7 Great Men in History (And Why You Should Hate Them)
Some historical claims are irrefutable: Hitler was a dick; Einstein was a brilliant sex maniac. A few other claims, however, are not quite as black and white. In honor of Labor Day, the only federal holiday that doesn't pay homage to a historical event or person, we've uncovered some 100-percent true reasons you should probably hate some of history's greatest heroes.
Historical Figure:
Patrick Henry
What He's Remembered For
Most people know Patrick Henry as the radical revolutionary credited for demanding "Give me liberty or give me death," thereby inspiring all of Virginia to take up arms against British tyranny.
Why You Should Hate Him
Few people know that when he wasn't giving moving speeches, he was locking his wife in his basement. In Mindblowers, by Jim Rhine, we learn that for the last four years of her life Henry's wife was chained in her basement, possibly in a straitjacket and forbidden to see her children. It isn't unreasonable to conclude that the following conversation may have, at some point, occurred.
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Alright, honey, I'm going out for some beer and stronger chains. Anything you need? |
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Yes. UNCHAIN ME FROM THE MOTHERFUCKING BASE ... |
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Besides me unchaining you from the basement. Which we've discussed, remember? Remember, hon? How we discussed that? |
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Patrick, I swear to God, either give me liberty or give me death. |
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Ha, ha! Well, no, of course. But ... waiiiittt ... that ... did you come up with that? Is that yours? Can I use that? |
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What? What are you talking about? |
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Honey, I think you just saved America. |
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Awesome. Now, unchain me from the basement. |
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That's just the sort of crazy talk I'd expect from a woman I chained in my basement. |
Historical Figure:
Gandhi
What He's Remembered For
Being a spiritual leader in India who fought for Indian independence without ever resorting to violence. He's primarily known in America as that Macintosh spokesperson who looks sort of like E.T.
Why You Should Hate Him
Here's a quote from Gandhi: "I do not consider [name omitted] to be as bad as depicted. He is showing an ability that is amazing, and he seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed."
Can you guess who's name was omitted? If you guessed Adolf Hitler, you're right and also totally insane for guessing that. You may remember Hitler as the character mentioned in the intro to this piece as an irrefutable dick. Apparently, Gandhi disagreed. We should have known this about Gandhi as soon as he started shaving his head ...
Historical Figure:
Thomas Jefferson
What He's Remembered For
He wrote the Declaration of Independence and served as a governor, a minister to France, a secretary of state and a president of the United States.
Why You Should Hate Him
Jefferson's torrid affair with his slave, Sally Hemmings, is already fairly well-publicized. You think that's a scandal? Please. President Sex Machine would be lucky if that was the end of that issue. Instead, he fathered and subsequently denied several of Hemmings' children while giving speeches explaining how a white man marrying a black woman would produce "a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent."
Also, Sally Hemmings was most likely the sister of Jefferson's dead wife, essentially his sister-in-law, so there would be a couple of kids running around the White House that Jefferson was both father and Uncle to. He'd really have his hands full. At least, he would have, had he ever actually acknowledged their existence.
Historical Figure:
Woodrow Wilson
What He's Remembered For
He was the 28th American president, a Nobel Prize winner and the only president in history to have a Ph.D.
Why You Should Hate Him
He was a gigantic racist. This is true. When he wasn't creating the Federal Trade Commission or setting up the League of Nations, Ol' Woody was praising the KKK and laughing at the "darky" stories his wife would tell him nightly. He referred to other ethnic groups, including African-Americans as "hyphenated Americans" and, according to John Richard Stephens' Weird History 101, has gone on record to say, "Any man who carries a hyphen with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready." The man clearly did not care for the hyphen.
With the rise of al-Qaeda, you could almost make the argument that Wilson was ahead of his time in his hyphen-phobia, a word he was probably terrified of. But, then you remember that he would have thought Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a bigger threat than al-Zawahiri and you realize Wilson was actually retarded.
Is this article sarcastic, ironic, or are we really supposed to hate someone because they were handicapped? Seems hypocritical after you spout over and over about hating people because they were racist, or sexist, or blah blah blah.
ReplyThere are far more pertinent reasons to despise Gandhi - for one thing, he called black people "kaffirs" and at the age of 37 joined a British expedition to put down African black tribes. For another, he was a blatantly self-serving politician who marginalised anyone who might prove to be a threat to his position in the Congress Party (google Subhas Chandra Bose, someone who might also put an end to this myth of a "non-violent" Indian freedom struggle), and acted as a safety valva to let off anti-British steam, rather than act as an actual revolutionary. By the end of his life, Gandhi was a back number, his policies largely rejected even by his own proteges, and had it not been for his assassination, he would have been a forgotten figure in Indian history.
ReplyReally? The author is being sarcastic about FDR, guys. Relax! Seriously.
Replydont worry guys when my time machine is ready ill let you have the first shot at Edision, and if im right it all should be ready before Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones reaturn so Tesla will be able to build that machine to save us
ReplyI was disturbed by the Patrick Henry story, so I Wiki'd him. It seems this article only presents the apparently horrifying side, and fails to mention that:
Reply1. Henry's wife was insane.
2. Henry kept her at home because he wanted to save her from the far worse conditions that she would get at a mental hospital.
3. Henry seemed to be following medical protocol at the time, except that he did everything he could to make her life comfortable.
Just check the Wikipedia article's "Sarah's Illness" section.
Are you f*****g kidding me? You hate FDR cause he can't walk? that is a s****y reason! You said a better reason in there, he cheated on his wife multiple times, but you go with he's in a wheelchair? What are you, Peter m***********g Griffin?
ReplyAlso, neither Edison or Tesla invented the lightbulb, it was an English inventor by the name of Swann.
Wait, back up to FDR. He had polio and was immobilized below the waist and couldn't technically walk(Although he was still able to walk). He was president through the beginning of World War II and made several famous addresses - Generally while on his legs.
ReplySo why the f**k should we hate him? I admire him all the more because he was one of the best presidents while immobilized.
Is the author seriously saying we should hate the wheelchair bound?
ReplyGandhi isn't actually that far off about Hitler. I've said this before: there are plenty of racist people out there with irrational thoughts about eradicating a certain group. The only thing that separates Hitler from just another misguided, deranged but otherwise harmless neo-Nazi is that PEOPLE OBEYED HIM. Wake up - Hitler wasn't the first, last, or most hateful person who wanted to kill all the Jews. He was definitely a bad man, but it would be more constructive to blame all the perfectly sane people who listened to him.
ReplyAlso, part of me will always really hate FDR for the Japanese internment camps. Think Guantanamo Bay, but with even less probable cause and even more obstruction of justice. It was legal to lock up anyone with 1/16 Japanese blood or more, and most Japanese-Americans (even first-generation) had no idea where or what Pearl Harbor was. As a lily-white, freckled redhead with 1/4 Japanese heritage, this just hits a little too close to home for me to jump on the FDR bandwagon like the rest of this country has.
Gandhi actually said that in 1940, when the WWII just began. The blitzkriegs were indeed relatively bloodless, and Hitler's genocidal tactics were not well-known at the time. Gandhi later denounced Hitler.
Well, except that WW2 began because Hitler decided to invade neighboring sovereign countries without provocation in an attempt to conquer all of Europe.
Given that Gandhi's chief struggle in India the resistance to the British invasion and occupation of his country, this makes him a hypocrite as well.
That the blitzkriegs were relatively bloodless is really reaching to justify something that should have been outright condemned. It's like saying a group of thieves were admirable in how they robbed a bank because they didn't kill anyone in the process. Except in this case, instead of stealing from the bank, they took the whole building, people and all, and instead of a bank it was an entire country.
It's been thought that Elanor Roosevelt was actually a lesbian so she probably really didn't mind FDR sleeping with his secretary.
ReplyHOLYSHITDAVIDBOWIE
I'm flabbergasted at how upset everyone is about the FDR thing! Haha, he doesn't hate FDR at all. It's sarcasm. Cracked ALWAYS writes about the Roosevelts and how awesome they are. Chill out.
ReplyAnother reason to hate Woodrow Wilson, besides his support for the KKK, is that he also signed the Federal Reserve Act which created the Federal Reserve Central Bank, that's controlled by a small group of private bankers (the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the House of Windsor/British Royal Family) placing the American people in dept to this group of private bankers by giving them supreme control of the issuance of credit and currency of the entire nation. (if want to know more how the money system actually works? Then Google "Zeitgeist The Movie: Federal Reserve...watch videos)
ReplyIn regards to Woodrow Wilson hatred of black people, it's important to note that while he had a lot of support from southerners, President Wilson shared the views of many liberal fascist Democrats in the North and in Hollywood at the time. Remember, Hitler considered himself a liberal socialist who later would become the leader of Germany's National Socialist Party, otherwise known as "The NAZI Party for short.
Wilson on the other hand, was the first President to screen a movie at the White House. 1915's The Clansman - that is.
President Wilson's film contributor/author friend, Thomas Dixon, contacted him, about screening The Clansman (also known as The Birth of a Nation). It pays to know racists. Soon after, the first film was screening at the White House.
Wilson and Dixon were social friends at John Hopkins University. And, they were also professional networkers. Wilson, for example, introduced, Dixon to the Baltimore Mirror's editor, where new writing opportunities were opening up.
It is hard to discuss The Clansman by Dixon, without mentioning Wilson, although leftwing writers seem to be very good at it.
As Anthony Slide points out in American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon (p.83): "Wilson and Thomas Dixon are far closer in racial philosophy than most liberal biographers of the president might have one believe."
Wilson's support of The Clansman helped to revive the political Klan.
Because, as I mentioned before, there were many racists in Los Angeles and New York, especially in the eugenics community (although they didn't always wear white sheets). Many of them were also Democrats. In fact, thanks to Hollywood, the Klan received a huge public relations shot.
I agree with what you say except for your reference to zeitgeist. This "documentary" is not the most truthful piece of film. As I do recall from the last time I watched it, they have a whole section on income tax and apparently, in the world those people live in, there is no law mandating income tax. Unfortunately for them the law that mandates income tax happens to be the 16th amendment to the constitution. The contention that the 16th amendment was not ratified is principly based on a book by William Benson called "The law that never was". The book argues that many of the state ratifications didn't count for reasons like Illinois misspelled a word, and that Ohio really wasn't a state at the time. While the arguments are creative and novel, they have never been successful argued in court as a basis for not paying taxes.
I did guess that the one in Ghandi's quote was Hitler, and I don't consider myself insane. With Hitler being considered the pinnacle of evil, and given the context I'd say it was pretty obvious. Oh, and Will Smith said that Hitler wasn't that bad too.
ReplyI may get a lot of flak for this, but when it comes to Ghandi: if this quote was said before September 1939 (when Hitler invaded Poland), it really isn't all that unreasonable. The Holocaust hadn't started in earnest yet; most Jews were simply being deported at this time. And he had annexed several territories without shedding blood, re-uniting Germanic people, and repairing the damaged pride they had suffered as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. It's likely that had WWII not happened, even with his well-known anti-Semitism (which really wasn't uncommon in Europe at this time), Hitler would be remembered as one of the more inspirational German leaders. Obviously, that hurts like a b***h to say considering what DID happen.
ReplyNow in FDR's defense: it's important to remember that Eleanor cheated on him, too. 'Nuff said. Both were still amazing people.
He hadn't started killing massive amounts of people yet, that's true, but he DID already hire goons to assassinate political opponents and use the Jewish population as a scapegoat for government problems. The thing that makes the Gandhi quote so despicable is that insinuates that those things seem to be what he liked about Hitler: Assassinating small groups of people who threatened him and manipulating the masses into submission rather than killing them.
DNA tests showed it wasn't Jefferson, but his despised horny relative, that was responsible.
ReplyActually, the DNA testing showed that a Jefferson male fathered the last child of Sally Hemings. There is no evidence it wasn't Thomas Jefferson. Along with the circumstantial evidence, it was most likely him. There is absolutely no evidence that the Carr brothers (who were blamed for it) were linked in the DNA evidence.
While I know your just joking for the Gandhi part(because you've should obviously have done your research and know Gandhi did not, in fact, support Hitler), it still makes me sad to read that part
Replythats because its a bullshit article
Its kinda sad that when i read the word "Nikola Tesla", the only reason it sounded like something i had heard before, is because ive played to much Command and conquer :o
ReplyI think we should also hate the stupid people who don't understand sarcasm.
ReplyWe should really hate those who take themselves and others who post too seriously. Perhaps you didn't hear my sarcastic tone. My snarkiness. You make me sad like onion rings.
We should hate FDR for being a parapegic? WTF Cracked?
ReplyWe should also hate you for being a dumbass.
I'm gonna go with valid question. I mean, I get the whole idea of double set-up with the twist being he married his cousin. But come on, no one was president longer than he was: That's a comic goldmine!
I did a biography on Gandhi in high school to discover he was really a dick before said 'enlightenment', too. He was quoted in the book to have said he would come home every day and beat the s**t out of his wife for fun. It's the path to enlightenment, brother.
Replydon't forget his racist stuff and sleeping naked with little girls(sexual or not, who cares)...
He still WAS a dick:
It's a pretty widely accepted idea that the only reason he used nonviolence is because it was the most effective option available to him; he knew that the Indian population wouldn't be able to win an actual war with the British army. While most of the people involved in that movement were good people, Gandhi was most certainly not.