111–120 of 240 posts
Gandhi. For being fearless _and_ inspiring an entire country to be fearless without a single weapon in hand. Think about it, it's nothing short of a miracle.
Gandhi is not the man you think he is: http://history.eserver.org/ghandi-nobody-knows.txt
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine how many millions of lives would be freer and richer if Deng had acted in the same way as Gorbechev, Yeltsin, or even Egon Krenz. Had Louis XVI acted in the same way as Deng, continental Europe may still be under the heel of absolute monarchism today, with all the stupid pointless wars that entails. The French Revolution was a step forward for humanity, no matter how messy it was.
Imagine how many millions of lives would be freer and richer if Deng had acted in the same way as Gorbechev, Yeltsin, or even Egon Krenz. Gorbechev was fairly similar to Deng. He liberalized the economy and increased freedom of speech, but he did not allow democracy. Yeltsin introduced democracy, and what was the result? A terrible economy, a dramatic rise in suicide rates and alcoholism, and now under Putin, even sp…
The British monarchy was a constitutional monarchy with almost all of the real power devolved to the nobles and the commons by the time of the French Revolution, quite unlike the French monarchy prior to the revolution. It's a fallacy to compare the two. The American revolution was an issue of home rule, not an issue of democracy vs. monarchy. And not the first such conflict the British Empire would face.
The Wars of the French Revolution were monarchist wars, waged to protect Europe's monarchs from the seeds of dissension spread from the revolution. So, technically, were the Napoleonic wars, as Napoleon was an emperor. However, the Napoleonic Code was a step forward for civil rights in Europe.
The aggressors in WWI and WWII were either monarchies or dictatorships: Germany under the Kaiser, Austia-Hungary under the Habsburg monarchy, the Ottomans under their monarchy, Germany and Italy under fascist dictatorships, and Japan under a monarchy. At best you can pin Nazi Germany under the banner of democracy, since the Nazis were technically elected to parliament (after their street thugs started the Reichstag fire and beat up all the opposition). But since the Nazis were outspoken detractors of the very idea of democracy, even that is a stretch.
Thomas Jefferson. A man who saw the world as it could be and did everything he could to get it there.
Bonus point for not having a mausoleum, library or any other grand memorial as a monument to him.
Jesus, because the world would be a better place if we were more like him.
Ah....which Jesus? The real person about whom we know nothing or the fictitious facade that the catholic church has erected?
Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality. Hence the modicum of truth in the old saying that no man is a hero to his valet. There is only a modicum of truth, for the valet, and the private secretary, are often immersed in the fiction themselves. Royal personages are, of course, constructed personalities. Whether they themselves believe in their public character, or whether they merely permit the chamberlain to stage-manage it, there are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human. The biographies of great people fall more or less readily into the histories of these two selves. The official biographer reproduces the public life, the revealing memoir the other. The Charnwood Lincoln, for example, is a noble portrait, not of an actual human being, but of an epic figure, replete with significance, who moves on much the same level of reality as Aeneas or St. George. Oliver's Hamilton is a majestic abstraction, the sculpture of an idea, "an essay" as Mr. Oliver himself calls it, "on American union." It is a formal monument to the state-craft of federalism, hardly the biography of a person. Sometimes people create their own facade when they think they are revealing the interior scene. The Repington diaries and Margot Asquith's are a species of self-portraiture in which the intimate detail is most revealing as an index of how the authors like to think about themselves. (source: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/Lippman/ch01.html )
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gandhi is not the man you think he is: http://history.eserver.org/ghandi-nobody-knows.txt
I'm sure the authors put as much effort into the conspiracy theory as they did the spelling of his name.
But, Gandhi is correctly spelt Gandhi in the article and not Ghandy or Ghandi as others often do.
Edit: Ah I see, the link spells it Ghandi. The article, however, gets it right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gandhi is not the man you think he is: http://history.eserver.org/ghandi-nobody-knows.txt
I'm sure the authors put as much effort into the conspiracy theory as they did the spelling of his name.