5 Famous Historical Bad Guys (And Their Side Of The Story)

It all started with the grittiest possible reboot of Mary Poppins. Now, whenever you discuss politics, the word "Nazi" gets thrown around a lot. It's usually unfair, but in this case it's unavoidable -- because David and Charles Koch were raised by a literal Nazi nanny. She had emigrated from Germany, where she was very pro-Hitler, and loved to tell fairy tales about naughty children getting tortured. Have you ever seen a congressman on TV arguing to destroy environmental protection and minimum wage and thought, "Jesus, who is funding this madman? Were they raised by Nazis? Were they psychologically tortured every day as a child?"

Yes. Strangely enough, exactly that.

The Koch children were subjected to some truly draconian toilet training: They were expected to poop at the exact same time each morning, or they would suffer castor oil and enema treatments. So yes, it's easy to be upset at the billionaires trying to burn the world down around them right now, but try to be understanding. They had Nazis forcing poop out of them when they were children.

Their nanny returned to Germany in 1940, almost certainly with bags of their feces to give to Hitler's scientists in order to create some kind of money golem. This seems like it would be good news for the children she terrorized, but it meant spending more time with their father. Fred Koch was a big believer in social Darwinism, which meant encouraging the boys to beat the shit out of each other to toughen them up. No matter what boys did in the Koch house, shit was expected to come out of them.

As the second-youngest brother, David took the worst of the "social Darwinism." Once, he was stabbed with a ceremonial sword. Another time he was bashed in the head with a polo mallet -- only the most bourgeoisie child murder attempts in this household. In the end, three of the boys joined forces to ostracize the gay one, then two of them joined forces to buy out the third one, and today Charles and David enjoy a life of funding evil and disinformation from a shadowy lair!

Thanks for the modern world, Nazi toilet training!

Wayne Wheeler may have a name built for Rock and Roll, but he had all the bitchy insecurity of Adult Contemporary. Not a lot of people have heard of him, but the results of his actions are known nation-wide. He was a Republican lobbyist who rose up the ranks in the Anti-Saloon League, which is somewhere between Chess Club and The Trying To Suck Our Own Dicks Society in terms of sadness and respectability.

The ASL, as you might have guessed, was one of the more influential powers behind prohibition. They constantly lobbied to make liquor illegal, and Wayne Wheeler was more personally responsible for prohibition than perhaps any single person involved. And he wasn't fighting to criminalize booze out of the dullness of his heart. It turns out he had a very stupid reason.

As with many origin stories, Wheeler's began in his early childhood. He worked on his family's farm in the 1870s, and the Wheelers had several hired hands working alongside them. But they weren't great at vetting their employees, even by 1870s farmer standards. One day, a farmhand got so intoxicated before work that he ended up spearing young Wayne in the leg with a pitchfork. The leg wound was a superficial one that quickly healed, but the hole it tore in Wayne's heart was not so easily mended. He vowed from that day forward that intoxication would scrape no more legs! He swore to all the barnyard gods that this devil known as alcohol had tasted its last blood!

It sounds like Batman's origin story, only with every single detail made infinitely more trivial and pathetic, but Wayne Wheeler kind of won. Whereas Batman is still fighting crime eight hours a night, Wheeler made prohibition happen. It only led to a rise in organized crime and a decline in happiness, but he did it!

Wilhelm was a breech birth, meaning he came out of his mother ass-first. Today, that means a flaw in the mother's bikini body. In 1888, it meant Wilhelm was born with a withered left arm -- a relatively minor disability, especially for someone of noble birth. Still, his mother (Princess Victoria, daughter of Queen Victoria of England) was not okay with it. She became obsessed with fixing Wilhelm's stupid, but totally non-fixable arm. Over the years, she had a series of doctors and madmen come up with ridiculous schemes to de-palsy her son.

First, Medical Team Britain tried tying Wilhelm's right arm behind his back and forcing him to use his left. It was a plan that was pedestrian both in its imagination and its effectiveness. His disability was not a case of him "just not trying arm stuff hard enough." When this (obviously) didn't work, they moved on to more creative methods. And when we say creative, we mean "mostly crazy but with a little witchcraft as well."

They tried giving his lame arm an "animal bath," which clearly needs no explanation. Oh, it does? Okay then, it's when you take your withered arm and jam it into a freshly slaughtered animal for 30 full minutes. This lets you absorb the dead creature's "vigor." This didn't fix anything, probably because carcass vigor preservatives were still so primitive in the early 1900s. In our world of technological marvels, animal viscera stays filled with vigor for hours. Hell, you probably have two or three of your body parts up a sheep corpse as you're reading this!

His mother also tried electroshock therapy. Because why force your crippled child to fist dead animals all day, when you can just electrocute him? She also went on to try what can only be described as an "arm-stretching machine." None of these things cured his incurable arm. To make matters worse, his mother didn't even bother to hide her disgust. Wilhelm tried and tried over the years to win his mother's approval -- wrote her countless letters, sometimes with erotic undertones -- but she wouldn't write back. As you maybe didn't see coming, she instead corrected all his grammar mistakes, and returned his letters.

This, along with all of the other physical and emotional torture, led Kaiser Wilhelm II to be just ... a total fuck. And in a strange way, his story also proves that Grammar Nazis not only predated, but led directly to Regular Nazis.

Well, losing happened. George Wallace first ran for governor in 1958, and espoused radically progressive views, like how the Ku Klux Klan might be "bad." He earned an endorsement from the NAACP and said the memorable words, "If I didn't have what it took to treat a man fair, regardless of color then I don't have what it takes to be the governor of your great state ... I advocate hatred of no man, hate will only compound the problems facing the South." Surely being a respected man with honorable ideals would have led to an easy win, right? Not in 1950s Alabama. The KKK, angry at being judged so harshly, endorsed his opponent -- who crushed Wallace in the Democratic primary, before cruising to the governorship.

Wallace was pissed. Like pissed enough he became instantly and profoundly racist. He was quoted as saying, "I was out-n****red, and I will not be out-n****red again." That's a hardcore lyric for an NWA album, and it was from an NAACP-endorsed democrat!

Wallace's next race for governor had him shouting "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" He held a stand-in at the University of Alabama to protest black students being allowed in. He called Martin Luther King Jr. a communist, and supported suppression of civil rights protests. Maybe he turned evil because of his loss, or maybe he was pretending to hate black people so that evil people would vote for him, or -- and this is going out on a limb here -- maybe he was a shithead racist the whole time and just lying about it. Any way you cut it, the results were the same: He made the world a much worse place for a lot of people.

George's story has a bit of a happy ending, though, if you consider a racist shithead failing in several Presidential runs and then getting shot in the spine, "happy." This led to him renouncing his racist ways and, while running as a pro-equality candidate, he became governor again. And he won with, get this: huge support from black voters. And then America learned its lesson and never voted for a racist ever again. So long as you don't check any election results from that point on until the end of time.

Back to the Star Wars analogy: Remember how the death of Anakin's girlfriend made him evil, but it was all mindless, overdone drama? That's what happened to Stalin. A year into their marriage, Kato died in his arms. Some described her as "having lost the will to live," and that's possible, since Joseph Stalin truly, truly sucked -- but "typhus" would be a more accurate cause of death. At her funeral, Stalin basically declared war against all of mankind in a very George Lucas-like monologue, wherein he said, "She died, and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity!"

It was a line so stilted it should have led to history's first eulogy boos, but instead Koba made good on his promise! That nobody wanted! He changed his name to Joseph Stalin, and caused unspeakable devastation from that point onward. And perhaps most tragic of all, George Lucas, during his inadvertent adaptation of this story seven decades later, would invent Jar Jar Binks. So there you go: Three degrees of separation from Stalin to Jar Jar. That's a surefire win in our new drinking game, "Connect All The Worst Things Together, And Then Just Drink."

Stephan infrequently tweets over at @StephanRoget, where he's mostly chuffed he didn't need to use an underscore or anything. You can read his latest articles here.

For more ways reality outdoes superhero movies, check out 5 Real-Life Versions of Marvel's Avengers and 5 Real-World Criminals Who Were Certified Supervillains.

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