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Louis Pasteur, in his effort to make French beer better than German beer, developed his pasteurization process for milk that saved uncounted millions of children from from death or serious illness.

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Hmmm...that wasn't in the book I read as a child, but I'll believe his motivation.

Also, though no friend of any form of Stalinism, I remain of two minds about Mao, because the Chinese revolution was a huge accomplishment in human history and saved far more people from starvation than either purges or silly policies killed under his rule.

Pax, I don't have the time or inclination to give a course here on social history, but more modern trends in materialist history (not just Marxism but the Annales school, for example) bear much more on the social, economic and material conditions of life, and social change (or statis) than on tales of a select few "great men" (rarely women) whether their greatness is of the positive or negative sort. For example, the social and economic conditions in Germany after the First World War that made it possible for people in a highly developed, highly educated country like Germany to listen to a pathetic racist buffoon. Or the fact that often, important scientific discoveries take place simultaneously in different countries.

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Social History is concerned with how people have lived their lives and how and why their experiences and behaviour have changed over time. It studies life in the past for men, women and children of all social groups and the historical causes and consequences of social change. It is concerned with the nature of family life, work and consumer behaviour. Thus, Social Historians ask a wide range of questions about social behaviour, organisations and identities in the past. Their interests span all continents and periods of history, and social change is studied at all levels of society, from the individual and the household to the national pressure group and government policy-makers. The social and cultural implications of the growth of modern government and its welfare agencies, developments in the material environment in areas such as housing or food, changing social processes and social relationships that arise out of economic modernisation, the growth of urban living, advances in modern science and technology, demographic change, work and leisure are just some of the topics studied by social historians.

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Jesus made it as a top good guy, and so did Moses and Buddha. But Mohamed gets no credit once again.

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1. Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
2. John F. Kennedy.
3. Harry S Truman.

These three people, in their own way, tried to improve the lot of the average person who usually got ignored, stepped on, downtrodden and generally the first to get stuck with the bill and the last to get the rewards of whatever happened in the world.

[ October 23, 2002: Message edited by: meades ]

[ October 23, 2002: Message edited by: DrConway ]

I mentioned "Stalin Wasn't Stallin'" on another thread, so won't bore you with the lyrics once more.

And, the cats and the swallows thing has the ring of apocrypha.

Ghengis Khan employed the same rules of war employed well into the 19th century: Cities that surrendered after it became clear they were going to lose were treated with clemency. Cities that held to the last man and drew out a siege beyond the point where it was clear they would lose were treated to savagery.

And there's cause to believe Ivan the Terrible suffered from syphillus, so some or all of his dimentia could be chaulked up to disease, something we don't consider "evil", but a disability.

Nothing of the Spanish in the New World?

Truman? The only one to use "the bomb"?

Nothing on the dog breeder who gave us high strung yippy poodles? Now, that's evil.

I can just hear Vlad the Impaler from the grave right now....."Sure, save Europe from the Ottomans, but just Impale 20,000 people, and what do they remember you for....?"

[ October 23, 2002: Message edited by: TommyPaineatWork ]

I always like to reduce things to data in these cases. If we go by "body count", I'm thinking those who formulated the interconnecting alliances that lead to WWI might qualify as number 1? Could that system be pinned on one man?

Then again, if so, he could argue that he couldn't be held accountable for evil generals like Hague who ordered men to walk into machine gun fire-- or German Chemists formulating chlorine gas bombs.

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Also, though no friend of any form of Stalinism, I remain of two minds about Mao, because the Chinese revolution was a huge accomplishment in human history and saved far more people from starvation than either purges or silly policies killed under his rule.

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I nominate the guy who invented "G.I. Joe."

General Haig is reputed to have been more stupid than evil. Then there's "Bomber" Harris, who advocated bombing the German working classes.

I don't know about throwing soldiers into the category of "Evil." War is an evil business. Soldiers have to make do in an evil situation. If they out-evil their opponents they win.

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The politicians who cause wars are to blame, not the soldiers.

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Got no job? Your social-economic situation getting you down? Well, join the forces, where officers sip brandy and look at maps while deciding which one of you should die! And, if on the off chance you don't die, you can be that officer to!

Join today!

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Also, though no friend of any form of Stalinism, I remain of two minds about Mao, because the Chinese revolution was a huge accomplishment in human history and saved far more people from starvation than either purges or silly policies killed under his rule.

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If you mean "a huge accomplishment in turning a Great Leap Forward into a Great Big Stumble", then OK.

Forced collectivizations proved a disaster when Stalin started 'em in agriculture, and Mao didn't do much better in doing the same for industry.

It IS to be said that one tiny positive tick in Mao's favor is that he understood the importance of not messing around with agriculture.

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General Haig is reputed to have been more stupid than evil. Then there's "Bomber" Harris, who advocated bombing the German working classes.

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Well, in total warfare, maybe the workers making bombs aren't, strictly speaking, "non combatants", and are legitimate targets.

The Haig thing is interesting. I do think much evil is of the stupid kind rather than the malicious.

Are soldiers not to blame? Just doing thier duty?

I mentioned the German chemist, because the story behind that is one of the more poigniant of the war.

He was married to a woman who was also a talented chemist in her own right.

While the inventor of the chlorine gas bomb sat drinking in cellebration on the day of it's first combat use, his wife retired to the upstairs bedroom and blew her brains out.

Ah, it comes to me now. Fritz Haber. It was his wife who blew her brains out. Fritz was an ace with gas. One of the things he developed was a gas called "Zyclon B".

Fritz was Jewish, and was one of the first to flee Hitler's regime.

I'll see if I can dig up a link on this story.

[ October 24, 2002: Message edited by: TommyPaineatWork ]
Fritz and Zyclon B:

The fundamental particle of the universe: Irony.

"The rapid developments and counter-developments of the chemical warfare programs of the Germans and Allies from 1915-1918, saw the military protective mask evolve from plain un-treated cotton mouth-pads to fairly sophisticated small-box respirators with fitted rubber face-pieces and effective canister filters. Although Fritz Haber, the German chemist who sired and directed the German chemical warfare program, was devastated by Germany's defeat and feared that he would be tried as a war criminal for his activities, he was instead awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Indeed, in his acceptance speech, Haber addressed the issue of gas warfare by stating, "In no future war will the military be able to ignore poison gas. It is a higher form of killing" (Goebel 2000).

Even though Germany was banned from producing gas weapons under the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 (Addington 1994), Haber continued his work under the cover of creating pest control compounds. One of his discoveries during this period was a fumigant known as Zyklon B. While this gas did have insecticidal properties, it was also deadly to humans in enclosed spaces. As events unfolded, the Nazis would in turn use this gas some 20 years later for their extermination camps."

The story of Haber's wife, Ludmilla, is not as deffinitively documented, at least on the english language hits I got on "Google". The hits that did come up tell a story not much more detailed than the one I recounted above.

[ October 24, 2002: Message edited by: TommyPaineatWork ]

[ October 24, 2002: Message edited by: TommyPaineatWork ]

[ October 24, 2002: Message edited by: TommyPaineatWork ]

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Originally posted by DrConway:
If you mean "a huge accomplishment in turning a Great Leap Forward into a Great Big Stumble", then OK.

Forced collectivizations proved a disaster when Stalin started 'em in agriculture, and Mao didn't do much better in doing the same for industry.

It IS to be said that one tiny positive tick in Mao's favor is that he understood the importance of not messing around with agriculture.

Small potatoes when the man was probably personally responsible for a helluva lot of Chinese getting tortured or killed.

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Some scholars credit Mao with doubling the average Chinese life expectancy. Chinese friends have acknowledged the disasterous leap forward years but tend to blame the managers of co-operative farming of that time period. They came to Canada with the shirts on their backs and several university degrees between them. Under Chiang Kai Shek's anti-Maoists rule, peasants weren't allowed to leave the rice fields to bear children. Chiang was a tyrranical leader and a good miss for the Chinese by comparison.

The sheer numbers of people in China were at constant risk of starvation for centuries from droughts and wars long before Mao. The Chinese or Russian's have never had the lush, green valleys and pastures of say California, Florida, Kansas, Ogalala, Idaho, Okanagen, or S. Ontario. North Korea has about 14% of the land being arrable enough to farm. The rest is mountainous regions and the threat of drought is constant. And according to the UN, blocking humanitarian aid to countries in dire need is supposed to be illegal.
Guess Who's behind in paying their UN membership dues ?.

[ 06 September 2004: Message edited by: Fidel ]

So much perspectve on historical figures has to do with one's bias and upbringing. In spite of better literacy, History is told by the winners....

I know people I think of as good and reasonable who are very uncomfortable about the reverence received by Nelson Mandela - yet this is not a majority view and probably not worthy of much mention in his historical accounts.

Minority groups of German Lutherans living in Russia bore considerable brunt of Stalinist purges and considered Hitler a liberator - and their story is virtually unheard owing to the allies turning a blind eye to East Europe following WW2.

FDR, Ghandi, and JFK had considerable personal weaknesses.

Benedict Arnold receives considerably different treatment in Canada and the UK than in the USA.

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Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

John Emerich Edward Dalberg, better known as Lord Acton

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Originally posted by Hephaestion:
I guess now is as good a time as any other to throw in this quotation. It's very famous— at least the first half is. Unfortunately almost no one has ever heard the second half, which to my mind is equally important.

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Originally posted by Mike Keenan:
That's odd. I'd heard that one many times (the first half, that is) but I'd always heard it attributed to Winston Churchill.

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Nope. Sorry, MK, but that one is most definitely Lord Acton.

Check out:

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"If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it."

— from "A Pig's Eye View of Literature" in Sunset Gun: Poems by Dorothy Parker.

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It's why American's know very little about the CIA's joint support with China of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge during the 1970's

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Or their liberation by the Vietnamese of all people

[ 06 September 2004: Message edited by: A_Texas_Oilman ]

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Originally posted by Michelle:
I don't know. I mean, Hitler hasn't made an appearance yet...

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Originally posted by Gir Draxon:
Wha??? Saddam Hussein didn't even get honorable mention on the evil list?

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Originally posted by jeff house:
Jesus made it as a top good guy, and so did Moses and Buddha. But Mohamed gets no credit once again.

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Credit? Didn't Muhammed preach that usury and rent are evil ?. This economic mechanism is how vast amounts of wealth are transferred from the poor to the rich.

American's have evolved from a manufacturing-exporting and personal savings nation to a domestic services/importing nation of workers living on over-extended lines of personal credit.
The increasing concentration of wealth among less the 1% of the American population seems to coincide with their expanding national debt and trickle-down deficit spending.

And on a tangential note, no wonder Gadaffi is a bad guy. Everyone in Libya owns either their own apartment or home as a result of the oil profits in his otherwise desert nation. He's setting a bad example for the rest of Africa living in third world conditions. Meanwhile, Calgary has over 1700 homeless people. A national disgrace with that much oil leaving for the States every day.

[ 06 September 2004: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by Fidel:
And on a tangential note, no wonder Gadaffi is a bad guy. Everyone in Libya owns either their own apartment or home as a result of the oil profits in his otherwise desert nation. He's setting a bad example for the rest of Africa living in third world conditions. Meanwhile, Calgary has over 1700 homeless people. A national disgrace with that much oil leaving for the States every day.

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And on a tangential note, no wonder Gadaffi is a bad guy. Everyone in Libya owns either their own apartment or home as a result of the oil profits in his otherwise desert nation. He's setting a bad example for the rest of Africa living in third world conditions. Meanwhile, Calgary has over 1700 homeless people. A national disgrace with that much oil leaving for the States every day.

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At one point the speech went something like, "Two weeks ago nobody had heard about him; now it's 'Gadhafi. Gadhafi. Have you heard about Gadhafi? Gadhafi. Gadhafi. Gadhafi's gonna get yo' mama.'

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Originally posted by t_link:
Yup, Gadaffi isn't such a bad guy if you ignore stuff like Pan Am flight 103, and when top Libyan officials were arrested for being involved with a explosion on a French airliner which exploded over the Saharan Desert.

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Well then ol' Ralphie-boy, being such an aw-shucks good ol' boy, and with all that oil money that he doesn't know how to spend (to the point where he has to put up a big ol' suggestion box for the voters) ought to be able to build housing for a measly 1,700 homeless people, huh?

Seeing as how he's a **Good Guy**, and not a nut job like Gadaffi, running around blowing up French airliners? Zut alors! He's not even a nutjob like the French, running around sinking Greenpeace ships! Why, he's not even a lunatic like George Bush, who's running around bombing innocent Iraqi children in retaliation for an attack in New York that their government had nothing to do with whatsoever.

C'mon, the guy ran a savage dictatorship that lasted 33 years, celebrated the coup which brought him to power by slaughtering 1 million people (or was it 1.5 million? who knows?), and then, just for a flourish, wiped out 1/3 of the population of East Timor.

An impressive record, all 'round, surely worthy of mention in the same breath as Genghis Khan and Vlad the Impaler.

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Well then ol' Ralphie-boy, being such an aw-shucks good ol' boy, and with all that oil money that he doesn't know how to spend (to the point where he has to put up a big ol' suggestion box for the voters) ought to be able to build housing for a measly 1,700 homeless people, huh?

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