So I Heard You Like Some Historical Villains...

difficult listening hour wrote in the comedy poll thread:

(someone mentioned nixon upthread. i sympathize with thatcher too but only because i'm american and thus to me she's an abstract pantomime villain, like she's played by tim curry; i can tell by how incapable i am of the same detachment w/r/t reagan that things would be different were my passport red)

A couple different related questions on my mind. First, are there certain historical villains with whom it is easier to sympathize? Villains being anyone that history has passed a negative (or even indifferent) judgement upon. Obviously there's some wiggle room here since figures like Nixon are actually experiencing a rehabilitation and reevaluation, so let's distinguish someone who interests you, or who you find fascinating partially because of his/her villainous characteristics, and not just because you minimize or have a different interpretation on those characteristics.

Second, who are your favorite historical villains? The further back in history, it seems, the safer a pick is. Lars Von Trier got in trouble saying that he understands Hitler, but if you go on about how you're a fan of - idk - Genghis Khan, or Caligula, you probably aren't going to threaten your career.

Also, we can just talk about historical figures who have become canonized as villains, even if you don't particularly dig them. I'm also really interested in the canonization process, and how that is reflected over long periods of time. In how many years will Hitler be like Khan - someone we recognize as probably evil and lacking in basic humanity, but distant enough that much of the emotional resonance has been emptied. (nb I'm assuming there aren't people who are still really upset about the Mongol Empire.)

not upset but if you read a bit about how Genghis and his crew rolled it's pretty terrifying/horrifying

(nb I'm assuming there aren't people who are still really upset about the Mongol Empire.)

― Mordy, Saturday, March 31, 2012 4:11 PM (1 minute ago)

some iranians, and SERBS always hold grievances

For sure, and I'm not trying to minimize his actual actions. I'm just noting that the further away we get from historical crimes, the less of an emotional resonance they carry for us. Robin Hanson would for sure characterize this as far/near ways of thinking - that distance reduces immediacy + feelings of personal-ness. It's not a logical thing tho - if anything, the further away we get from a crime the wider the vibrations of that crime. For example - we can assume that immediately after WW2 hatred of Hitler was at an all-time high, and that in 500 years it'll be lessoned from where it is today (which I think is a reasonable assumption). Yet taking into account the consequences of all the people who died (in battle, in camps, through starvation, etc the deprivations of war), they will no longer have descendants, their inventions that were never invented will not be able to grow, etc. So the further we get from Hitler the worse his crimes are - they become magnified by the consequences. But we will never experience our hatred and repulsion more down the line than we do now. Idk. Paradox?

Uncle Joe!

Also, plz don't let theorization dissuade anyone from talking about their favorite villains and why.

I feel like Alfred might be the expert here so...

someone like nixon is relatable because everything he does, including everything he's hated for, grows out of a personality (resentment, alienation, envy, ambition) that he's cursed/(blessed) with from childhood and isn't strong enough to climb outside of, which is more or less human problem #1 even if we all hope that we can do better (and even if lots of people do better than nixon). i feel the same way about stalin, who's of course much harder to forgive because 1) 20 million people and 2) unlike nixon he dies a winner.

It's my ambition to be an underrated historical villain.

Underrated historical anybodies tend to have the same fate: If you're lucky, a footnote in some highly specialized history scholar's dissertation and no one knows your name.

So the further we get from Hitler the worse his crimes are - they become magnified by the consequences.

i'm sure Borges said the opposite of that somewhere - that all crimes diminish to nothing as they weave into the fabric of the bigger picture. i'm more inclined to agree with that, tbh - so many chance moments wipe out potentialities that even huge crimes probably don't amount to so much in the scheme of what will never happen. and of course, conversely, those huge crimes lie in chains of causation of many, many things that we would probably consider good?

I suppose we liberals would consider Reagan a villain. He's what Gatsby could have been if instead of Daisy he wanted the White House: a nullity, inscrutable to even his wife, a loner essentially, but animated by a couple of principles and blessed with a telegenic warmth so sui generis that it goes way past sinister.

http://www.barglow.com/benjamin-angel-2.jpg

A Klee drawing named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

that's a concept from Walter Benjamin too (and Laurie Anderson).

yeah, that's a direct WB quote

reagan's so hateable because he seems like a channel for dark forces, a delivery mechanism, polished and marketed, and like alfred says null, instead of a sweating muttering straining idiosyncratic rage-filled doomed wannabe caesar who takes his country down with him.

The trick with Reagan is he was both mechanism and first cause.

(and yet of course nixon/ailes get there first, on the marketing-dark-forces front)

it's easy to hate reagan paradoxically bc it's so hard to hate him

exactly!

and contrawise, it's hard to hate nixon bc it's so easy to hate him

yeah. and because everyone did. and even if they didn't he suspected they did.

I know this is lol Norman but here's Mailer:

o Nixon had demonstrated that a politician who was fundamentally unpopular even in his own party could nonetheless win the largest free election in the world, and give every promise of doing considerably better the second time! What Aquarius had not realized until this convention began however to disclose its quiet splendors of anticipation and management was that Nixon would reveal himself not only as a genius but an artist. What had concealed the notion of such a possibility for all these years is that it is almost impossible to conceive of a literary artist who has a wholly pedestrian style. It was possible that no politician in the history of America employed so dependably mediocre a language in his speeches as Nixon, nor had a public mind ever chased so resolutely after the wholly uninteresting expression of every idea. But then few literary artists proved masters of the mediocre.

Nixon was the artist who had discovered the laws of vibration in all the frozen congelations of the mediocre. Other politicians obviously made their crude appeal to the lowest instinct of the wad, and once in a while a music man like George C. Wallace could get them to dance, but only Nixon had thought to look for the harmonies of the mediocre, the minuscule dynamic in the overbearing static, the discovery that this inert lump which resided in the bend of the duodenum of the great American political river was more than just an indigestible political mass suspended between stomach and bowel but had indeed its own capacity to quiver and creep and crawl and bestir itself to vote if worked upon with unremitting care and no relaxation of control.

I don't know anything about Reagan. He's a villain? What were his villainous deeds

I have to go out soon, but please fill this thread with discussion bc I've been thinking about this particular constellation of things for months and I rarely get to discuss it with anyone bc I think admitting in polite society that you have affectionate feelings for any of these gentlemen is taboo.

i wonder if it'd be possible to write a humanizing historical fiction about reagan

i suspect not

and of course the Nixon-Reagan relationship was fascinating for obvious reasons: Nixon couldn't figure out why Reagan made it look so easy while The Man From Whittier made sure to remind you how hard he worked.

i wonder if it'd be possible to write a humanizing historical fiction about reagan

i suspect not

that I'm aware of it's never been done, in part, I suspect, because Reagan beat us all by already playing Ronald Reagan better than anyone ever would.

"a humanizing historical fiction about reagan" is the republican party's current major plank iirc

is Metternich a villain? I hope not.

Kissinger is as malevolent as Stalin and a robust body count on his resume.

I know Reaganomics and Iran-Contra but otherwise it seems pretty cool for today's Republicans to be all "I'm a Reaganite". If he's a villain, OK, but can you imagine if candidates in Cambodia or Serbia campaigned on "The market reforms of Pol Pot" or "Fiscally, I'm a Milosevician"

reaaallly wish ILE attracted Republicans of the non-don weiner type.

Kissinger is malevolent as Stalin? Did I miss the part where Kissinger imprisoned the population of California

East Timor, Chile, Cambodia, Cyprus, and, er, Vietnam would like a word with you, Owen.

off-topic, i read the other day that america's prison population is now #2, historically, under joe's!

let's not be beastly to the German

ok I'm off to the pool to kill millions of skin cells!

Evil Taking Sides: Erik Prince or Viktor Bout?

I seem to be the only one who is still considering this question, but until they both stop being evil it's a valid one. After spending time considering both options, I think Prince wins. Bout is more actively evil, but also doesn't use the far right xtian conservative movement to cover up his profiteering afaik.

well, and worse, prince no doubt thinks his profiteering is his god-given reward for doing such good work for the far right xtian conservative movement (and for the great Tenth Crusade, or whatever we're up to now).

Indeed. It would take a lot of mental gymnastics to make him even remotely sympathetic imo. There's the father-son angle, but even that doesn't really do it -- his dad died, he had to quit being a Navy SEAL, and then he took his inherited fortune and used it to build a giant killing machine that feeds on US taxpayer money. At least from what I recall Bout built his own empire of death.

He also speaks more languages than Prince.

god that photo of Prince in that thread

might ask Z S to make a satisfying gif of that pic

It's even worse because it's a fake shameface. You know he doesn't think HE did anything wrong.

In other privatization news, I just learned that Thurgood Marshall Jr is on the board of directors (the only man of color, I will add) of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Look at these folks http://www.cca.com/about/management-team/board-directors/

If corporations are people, I nominate CCA in addition to Blackwater/Xe.

yeah, it's like he's suppressing laughter while making that stupid face (there's a thread for that face right?)

this facial expression

btw, I was going to suggest Bishop Landa for underrated historical villain as I'd read a while back that he singlehandedly wiped out the historical record of Mayan civilization, but that wikipedia article complicates the story.

while we're in south america the conquistadors are pretty all-time; cortes in particular is like if all star trek episodes were about the "terran empire" in mirror, mirror.

http://www.cca.com/static/assets/wedell_R.jpg

majorly dig the walter benjamin thing mordy posted btw

here’s the rest of it: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm