Tyler Cowan muses on what historical or literary figure people referred to before Hitler became everyone's stock idea of a villain? It turns out that Pharaoh and Judas were favorite choices for millennia. Commenters chime in with nominations for Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and other barbarian invaders. Nero, Caligula, and Domitian fell out of favor a while back.
Once Hitler came along, he really enjoyed a consensus. This is a Western perspective, of course.
Well, and the Devil. He got mentioned a lot in the old days. Maybe after Hitler we decided we didn't need him anymore.
ReplyDeleteIllustrating what I have long feared...that the communists were better propagandists than the Church ever was.
ReplyDeleteHitler made enemies of the Leftist alliance, in his day, as well as the capitalists and American individualists.
ReplyDeleteBut in reality, it was more like a 3 way free for all. Communists vs Fascists, in their little civil war, vs everybody else that wasn't part of the Left.
Caligula and Nero will be coming back in favor, now that the US is going full homosexual. Military, economic, White house, everything.
ReplyDeleteSoon, homosexuality will be required by law, or else.
Fu Manchu was pretty evil.
ReplyDeleteOh, wait--this is about real guys who actually lived. Emphasis on guys. Elizabeth Bathory, not so much. Queen Mary I, ehh. And so on.
There's that propaganda thing, again.
Eric Hines
Nah, I was including literary figures. As far as evil women go, Lucretia Borgia? Medea? Salome?
ReplyDeleteNero is a good one. He murdered his wife by kicking her to death, and then used his position as Emperor to order priests to conduct a marriage ceremony between himself and a male look-alike of her (whom, of course, he had castrated as a youth to preserve his looks).
ReplyDeleteAfter the marriage ceremony, he went around Greece compelling all the Greeks to pay the traditional wedding homages as if nothing was wrong. It's the ultimate "Gaslighting" that Tex talks about sometimes lately -- everyone knew that it was an outrage, but he was compelling them to pretend that his monstrosity wasn't right in their faces.
As far as evil women go, Jezebel has a high place in the literature.
Nero, Haman (quasi-historical but still invoked), Napoleon in some areas, Agrippina, Semeramis, Attila the Hun (except in Hungary - there it was the Mongols). It's hard to come up with a name from north of the Alps that isn't a strictly local bogey.
ReplyDeleteLittleRed1
Attila is, to this day, a popular name for boys in Hungary.
ReplyDeleteAtilla seemed pretty modern for a barbarian. If the Pope hadn't visited him and then Atilla mysteriously died due to God's grace, Western European might have become a very different culture after the fall of Rome.
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