5 People You've Never Heard Of Who Saved the World
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John F. Kennedy? You've heard about him. Caesar? Got his own salad. History is stuffed with famous warriors and mad geniuses who are just waiting to be played by Russel Crowe, or at least, Ben Affleck. This article isn't about them. This is about the little guys who wandered onto History's highway and managed to do something that changed the world for the better, and in a huge way. #5.
The Security Guard Who Brought Down a President
Wait, Who? There you are, getting ready for work, brushing your teeth, staring at the mirror, wondering if anyone is going to notice that zit... and then this thought kinda just pops into your head: "Today, I'm going to accidentally bring down the American government." Never happened to you? Security guard Frank Wills had no early warning either. With a hefty paycheck of $80 a week, Wills might have had good reason to believe he was well out of History's high beams. But in 1972, while patrolling the offices where the Democratic National Headquarters was, Frank noticed that little strips of tape was holding a few doors open. He tore them off. Coming back later, he saw that the tape had been replaced and, deciding that shenanigans were afoot, he called the police.
You all pretty much know the rest of the story. The burglars were arrested, tied to Nixon's re-election campaign and eventually, to the President himself. Amidst charges of massively illegal behavior, Nixon finally resigned in 1974, and was beaten to death in an alleyway behind a New Jersey Taco Bell.
No, wait. He became a bestselling author, and lived for years. Wills, the hard working American who was just doing his job, managed to disintegrate into obscurity almost as quickly as he'd emerged. He played himself in the 1976 movie All the President's Men, but he didn't even get a raise for bringing down the government. In fact, when he left the job because they apparently refused to pay for vacation time, he found he couldn't get work anywhere else. One university told him that they didn't want the government to withhold funding because they'd hired him as a security guard. Money went fast, and there wasn't a whole hell of a lot of it to begin with. He couldn't pay his electricity bill, couldn't afford to bury his mother, and had to wash his clothes in a goddamn bucket. And not one of those fancy golden buckets. In 1983, he was sentenced to a year in prison for shoplifting a pair of $13 shoes. And that was pretty much it until he died in 2000. Without This Person, We Might Not Have: The desire to add "-gate" to every scandal that makes the news. That, and an executive branch that wasn't totally corrupt. For most of the 20th century the media had a crush on the president. Teddy Roosevelt made racist jokes, JFK chased tail, and the press blushed and wondered if the president ever thought of them when they weren't around. Frank Wills showed the world how important accountability can be, especially when the president is a paranoid lunatic.
Watergate caused Congress to strengthen the Freedom of Information act, making it a vicious scalpel of Truth for the common man. Until George W. Bush weakened it in 2001. And in 2002. Don't worry, though. We're pretty sure his intentions are pure. #4.
The Kid Who Killed Richard the Lionheart (and Changed History)
Wait, Who? Richard I of England, usually portrayed as a smug Sean Connery type, spent most of his life at war. When he wasn't slaughtering heathens, hating Jews and seizing land, he was at war with his brothers and his father. The man had lived to the then-unbelievable age of 42 when a hundred elite assassins sacrificed their lives to mortally wound him in a dazzling swordfight along a sheer cliff face. No, just kidding. It was one kid with a crossbow and a frying pan. The young assassin was such a nobody that historians don't even know his name, calling him either Peter, Dudo, John or Bertran (we'll just call him PDJB). The Lionheart came to PDJB's tiny land to suppress a minor revolt, killing the kid's father and brother during the assault. With most of the castle's defenders dead, Richard the Lionheart took a stroll along the base of the walls.
And there, history tells us, the Lionheart rofled. Because at the top of the wall, all alone, was our friend PDJB, batting away arrows with a dented frying pan, and shouting insults at the top of his young lungs. Spotting the king, the boy fired an arrow and missed. Richard, who clearly thought arrow wounds were things that happened to other people, cheered on the defender. The second arrow buried itself in his shoulder. After an unsuccessful surgery made the wound gangrenous, the dying king had PDJB brought to him, and pardoned the boy. Once the king had died, his soldiers skinned PDJB alive. Then, to drive home the point that everyone was just so irritable about the regicide thing, they hung him.
With Richard dead, his brother John became King of England, and began losing territories from Richard's hard-won empire so fast that you have to imagine he was getting candy and handjobs out of it. Without This Person, We Might Not Have: The Magna Carta. Though there is still a debate as to whether Richard was even into the ladies, he was still married to one. If he had survived long enough to have a kid, the crown wouldn't have gone to John, who lost so many battles that he got the nickname "Softsword". After a particularly nasty defeat, his Barons forced him to sign a document that essentially made him a king in name only. Add this to the fact that we remember John now as the sissy, whining lion in Disney's Robin Hood, and you have a pretty fair idea of how bad he was for England at the time.
If it wasn't for that one lucky shot, English royalty might have held on to their God-given deathgrip on the lives of their subjects. Our Magna Carta-inspired Constitution? Gone. And you and I, buddy? Proud citizens of the great nation of "New England". Kiss that July 4th holiday goodbye, suckers. And pretty much all of the political advances of the past few hundred years. #3.
The Slave Girl Who Helped Conquer The New World
Wait, who? Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes has always been credited with taking down the savage Aztec empire when it was at its bloody peak, but he never would have gotten anywhere if it hadn't been for his mistress, Dona Marina. Let's look at the numbers. The population of the Aztec empire around that time was about 20,000,000. Cortes, in typical we-have-superior-weapons-plus-they-are-heathen-savages fashion, only thought to bring 600 men. We'll leave you to do the hilarious math. Fractions have never been our strong point. The idea is insane. He should have been on a sacrificial altar within a week. But shortly after landing, he was given twenty slave girls as a gift. La Malinche, later Dona Marina, was among them, and became his "translator".
Remember: Cortes and his men didn't know the land, the language or the culture. Any reinforcements were months and months away. With Marina's help, the Spanish army avoided traps, made allies among the natives and worked their way towards the capitol of Tenochtitlan, which surrendered without a fight. Historians have been having a vicious cage match over this for years. The most interesting theory is that Marina took advantage of religious prophecy and imagery to trick her people into thinking that Cortes was the earthly incarnation of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. By the time the devout emperor realized he had been tricked, it was too late.
Without This Person, We Might Not Have: The world. Everyday life in the Aztec Empire looked like a Rob Zombie movie. During one four day "festival" they sacrificed 84,400 people in order to prevent their sun god from causing the apocalypse. Now nobody can say for certain what would have happened to this terrifying culture if they'd given Cortes a less cunning slave girl, but it almost definitely would have happened like this: Instead of gods, the Aztecs see Cortes and his men as bank robbers with weird pigmentation. After slaughtering them easily, they spend the next few decades studying his advanced weapons. Hundreds of years later, you spend most of your childhood hoping that Aztec fighter jets don't bomb your city as a sacrifice to the sun god. |
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f**k WHOEVER WROTE THE IGNORANT ARTICLE
I also think it's an insult to Native Mexicans to imply that the brutal Spanish Conquest was the "salvation" of anyone. It benefited the conquerors (as do most conquests--Arab, Mongol, Roman, etc.) at the expense of the indigenous peoples. Tens of millions died of diseases and they were subject to poverty and oppression that still reverberates today. The fact that Cortes so handily toppled the greatest empire North America ever produced is proof enough that Mesoamerican civilization could never have CONCEIVABLY posed a threat to Europe.
I'm a Cracked fan, but your portrayal of Cortes' conquest and the Aztec Empire is fallacious and ludicrous. The Quetzalcoatl myth is a post-Conquest fabrication. Sure, Malintzin/Malinche/Dona Marina was an IMMENSE help to the conquistadores, but ultimately Cortes' seemingly-ridiculous numbers (which you did get right) against those of the Aztecs (actually, Central Mexico ALONE had something like 25 million people, and the Aztecs had conquered lands in the Gulf Coast and Oaxaca as well) were offset by two very basic factors: superior weaponry and horses. After kicking the s**t out of Mesoamerican armies with quilted-cotton armor and wooden swords studded with obsidian (volcanic glass), Cortes was able to secure all the Native allies he needed (granted, Malintzin's help was indispensable here).
Furthermore, that's not even mentioning diseases. The Europeans brought diseases Native Americans had no resistance to. Beginning about 1520 (during the siege of Tenochtitlan) these diseases devastated Mesoamerica, both the Spaniards' native allies and the Aztec populace. Those 25 million people were reduced to about one million three hundred thousand by 1600 or so.
I agree that the Aztec Empire was particularly bloodsoaked, representing as it did the greatest cannibal empire ever created. But I think your portrayal of it as Rob-Zombie-esque is problematic--this was a civilization without beasts of burden, driven to a destructive cult of war and sacrifice in order to obtain protein (astounding, I know, but true). There's absolutely no way that the Aztecs would have acquired iron technology by studying the Spaniards' weapons--for one thing, there wouldn't have been TIME: if Cortes had failed, despite his steel weapons, gunpowder, horses and disease, the Spanish would have sent another force. For another thing, iron technology is very specialized: you have to really KNOW what the f**k you're doing. Whereas a troop of Boy Scouts can produce artisan-quality copper (which, plus tin makes bronze) iron requires the use of charcoal to create much hotter temperatures in order to melt iron ore.
Sure, if the ancient (pre-Aztec) Mesoamericans had been able to trade with the Iron-Age Mediterranean back in Roman or Carthaginian days, there's no reason they couldn't have picked up the technology. But the fact is that at the time of the Conquest the only metallurgy in Mesoamerica was concerned with precious metals--silver, gold. They weren't even in the Bronze Age.
As an example of how Iron Age technology DID diffuse, consider the case of Western Africa. Phoenician settlers in the Maghreb (the coastal littoral on the Mediterranean) introduced it and it spread across the Sahara, transforming hitherto-Stone Age African cultures in the Sahara, the Sahel/Niger drainage and Western Africa. Western African Bantu-speakers migrating east and south brought iron to East Africa and Central Africa, respectively (granted, some of the migrations were underway before iron, but iron greatly expanded their reach and size).
How about the Russian guy who saved the world from total destruction.
In the middle of the cold war, an American weather balloon got out of control and floated under a Soviet satellite and it was somehow mistaken to be a missile, so, whoever was leader of the USSR when this happened ordered America to be Nuked, the guy who launches the missiles gets the order but thinks something is wrong and never launches the missiles, when the Soviets find out that they never got nuked, instead of celebrating and congratulating the guy who saved America and Russia, they give the guy the death penalty for disobeying the order.
I don't think it gets the importance of the Magna Carta right.
At the time, kings didn't claim a god-given right. The first guy who came up with that idea was from the 16th century. Afterwards, the king didn't essentially rule in name only. It's more that there was now explicitly written down that he needed to follow rules just as much as anyone else.
It was the pretty much the basis of English law and from there the law of a lot of the places they later conquered. But New England didn't exist at the time. Maybe it might never have. Or maybe it might have turned into the USA just as in real life, just with a different style constitution. Most probably with a basis in Roman law instead, like most countries in Europe. The Magna Carta clearly isn't that crucial to political freedom and such like seeing as only English-conquered places. Those with other constitutions aren't necessarily worse off on freedoms. One thing that would be likely though is that there would have been no English civil war.
garethmcc- not to sound like a dick, but South Africa didn't even have equal rights for all until the 1990's. Only then was everyone allowed to vote, and there's still a lot of segregation. Sorry, but I don't consider that 'modernized'.
South africa is a fantastic, modern country to live in that has a more humane constitution than any other country in the world. Blood Diamonds? Give me a break! I have lived here all my life and the statement "You'd still have South Africa, and all the awful s**t that goes on there,..." just sounds grossly uneducated and has let me lose a lot of respect for the writers of Cracked. I know its a comedy site but stuff like that is not funny at all.
Loved it!
How about the Soviet soldier who, in 1983, ignored a false missle-launch signal from the Kremlin and saved us from World War 3? They gave him a dishonorable discharge, and now he dosn't have a pot to piss in...he's the Watergate guard times a billion.
EVERYBODY knows La Malinche, at least they do here in Mexico. She's like this big National Figure.
That is the biggest load of s**t about South Africa anyone has ever written. Really, come on... Blood diamonds. South Africa is one of the leaders in enforcing human rights and you're on about blood diamonds?
Hi, majority of commenters, I'm Satire. Have we met?
Randal2477.... no one cares lol
Dave Mathews blows ass. He's worse than Bruce Springstien
Oh yeah baby.
That Taco Bell is NOT off "Route 34". It's off Stelton Rd. in South Plainfield at the Middlesex Mall.
And yes, I would not be surprised to find out Jimmy Hoffa was buried there in that alleyway.
That Taco Bell sucked, actually. 12 people got food poisoning at that one a few years back, and they closed it and had them like retool the whole thing. It was big news. People pooped because of it.I am glad I was never poisoned there, that I know of.
Also, that Payless Shoes over to the left used to be a Roy Rogers. ROY'S CHICKEN WAS THE BEST!!!!!!!!!!
I dunno, but that's awesome.
You forgot Stanislav Petrov, the Russian officer that did not follow military orders to launch nukes at the United States, when the radar machine was malfunctioning.
Dear 'boobpatrol' re: comment left 11/13 at 7:22pm
The Watergate Hotel had NOTHING to do with the DNC.
It had everything to do with Daniel Ellsburg, and what was in his files.
Nice screen ID.
Haha, great article. I loved the hypotheses for every situation. Aztecs with technology would be a nightmare! Now I'm thinking about how many times George Washington brushed with died, and what if Jefferson didn't buy the midwest from Napoleon? This article got me thinking about "trivial" things
Frank Wills saved the world? The hell he did! Anybody under the age of 60 here actually know what the f**k watergate was actually about? Stealing the formula for mind-control? The largest nuclear bomb ever invented? Evidence that Nixon had given nuclear bombs to terrorists? No! Nixon was (*gasp!*) trying to get a look at what the DNC's election campaign strategies were gonna be! That's much worse than, I don't know, Hillary Clinton having her long-time law partner shot to death and framed for suicide. That's far worse than Madeleine Albright providing the ingredients for nuclear bombs to a country that has sworn to destroy us! Far worse than provoking a cult full of crazy people in Waco by shooting at them and setting their building on fire, then blaming them for the men, women, and YES, children being burned to a crisp inside! Oh, far worse! He was stealing a sneak preview of s****y, cliche democrat speeches that use a lot of buzz-words yet say absolutely nothing. Even Hitler would never have stooped that low!
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Just pointing out the BIGGEST flaw on the bit about the "slave girl" nobody knows. THERE IS A f*****g WHOLE WORD IN SPANISH FOR HER AND HER EFFECT ON HISTORY. Malinchista is a person who despises their own culture in favor of a foreigner. Kids who listen to music in a language they don't know are malinchistas, people who acquire language or manners from other cultures are malinchistas. SO SHE IS GOD DAMNED KNOWN ABOUT.