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Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000
Subj: Article January 2, 2000
The century's greatest heroes..and its bloodiest villains
By Eric Margolis
January 2, 2000
PARIS -- One hundred years ago, most people earnestly believed the
dawning 20th century would bring a golden age of technology-based
prosperity, reason in human conduct, an end to war, and remarkable
advancement of all mankind.
Instead of a golden era of humanism, the 20th Century became the
bloodiest era in the past 1,000 years. To avoid repeating the
crimes and horrors of the century just past, we must study -- and
restudy -- its political heroes and villains. The heroes may
not return, but the villains and their malevolent thinking
certainly will. Study history, as Santayana warned, or relive it.
HEROES
+ Konrad Adenauer -- Took over leadership of a ruined, defeated,
disgraced Germany, in 1949, which was still under foreign
occupation. In fourteen years, the Adenauer government organized
the rebuilding of Germany from rubble, its restoration to
international respectability, and its re-emergence as a world
power. Dignified, stern and upright, Adenauer symbolized all that
was good in the old Germany.
+ Winston Churchill -- A deeply flawed hero. A great war leader,
historian, and brilliant actor who brought out the pride and valor
of Britons. But Churchill, the century's most ardent imperialist
and leader of Britain's war pro-war faction in two world wars, was
so blinded by his hatred of Germany, that he ended up destroying
the British Empire, and, with Roosevelt, handing half of Europe
over to Stalin's tyranny. Hitler, not Churchill, saved Britain in
1940 by refusing to destroy the trapped British armies at Dunkerque
and declining to invade prostrate England -- in vain hope of an
Anglo-German alliance against the USSR.
+ Charles DeGaulle -- A majestic figure of profound dignity,
foresight, moral energy, determination and style. He almost
single-handedly saved France from the ignominy of defeat by Germany
in 1940, rekindling the pride, elan, and power of his great nation.
DeGaulle was the only Allied leader who understood the Soviet
threat. After the war, his embrace of old foe Germany laid the
foundation for united Europe. In spite of the spiteful mockery of
his Anglo-American allies, among the greatest of the great.
+ Deng Xioping -- Deng seized power in China after Mao's death in
1976 and ended the dementia of the Cultural Revolution that killed
2 million people and nearly destroyed China. In 20 years, Great
Reformer Deng transformed China from a vast, impoverished prison
camp into a dynamic nation destined to become a world power.
Deng deftly dismantled communism and Mao's totalitarian system,
releasing the Chinese peoples' inherent energy and talent, and
brought China into modern world. Under Deng, the income of Chinese
jumped tenfold. Deng laid the foundation for a future more
politically relaxed China that resembles modern Singapore.
History will hold Deng a greater revolutionary than Mao Tse-tung.
+ Dwight Eisenhower -- The best president of the 20th Century and
the finest American. Eisenhower personified the admirable
qualities of Americans: energy, simplicity, forthrightness,
confidence, and decency. Eisenhower's years as president marked
the high point of good government and civic values -- before
made-for-television politicians degraded and besmirched and
cheapened the presidency. I like Ike.
+ Mohandas Gandhi -- The greatest Indian of the millenium.
A leader spiritual and temporal who combined moral saintliness with
political cunning and inspiring leadership. Gandhi's crusade for
non-violence, human rights, religious tolerance and aiding the
helpless were a beacon of light in the 20th Century's darkness --
particularly since he did so on a vast subcontinent where none of
these qualities were known. Though the racist Churchill dismissed
Gandhi as `a half-naked fakir,' the Indian sage will likely be
regarded by future historians as the noblest and most important
human being of the 20th Century- and, of course, the father of
Indian independence.
+ Mikhail Gorbachev -- A tragic yet admirable figure who did not
understand that communism was not an economic system, but one of
mass control and intimidation. Gorbachev's attempts to reform and
modernize communism, and the even more important rejection of class
struggle and international revolution by Foreign Minister Eduard
Shevardnadze, destroyed the Evil Empire that was Soviet Union.
Gorbachev's refusal to use tanks to crush nationalist uprising in
the USSR and Eastern Europe, and his withdrawal of Soviet forces
from Germany, saved the world from a war that could have easily
gone nuclear. Today, he is reviled by Russians. History, however,
will view him as man who was too decent and humane to perpetuate
the Soviet Empire.
+ David Ben Gurion -- Modern patriarch of the Jewish people, he led
his people out of the wilderness of the Holocaust into the promised
land of Israel. A man of Biblical majesty and enormous inner power,
without Ben Gurion the state of Israel may not have succeeded.
Tragically, the price of the Jewish homeland was the eviction of a
million Palestinians from their ancestral homeland, a problem which
has yet to be resolved half a century later.
+ Pope John Paul II -- Stalin once asked, sarcastically, `how many
divisions has the Pope?' The answer came three decades later in
the form of Pope John Paul II. This Polish warrior pope helped
raise the storm winds that finally blew down the evil edifice of
communism and freed the long- suffering peoples of Eastern Europe
who had been condemned by Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta to
Soviet totalitarian rule. Great warrior, great humanist, he
renewed the vigor and teachings of the Catholic Church, and
expelled the marxist priests who had infested it. If there ever
was a true saint, it is John Paul II. The greatest pope since
the Renaissance.
+ Jean Juares -- French humanitarian, thinker and martyr, his voice
thundered at the beginning of the century for the rights of the
common man. His calls for Franco-German brotherhood presage the
European Union. Juares was assassinated for opposing France's
entry into World War I, the greatest disaster of the century.
+ Imam Ruhollah Khomeini -- A Shia cleric of enormous moral stature,
he sparked an historic revolution in Iran that overthrew the US-run
regime of the vainglorious, thieving, hated Shah, Reza Pahlavi,
freeing Iran from 30- years of western exploitation, inspiring
Islamic revolutionaries from Morocco to the Philippines. Khomeini
showed that ideas and faith were more powerful than police states.
+ Gamal Abdel Nasser -- Nasser electrified the entire Third World
and personified the struggle against British and French
colonialism. Though he suffered disastrous military defeats and
economic failures, Nasser still managed to instill a sense of pride
and manhood in the demoralized Arab and Muslim world. His
strength, honesty, concern for his people, and determination to
restore Egypt's long lost dignity, made Nasser a titan among
Mideast leaders. Egyptians still call him El Rais' the boss.
+ Ronald Reagan -- A simple man wise enough to know right from
wrong in a confusing, morally ambiguous world, Reagan, like
Eisenhower, brimmed with optimism and decency. Intellectuals and
the media scoffed at him, but ordinary Americans knew what a truly
great and good man Reagan was. Against all advice, Reagan
challenged the Soviet Empire and defeated this scourge of mankind.
His impending death will break America's heart.
+ Margaret Thatcher -- A grocer's daughter who managed to overcome
Britain's poisonous class structure, restore the jejune
Conservative Party, and rescue her nation from the swamp of
socialism into which it was sinking fast. The toughest politician
in Britain, she and Ronald Reagan led the free world to victory in
the Cold War. Thatcher is the greatest woman of the century.
+ Theodore Roosevelt -- A true man's president. Adventurer,
outdoorsman, explorer, Teddy Roosevelt captured the robust spirit
of a young, dynamic America and the wild west. When an American
named Ian Pedicaris was kidnapped by the Barbar chieftan
El-Rasaouli, Teddy R. wired him, "Pedicaris alive, or El-Rasaouli
dead." A bully president and a memorable American.
VILLAINS
+ Heinrich Himmler -- A sadist and monster, Himmler made his SS
organization into an industrial scale killing machine of Jews and
other `inferior' races. His racist brutality turned the Ukraine
and western Russia against the Germans, who had been welcomed as
liberators from Stalin. Small-minded, arrogant, and efficient,
he personified the worst in the German psyche.
+ Adolf Hitler -- A frustrated artist who saw himself as the
`Nordic Christ,' and Germans as `the chosen people,' Hitler was
the almost inevitable result of Germany's humiliation after World
War I. An idealist, he was determined to better mankind by purging
the world of inferior races and peoples -- and smokers. Hitler's
Reich murdered 12 million people, half of them Jews. If Britain
had the right to colonial rule over India and Egypt, Hitler asked,
why did Germany not have the right to rule Poland and Russia?
In 1942, Hitler told the Duce, `My dearest wish would be able to
wander about in Italy as an unknown painter.' Hitler rightly
predicted the Soviet Union would become a mortal peril to Europe
and America.
+ Josef Stalin -- Genghis Khan with tanks. An extraordinary
monster, the biggest mass murderer since the Mongols -- perhaps the
biggest in all history. Everyone was Stalin's enemy. Power was
everything. Stalin presided over the murder of 40 million of his
own people and the imprisonment of tens of millions of Russians and
East Europeans. The master terrorist of all time, Stalin knew how
to conjure fear and obedience on a mass scale. He repeatedly
outwitted the bumbling Roosevelt and Churchill and infiltrated
their governments with his agents. A despot whose names inspires
fear and respect (in Russia) to this day. The real victor of WWII
in Europe.
+ Lazar Kaganovitch -- Stalin called him `my Himmler.' Kaganovitch
personally supervised the murder of 6-7 million Ukrainian peasants
in the mid-1930's -- a decade before Hitler's crimes -- and went on
to organize the mass murder of 2 million Muslims in the Caucasus
and deportation of another 2 million to Siberia. This work
continues today as Russian forces complete their Mongol-style
destruction of tiny Chechnya.
+ Kim Il Sung -- North Korea's communist despot, Kim, who began the
Korean War that killed over 2 million of his people, was noteworthy
for creating -- along with Albania's Enver Hoxha -- the most
lunatic totalitarian regime on earth, turning North Koreans into
brainwashed robots, an Orwellian monstrosity that still persists.
+ Vladimir Lenin -- Falsely portrayed by historical revisionists as
the `good' communist whose ideas were later corrupted, Lenin was,
in fact, the father of the system of `Red Terror' which resulted in
the death of some 40 million Soviet citizens from 1922-1953.
Stalin merely expanded on and perfected the institutionalized
repression created by the utterly ruthless, brilliant, iron-willed
Lenin who was determined to impose marxism on the world. Life
meant nothing; the Party was everything, according to this
perverted genius, the very worst of the many bloody-minded
intellectuals who brought untold suffering to this century.
+ Mao Zedong -- Brilliant, determined, visionary, colorful,
Mao defeated the nationalists and Japan, and unified China.
Two million `landlords' were shot. Mao woke China from centuries
of sleep, and laid the basis for a modern nation. But he created
a grim, totalitarian police state that rivaled Stalin's USSR.
Mao's`reforms,' so lauded by the CBC and western liberal admirers,
bankrupted China and led to the death of 30 million peasants.
The Cultural Revolution unleashed by the dying Mao killed another
2 million people and saw China's greatest art treasures destroyed,
the worst act of cultural vandalism in modern history.
+ Mengistu Haile Mariam -- The bloodiest of Africa's modern tyrants,
in 1973 Mariam overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie and embarked on the
communization of Ethiopia under Soviet guidance. Farmers who
resisted collectivization were denied food and seeds: 1.5 million
were starved to death while fuddled Canada aided the Mengistu
regime, even flying food to its troops. Hundreds of thousands of
Ethiopians were tortured and murdered. Today, mass murderer
Mengistu resides comfortably in exile in Tanzania while Chile's
former leader, Gen. Pinochet, is held by Britain on flimsy Spanish
charges his security forces killed 2,600 marxist rebels and
civilians.
+ Benito Mussolini -- A strutting popinjay, a windbag, a buffoon
from comic opera, he made Italy look very silly. Though largely
inoffensive in Europe, the Duce's Fascist Legions used poison gas
and concentration camps extensively in Libya and Ethiopia.
Mussolini was a great orator, great dresser, and made the trains
run on time -- until bombed to smithereens by the Allies. Clever
Italians have managed to convince most people that they were
actually on the Allied side during WWII. Though a very minor
malefactor, Mussolini proved even fools can be dangerous.
+ Pol Pot -- A vicious teacher turned ideologue, he combined the
worst of Cambodian nationalism with Maoist ideology and dementia.
Pot and his Khmer Rouge sought to create a perfect agrarian society
-- led by the communist party -- by killing anyone with an
education. A million Cambodians were slaughtered in the name of
`agrarian reform.'
+ Franklin Roosevelt -- A clever, flamboyant American leader
idolized by Democrats as the greatest president. But recent
revelations from Soviet KGB archives show FDR's administration
was riddled with communist agents and sympathizers who ended up
virtually directing US foreign policy during the war.
Roosevelt (and Churchill) prolonged the war and aided the Soviet
advance into Eastern Europe by refusing to negotiate a surrender
with Germany. In effect, Roosevelt defeated a lesser tyrant --
Hitler -- by allying himself to a far greater criminal -- Stalin,
who had killed tens of millions of people before 1939. At Yalta,
Roosevelt and Churchill gave half of Europe to Stalin in payment
for defeating Hitler.
+ Woodrow Wilson -- Named here not because he was an evil man, but
because he was a good man whose wrongheaded idealism helped create
the greatest disaster of the century: the end of World War I and
its aftermath. Gulled by British propaganda, Wilson foolishly sent
American troops to fight on the Western Front, thus giving victory
to the Allies in a previously stalemated war. Had US troops stayed
out of the conflict, the Allies and Central Powers would have come
to a negotiated peace settlement that punished no nation for a war
that began virtually by accident. This would very likely have
prevented the century's two worst scourges: the Bolshevik
Revolution in Russia and the rise of the Nazis in Germany.
Instead, Wilson watched helplessly as Britain and France ground
Germany into the dust and carved up the empires of their defeated
foes -- leading directly to today's conflicts in the Balkans and
Middle East.
+ Papa Doc Duvalier -- The consummate master of evil. A country
doctor turned despot, Francois Duvalier imposed a reign of terror
over Haiti that was exceptional for the supernatural fear he
inflicted on his people. High priest of Ongan (voodoo), and a
ruthless dictator, Papa Doc was said to read people's minds and
turn the dead into zombies. The most frightening person this
writer has met.
30
MARGOLIS
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