You, personally, know the difference between good and bad, I’m sure. I mean, I’m sure you don’t recognise Che Guevara as a symbol of freedom, or Mother Teresa as the epitome of kindness. Oh, sorry, you do? Hmm.
The problem, here, is that people have a natural instinct to place people in to one of two categories – ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – without considering anything that isn’t a polar extreme. With the recent ‘Kony 2012′ issue, it’s become increasingly obvious that the cause is not quite so pleasant as people originally believed. So maybe we should look back on some of the other people throughout history who aren’t remembered as they should be.
Let’s start with Mother Teresa. Obviously, you know her as the Albanian nun who for 45 years ministered to the sick, orphaned, and poor, beatified by John Paul II, and given the title “Blessed Teresa of Calcutta”. Or, at least, that’s what Wikipedia says. I’m not going to pretend to know more than I do. I’m not going to say that looking after people is a ‘bad’ thing. No. However, she was still a deeply unpleasant woman, and it’s incredibly worrying how so many people seem to remember her in such a good light.
Mother Teresa was an incredibly conservative Catholic who, upon receiving her Nobel peace prize, claimed that “the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion”, and condemned contraception, divorce, and, essentially, women’s rights. Of course, this is why the Catholic Church love her, because they’re right-wing, narrow-minded, bigots, but that’s another article entirely.
As if this weren’t enough, she began an international corporation using vulnerable Indian girls, who were forced into becoming nuns by their families. Upon these people, she imposed very strict rules, including chastity, absolute obedience, and so on and so forth. Perhaps this is to be expected of religious nutters nuns.
If I carry on giving reasons why Mother Teresa is not a saint, this article will stretch on for an eternity. So I’ll skip to the most important reason:
That’s your saint, saying that. It’s good, isn’t it, that the poor suffer, so the rest don’t have to. Really nice.
Once, she tried to comfort a screaming sufferer by saying “You are suffering, that means Jesus is kissing you!”
There is a whole range of similar quotes I could post. The problem is, this line of thought was incredibly prevalent in her work “helping” people. Her hospices didn’t make particular use of painkillers, or even aspirin, as she truly believed that through these people’s sufferings, it would lead them to find Christ. So, yeah, she’s evil.
On to Gandhi. The best way to illustrate the misguidedness of his teachings is to provide some quotes. There is a great article here that talks about Gandhi’s evils. However, I will summarise. In order to preach forgiveness, Gandhi asked British government officials to surrender themselves to the Nazis, stating “Hitler is not a bad man”. Perhaps this is an illustration of how, he believed, forgiveness could triumph, but in reality he was essentially condoning the action of the Nazis.
“The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife,” he said. “Collective suicide,” he told his biographer Louis Fisher, “would have been heroism.”
Che Guevara is widely recognised as a symbol of revolution and freedom from oppression. However, this very same man was a racist, homophobe, and an anti-semetic. Again, there is no better way to illustrate this than through the man’s own words.
Written in his book: “The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink.”
As well as: “The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing…”
I won’t continue with the quotes, because, quite frankly, after writing this articles I am already banging my head against the wall and drinking heavily.
But to conclude, people have a way of remembering these people for certain ‘good’ acts, whilst simultaneously forgiving / forgetting the ‘evil’ ones. How is it that these people can be so widely recognised for all the ‘good’ they have done in the world, when in reality they are disgusting excuses for humans beings? If anyone has an answer for me, please, tell me – I really would like to stop having to drink excessively.
Jack
Jack
Jamie
Charlie
Rob
Essentially, this is the general population being ignorant and submitting to (I’d like to say propaganda, and you know what, I will) propaganda and also adhering to what I guess is human nature. Most people don’t want to know more than they should, and most people feel safe in a world where there is complete moral good, and complete immoral bad. We need heroes and villains. We need something to fight against. If the world were a stellar fruitloop of good and great and Hitler and Churchill would tango together, then where’s the fucking fire in life? There has to be good and there has to be bad. We hate bad people because they’re evil, and we hate evil because everyone thinks they themselves are not.
That’s an incredibly good conclusion to this post, and you’re right – I guess this is why there’s a very obvious formula in movies where one guy is the definite villain whilst the main character is obviously a fighter for ‘good’. An antagonist for a protagonist. Means people don’t have to think too hard.
On a similar vein of thought, this is why TV such as The Wire and Game of Thrones are so brilliant – they give you both points of view, and there’s no definite ‘good’ character.