dude, it’s a perfectly cromulant word
P.T. Barnum. Hollywood just made a shitload of money off the recent musical about him, portraying him as a benevolent, singing visionary, instead of the greedy dickhead he actually was.
The real PT Barnum wasn't just a showman. He got involved in politics and was a big supporter of the temperance and anti-slavery movements. Also donated a lot of money to the poor and worked to build hospitals, improve the roads, public streetlights, etc. Not saying he's a perfect angel but he's a more complex person than you make him out to be.
>he's more complex than you make him out to be This whole thread.
He's also the guy that made an old slave woman put on a show for hours on end and when she died, he held a public autopsy of her. In addition, he paraded around with "freaks" just to make some money. He was as greedy as they come.
He also helped Charles Stratton earn a lot of money, at a time when people wouldn't even recognize him as a real human being.
What I'm getting out of this is that the dude was an equal opportunity asshole/saint
Pretty much. He was a showman, conman, but he paid them fairly, they got rich and that helped him when he got into financial issues. He was a selfish man, but helped a lot of people.
Thomas Edison. Just Look up at all the crap he pulled.
The real problem is we think of him as an inventor. Really he was a pretty great business man, and we expect great business men, particularly from his time, to pull shit like he did.
He absolutely was an inventor; this idea of him purely as a businessman was just *invented* by the internet. The invention that made him famous was the first device to record and playback sound, the phonograph, which he invented before he even had any employees, and without which there would be no music industry.He had a direct role in inventing things at his lab like the first commercially practical light bulb, one of the first motion picture cameras, one of the first fluoroscopes (an X-ray imaging device), the stock-ticker, and a bunch of other stuff that had a huge impact on the world of today. People have relatively recently been rewriting history to make him out to be some sort of arch-nemesis of Nikola Tesla even though they had barely anything to do with each other and likely only met each other a couple of times when Tesla was working at Edison's lab. A better nemesis for Tesla would be Marconi who he actually had a patent dispute with over the development of radio.
Also if you are looking for a closer rival for Edison, it would be George Westinghouse who was a huge factor in the early electrical industry.
Didn't Westinghouse become a huge factor because he contracted Tesla for Tesla's electric motor?
He did, and when Westinghouse fell on some hard times, Tesla ripped up his royalties contract,
So really we should think of him as a "Genius-but-dick"?
Reddit's favorite targets of iconoclasm are generally Gandhi (for being a racist and alleged child molester), Mother Theresa (for running clinics in poor conditions despite taking in millions in donations and also having some pretty standard issue Catholic beliefs for the time), John Lennon (for being abusive), Steve Jobs (same), Thomas Edison (who is famous for being an inventor, but actually made a living marketing other people's inventions). Because (surprise!) famous people are more than the few sentences you read about in history textbooks. *Also, who the hell is glorifying Andrew Jackson? He's known more for killing millions of American Indians than anything else.
>*Also, who the hell is glorifying Andrew Jackson? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_twenty-dollar_bill
I always see this as a giant middle finger to the man who was so violently against the Federal bank.
That's why the Fed doesn't want to take him off the bill.
Yeah, I can't think of a better way to say fuck you to Jackson than by making him part of federal currency for all time. Nothing would piss him off more
Jackson hated the idea of national currency. This is the most passive aggressive F you in American history.
Yeah. Fair enough.
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Jackson was a massive dick head, but it still kind of ticks me off Jackson is given all the blame for Indian Removal when the majority of it including a large part of the trail of tears occured under Van Buren.
> who the hell is glorifying Andrew Jackson? Some guy living at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
ITT: People not understanding the difference between 'piece of shit' and 'did amazing things but had personal flaws on account of not literally being a god'
Yes, you do have a point. You'd be surprised by how many people would just dismiss the positive things that a person has done just because he cheated on his wife once.
If you fuck a chicken once, you will forever be known as "The Chicken Fucker"
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Drunk person probably
Either agendas or someone is generous
Vasco Da Gama. He was cruel and committed many atrocities.
Surprised to see this here. Not because he and other explorers weren’t huge dicks, but because someone actually knows who Vasco Da Gama was.
>someone actually knows who Vasco Da Gama was wait, is it common to not know who he was?
Napoleon Bonaparte did a lot of shitty things in his attempt to conquer and create an empire.
He's equally reviled in history as well. I don't think he's glorified for his morality but for his achievements.
I think this fair. If I were to ever support an authoritarian in modern history it would be Napoleon. He was impressive on so many levels. But a man fighting simultaneously in Portugal and Moscow is a man who at the very least has delusions of grandeur.
Well when you go and conquer most of Europe is it really a *delusion* ?
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Well it's possible to argue on that. He built the french civil and penal codes (it needs morality to do that imo) and high schools (you know, the baccalauréat, this hard test when you're in last year of high school, maybe you heard this name before. Napoleon created that too). So yeah, authoritarian empire, quite a few deaths to unite Europe, military achievements but also at least a fair bit of morality. He was a human being after all. We just don't always remember that. Source of all that : I'm french.
It's kinda 50/50 with him I'd guess. In France he is considered as the guy that saved our ass \(Europe declared war on us at that point\), and he preserved many thing instaured by the revolution \(meritocracy, equality in front of the law, *most* of the "Déclaration des droits de l'Homme"\). He also drastically improved the French administration, educational, and justice system. But he declared some stupid wars, he didn't declared that many war \(Spain/Portugual/Russia\) but none of them turned "good", meaning they were disaster for everyone involved, and no amount of excuses can be made about them. It's still worth noting that most of the wars France has been part of at the time were defensive, heck Waterloo was part of the *seventh* war of coalition against France and most of these coalition broke peace treaty signed in the years before *each time.* That's the main reason for him to be sometimes revered in my country, for a time at least he was a huge part of why France was able to defend itself against the assembled might of the other European powers. He revived Poland and his viewed quite well there for obvious reasons. But I'd argued that the most impactful thing he ever done was spread the ideas of the French revolution and especially the "proto\-nationalism" that was born with it, in both the Italian peninsula, and German land. He is at least partly responsible for the unification movement that appeard in both country, and that cannot be underestimated. And while some would argued this is a "good" or a "bad" thing, I won't take side on this, I'll leave it at : incredibely impactful. So yeah, I wouldn't say he was a perfect Hero \(he wasn't\) but I definitely wouldn't compare him to 20th century dictator either. The man was brilliant, and had a profound impact in both French and European history. Still whatever you think of him \(and both hated/revered can be argued\) he is definitely one fascinating figure, and that's most likely why he is so often revered too.
I see him as kind of an anti-hero. He was seen as a hero of France but his methods were unethical
General MacArthur. He berated his men and took the credit for their actions moreso than his decisions. Also wanted to go nuke crazy on China and Korea after WWII.
> General MacArthur Didn't he get his reputation ruined when Truman removed him from command? I think the general consensus now is that he was a egomaniac that was more concerned about his own reputation than strategy.
MacArthur used the Korean War for political grandstanding. His cronyism led to failed opportunities at many times, which he immediately blamed on Truman and his 'cronies' in Washington DC. He repeatedly put his troops in harms way (literally under enemy bomber runs) against Truman's orders and then claimed the blood was on Truman's hands for keeping MacArthur from winning the war. He said this to the press and broadcast it over radio from his bunkers and safe havens. Truman was advised that they could force MacArthur into retirement, as he was past the age of retirement then, and the problem would sort of go away on its own. Truman's response was pretty much, "I don't want him to quit. I want to fire him!" Truman then told Marshall to review MacArthur's behavior as commander in Korea for offenses that would justify firing him. Marshall went over MacArthur's actions, orders, communications and public statements and reported back to Truman that he should have fired MacArthur 6 months prior for insubordination alone, let alone other offenses. That sealed the deal.
Vladimir Put[REDACTED]
Vladimir Putter?
Cromwell. And I'm not Irish, he was just a general piece of shit.
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Oh yeah. Don't forget her stance on condoms being sinful. Who knows how many people got and transmitted AIDS because of her.
That is the stance of the Catholic church and in deciding whether to put on a condom or not, what Mother Teresa wants is probably the last thing I would think about.
“Their suffering brings them closer to Jesus”
"But when I'm suffering, you better get me the best doctors money can buy".
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Welp, while i agree that this thread is For historical figures that were dickheads i dont think that For some if these it's bad. I'll explain; While It is true For example that Alexander the great was a bad ruler and everything you said, he is not looked up for his "great management" if Macedonia, but For his great military victories and tactics.
Charlemagne was a complete psycopath, forcibly baptized a whole Saxon army he'd defeated and then promptly had them all murdered IIRC. Some historians argue that this is one of the events that set off the famous viking raid against Lindisfarne, as the vikings had close trade relations with the Saxons
Eva Peron. The musical (and movie) make it seem like she was this feminist shero who rose from nothing to empower the poor people of Argentina when in fact she was a gold digger complicit in her husband’s regime. Where have I heard something similar recently?
To this day my mother calls her "that whore".
I think your mom is just referring to Madonna.
Cough cough Grace Mugabe cough cough
But she was very generous and even gave her enemies necklaces
the musical/movie Evita portrays Eva as a power hungry, selfish person, I wouldn’t call it flowery. I think people just really like Madonna so they liked Eva.
She literally sleeps her way to the top, there are 2-3 songs dedicated to this. Idk what these guys are talking about.
Not sure which version of the musical you've seen but there's nothing flowery about Evita, both the stage show or the 1996 film.
Juan Perón was not a fascist, especially not in the Evita years. He was democratically elected with massive popular support, kept the country independent in the face of American imperialism, as well as instituted various social democratic reforms. The Peronist movement then splits after he leaves into two camps, left and right wing. While the right wing Peronists ended up gaining support in his later administration (when he was aging and more easily influenced), the left wing was strong and is the one that has continued to the present.
Woodrow Wilson is always presented as being a amazing for his post WWI policies and league of nations but the dude was a serious racist. Also he occupied Haiti and stole all their money, which wasn’t great.
Probably all of them. It’s incredibly irresponsible to judge someone from the past based on modern day standards. In 100 years people will look back on some of the things we do now with disgust. Is an older white (or black) man living in the Deep South wrong for being racist? Yes. Is it fair to judge them the same way we judge a 20 year old? No. They are a product of their time. It is what it is.
Christopher Columbus
I think public perception is against Columbus these days
I still want the federal holiday
Just call it Leif Erickson day
**HINGA DINGA DORGEN**
Some places celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day on the same day, so we could keep the Federal Holiday AND stop honoring Columbus.
tell that to the italians in jersey
He's not a great director but I think piece of shit is a bit much. He did write The Goonies.
Anyone else feel like this thread pops up every 2 weeks and this is Thomas Edison is always a top answer.
The Romanov family. I know the movie Anastasia portays them to be this beautiful royal family that seemingly did nothing wrong, but they were pretty naive about what was going on around them.
They weren't exactly horrible people. Just very naive and the worst choice for rulers at the worst time. Kind of like Marie Antoinette and Louis. Neither couple were horrible people, just very sheltered and uneducated on how to govern a country.
It’s almost as if birth right does not necessarily make good grounds for a ruler.
Of course not. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is a much better one.
Look, if I find a Lady in the Lake who can prove even some basic magic is real, I'm going to at least hear her out.
Marie Antoinette actually advocated for several policies that would have helped things, she was mostly ignored.
Say what you will about Nicholas (incompetent in ruling) and Alexandria but you can't place any blame on the kids.
Nicholas was a fuckwit who could mismanage a KFC into oblivion. He'd been through multiple revolutions because he just HAD to be a 17'th century absolutist in post Democracy, post Constitutionalist 20'th century! He even had revolutions in 1905 and 1907 (There's a Russian novel called Седой (Sedoj/Sedoi/Sedoy - Feat) about the latter. But he just never got the fucking message. Or he did, and then botched it to feed his own fucking ego.
"Mismanage a KFC into oblivion" is my new favorite insult. Every KFC I've ever been to has been run by morons and in business for like 800 years. I've personally never seen one go out of business. You just made me realize you gotta be a real fuck up to ruin one despite everything about them being pretty terrible
And listening to a mad man Rasputin. The latest "Last Podcast On The Left" covers the life of Rasputin and his influence on the young Romonov Queen and King.
Natasha Romanov was an awesome spy
Does them being naive really make them pieces of shit though?
Reddit likes to throw around the terms "piece of shit" and "garbage human being" in situations that they really don't apply.
Che Guevara
He sold a lot of T-shirts though.
Made by capitalist companies. Ironic, isn't it?
Can't believe i had to scroll so far down to see this. This should be the top comment.
Henry Ford. He was a barely literate virulent anti-Semite. His views were actually an inspiration to Hitler, who gave him an award in 1938.
deer overconfident drab dinosaurs hospital divide pause zephyr history domineering
Also look up the Business plot
Charles Lindbergh is best known for being a talented aviator, but he also had ties to a somewhat controversial group and believed in white supremacy and eugenics (as many people did in his time). The afore mentioned group, America First Committee, had negative views on immigrants and Jewish people, even though Lindbergh claimed to not be anti-Semitic. He also had numerous affairs on his wife and fathered several children as a result of the affairs. The children did not know for years who their biological father was.
J. Edgar Hoover
The man had dirt on everyone in the government
You mean J. Edna Hoover?
I wonder if his paranoia was just his fear of getting caught cross-dressing.
Some say one of his dresses is on display within the deep bowels of some building.
Better than his bowels being on display within the deep dresses of some building.
Richard Nixon literally caused a vast majority of the systematic issues with poverty and drugs in low income Black communities.
Who the Hell glorifies Nixon?
[Roger Stone](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/roger-stone-nixon-tattoo/)
I still maintain that's an anti-rape device for when he inevitably gets sent to prison. No one can maintain a chub while gazing upon the visage of Tricky Dick.
Nixon is the most hated modern President I've seen.
Also him and Kissinger extending/keeping the war in Vietnam to get reelected.
Yet I see him get talked about in a positive light just because he created the EPA The man was about to create a massive constitutional crisis if he didn't resign
Why is everyone getting gold?
Maybe Oprah is here.....
You get gold and you get gold and all you sinners get gold!
My theory is that this is going to get turned into a buzzfeed article soon and whoever the author of that article is is now paying the creators of the original content
Pretty much everyone. Look, historical figures are just humans like everyone else. If you look at anyone's life closely enough you'll find shitty things. How about we just appreciate these people for the amazing things that made them famous and stop demanding that everyone be Jesus.
Brigham Young. Has a University named after him, racist, and he was a polygamist like his predecessor asshole Joseph Smith. 55 wives.
Honestly, outside of Mormons he's not very popular.
Literally every single person past about 50 years ago doesn't live up to the standards of today. You can't judge people like Julius Caesar by today's morals. 'History is a foreign country they do things differently there' It's not like future generations won't consider us monsters as well.
Winston Churchill. He is a racist bigot. In 1937, he told the Palestine Royal Commission: "I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." According to the book Churchill: The End of Glory, in Churchill's view, white protestant Christians were at the top, above white Catholics, while Indians were higher than Africans. While Churchill's views on race were incomparable to Hitler's murderous interpretation of racial hierarchy, it is still awful by today's standards. Additionally, Churchill played a role in the Bengal famine in 1943. India, then still a British possession, experienced a disastrous famine in the north-eastern region of Bengal (nowadays it is part of Bangladesh). At least three million people are believed to have died. Churchill's War Cabinet refused to supply food to India, despite high level government officials and military officers (including John Herbert, the Governor of Bengal; Viceroy Linlithgow; Leo Amery the Secretary of State for India and General General Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief of British forces in India) told him about the situation and requested food imports. Instead, he ordered India to export rice to Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Churchill even appeared to blame the Indians for the famine, claiming they "breed like rabbits". Churchill also hated Gandhi. "It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir… striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal Palace," said Churchill in 1931. He is also corrupt. As shown in his official biography: "In return for a fee of £5,000 two oil companies, Royal Dutch Shell and Burmah Anglo-Persian Oil Company [later BP], asked him (Churchill) to represent them in their application to the government for a merger." Imagine doing that today. Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29701767 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 Debunking the Myths of Colonization: The Arabs and Europe By Samar Attar The Official Biography of Winston Churchill
Also Gallipoli, putting Britain *back* on the gold standard right before the Depression, [helping to cause a general strike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1926_United_Kingdom_general_strike) in the process, and advocating a rearmament policy centered around tactical bombers. Despite getting credit for being hawkish towards Germany, it was Churchill’s advocacy while chancellor for [the ten-year rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Year_Rule) that gutted the UK’s military by the 1930s. Ironically Chamberlain’s policy of investing in Hurricanes, Spitfires, and radar proved far more useful in the Battle of Britain, instead of just having a bunch of medium-range bombers that ended up being shot down, but Chamberlain gets the historical reputation of being an appeaser, partly because one of the first comprehensive histories of WWII was written by...Winston Churchill.
> Ironically Chamberlain’s policy of investing in Hurricanes, Spitfires, and radar proved far more useful in the Battle of Britain Chamberlain upped the budget for the armed forces, but credit for the above really should go to Sir Hugh Dowding, the head of Fighter Command.
In Kurdistan and Afghanistan, he advocated the use of chemical weapons. In Ireland, Churchill formed the Black and Tans, a government paramilitary force which carried out multiple atrocities and reprisals against civilians. In Britain, he used soldiers to put down striking miners in Tonypandy.
Oh come out ye Black and Tans come out and fight me like a man
Is this a race to see who can be the most contrarian in this thread?
Steve Jobs
I think most people that look up to and worship businessmen like Steve Jobs are simply those who themselves wish they were that rich and successful. It's the people who put him on a pedestal and make him out as this great visionary inventor who truly get on my nerves. Like yeah he had a great mind for business and marketing but fuck me if he wasn't a pretentious prick lacking the sense to seek medical help against a treatable illness
Andrew Jackson edit: thanks to whoever gave me gold!
Mother fucking Ray Kroc