This Terrible Person Died Today

Nikolaus ‘Klaus’ Barbie. The head Gestapo man in Lyon. The...

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 00:04:54 -0400

Nikolaus ‘Klaus’ Barbie. The head Gestapo man in Lyon. The Butcher of Lyon. Maybe responsible for fifteen thousand deaths. He tortured children. Maybe I can stop there? After the war the CIA thought hey, lets work with this guy! West German intelligence thought hey, lets work this guy. British intelligence thought hey, lets work with this guy. They all did.

Extradited to France from Bolivia in 83, died in prison in 91.

July 26, 1984. Edward Theodore Gein. O William Jennings Bryan,...

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 15:31:00 -0400

July 26, 1984.

Edward Theodore Gein. O William Jennings Bryan, I wanted it to be you today but you were just so earnest. Plus, you left that dollar for my ancestor after your horse ate his hay while he was in the dollar store. Ever see Psycho? Not that scary, right? Well, Norman Bates is a lot less scary than his inspiration, Mr. Gein. He only definitively killed two people, sure. He also made a female suit out of corpses. His house was gaudy in that way houses made out of corpse bits are gaudy. Ya know, just tacky to decorate in human skin. On the plus side he never had sex with any of the corpses he dug up or murdered because they were “too smelly.” He died of respitory failure in a mental institution. If we are being fair the mental institution thing should disqualify him from this blog but hey, sensationalism!

September 20, 1945. Eduard Wirths. For a secular fellow like...

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 15:29:33 -0400

September 20, 1945.

Eduard Wirths. For a secular fellow like myself the name of Josef Mengele is the name of the devil. The words summon horrific imagery, impossibly cruel things happening to impossibly innocent people, the great tools of science violently turned on the living as a sort of lark, a mad horrible path of modern science fueled by an ideology so degenerate in view and so expansive in aim that the only reasonable thing to do was to team up with Stalin to defeat it. Dissecting children, vivisecting pregnant women, the odd and random sterilization. Killing fourteen children in a night. These are only some of the things we know of. Worse fantasies he probably indulged in to whom no witness remained alive. Eduard Wirths was his boss.

Eduard Wirths was the head doctor at the Auschwitz concentration camp and Mengele was not his only subordinate. Mass sterilizations, typhus injections, all under his purview. In his review recommending Mengele for promotion Wirths wrote he had made “valuable contribution to anthropological science by making use of the scientific materials available to him.” The scientific materials avaliable to him. Human beings.

Captured by the allies, Wirths hung himself.

Simon Weisenthal, the Nazi Hunter, died on this day as well.

July 19, 1099. Pope Urban II. He launched the First Crusade....

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 22:50:18 -0400

July 19, 1099.

Pope Urban II. He launched the First Crusade. Hey, he wanted to help Byzantium, sure. But he promised absoluttion and erasure of sins for those who took part in the war. What a great way to recruit the worst of people to go engage in combat. His legacy includes the sack of Byzantium, the sack of Jersualem, and a heavy contribution to those great Christian-Muslim relations of the following centuries.

July 28, 1794. Maximilien Robespierre. Let’s have a...

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 23:38:05 -0400

July 28, 1794.

Maximilien Robespierre. Let’s have a revolution! Let’s preach liberty, equality, fraternity! Let’s take that American experience and make it better. O, and lets behead everyone! Let’s retard the growth of liberty by turning it into a monarchy vs murder thing. That’s a good idea. Thanks, chairman of the public safety committee! Guillotined when they figured out that maybe he shouldnt be the vanguard of the revolution.

Olympics opening. Let’s forget there are terrible people for a day.

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 22:03:11 -0400

Olympics opening. Let’s forget there are terrible people for a day.

July 25, 1991. Lazar Kaganovich. Way back in 1922, well before...

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400

July 25, 1991.

Lazar Kaganovich. Way back in 1922, well before it was cool, Lazy was fine with executing any order Stalin gave. He didn’t change much in later years. He helped organize the Holdomor in the Ukraine, a famine that killed 2-7 million people. Among the many deaths he was responsible for, his own brother. He died at 97. Too old.

July 23, 1951. Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Pétain. When...

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400

July 23, 1951.

Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Pétain. When I compare Marshal Petain to Joe Paterno I need you to know I’m not trying to be lazy. If I was trying to be lazy I would just go with William Luther Pierce, the author of the Turner Diaries. I would quote this one sentence from Wikipedia. “He is also the founder of “Cosmotheism”, a religion based on white separatism, Aryan nationalism, racialism, panentheism, eugenics, and National Socialism.” I would then be done. But Petain. Petain was justly loved by the people who would later justly hate him. In a few short years at the end of his life he erased his accomplishments and established cowardice and evil in his legacy. And when I compare Petain and Paterno to Croesus I need you to know I’m not trying to be douchily booky but I can’t help it. Croesus was the richest man in the world. One day he asked Solon, the Law Giver of Athens, to name the happiest of people. Solon named these dead twins who died taking their mom to church. “What of me?” Croesus asked. “Call no man happy till he is dead,” Solon answered. Later, overthrown by Cyrus the Great and about to be burned alive Croesus shouted `O Solon.’ Thus Petain and Paterno. Petain stopped the Germans at Verdun and though he didn’t say ‘they shall not pass’ the French thought he did. They loved him. Decades later he allowed himself to be the figurehead for the Vichy regime. The exportation of Jews. The loss of the French fleet at Oran which, if it had surrendered to the British could have shortened the war. You could say he was an old man but after the liberation, relocated outside of France, he refused to be part of the government any longer. Why couldn’t he have refused earlier? Why? He was sentenced to death but his old subordinate, De Gaulle, commuted his sentence to life imprisonment.

July 22, 2012. Uday and Qusay Hussein. The crimes of the sons...

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 22:09:00 -0400

July 22, 2012.

Uday and Qusay Hussein. The crimes of the sons of Saddam ranged substantially beyond fashion. In a lot of fiction you get a pair of mismatched villains working against the protagonist. Often it is the big mean slow one one and the terrible smaller ruthless calculating one. There is a whole endless tv tropes page about it. Uday and Qusay were exactly like that except that instead of being fictional they were real and instead of some intrepid hero their enemy: the people of Iraq. In 1988 their Saddam’s bodyguard introduced him to his future second wife. Offended for his mother, Uday walked up to the bodyguard at a party and beat him bloody then took an electric carving knife to him. At a party. Later in charge of the Olympic committee his idea of of team management proved caning the feet of soccer players he felt were under-performing. The stories out there regarding his treatment of kidnapped women are well beyond horrific. Qusay’s crimes were more administrative. Prison overcrowded? Execute the excess. The Marsh Arabs being thorny in their resistance? Drain the marshes. The United States paid thirty million dollars for their location. They were killed in the ensuing firefight.

July 21, 2006. Ta Mok. Noam Chomsky aside the Khmer Rouge...

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 19:35:53 -0400

July 21, 2006.

Ta Mok. Noam Chomsky aside the Khmer Rouge killed millions of people in Cambodia. And yet out of all the Khmer Rouge Ta Mok was the one who earned the nickname “the Butcher.” The Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979. He was was finally captured in 1999 and died of heart complications awaiting trial.

For personal reasons I am entirely too tense for a post today. It would have been Felix Dzerzhinsky,...

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 19:53:38 -0400

For personal reasons I am entirely too tense for a post today. It would have been Felix Dzerzhinsky, the man who set up the forerunner to the KGB. I apologize to my readership.

July 19, 1965. Sygman Rhee. It is easy enough to look at North...

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 23:37:29 -0400

July 19, 1965.

Sygman Rhee. It is easy enough to look at North and South Korea at night and figure out which side has it better these days. Bank in the day, though, Mr. Rhee was almost as bad as Kim Il-Sung. Before the Korean war he rounded up hundreds of thousands of communists, dissidents, and generally people he did not like. After the war started her ordered all of them, many children, shot. Maybe a hundred thousand dead. His regime generally tortured and murdered it’s opponents. Terrible guy. Just like most George Washington grads. Retired to Hawaii after being overthrown because the US loved him. Died of a stroke.

July 18, 1984. James Huberty. There are levels of institutional...

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 22:10:38 -0400

July 18, 1984.

James Huberty. There are levels of institutional failure here as well. Before the act, there was the 911 dispatcher who, after receiving a call from a citizen who watched a man walk down the street with two guns, gave the officers the wrong address. There was the mental heath official who wrote down the wrong address and never called back. There was the system deciding a man who shot on his head had no issues. After, the lawsuits, the silly greedy misplaced lawsuits against McDonald’s. Falling Down, a great movie, making light of the idea of a guy on a shooting rage being in a McDonald’s. But all that is all that. One day James Huberty walked into a McDonald’s and shot and killed 21 people. Shot by a SWAT sniper.

July 17, 1961. Tyrus “Ty” Cobb. His dad named him after the...

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 00:14:13 -0400

July 17, 1961.

Tyrus “Ty” Cobb. His dad named him after the city of Tyre since he was so impressed with its resistance to Alexander the Great. So he sort of lived that way. He his famous for once beating a heckler who had no hands while shouting “I don’t care if he has no feet.” At spring training he got in a fight with a groundskeeper over the state of the field. When the groundskeeper’s wife tried to pull him off he choked her. He did support alot of good causes. Most awfully, he once slapped a black elevator operator for being uppity. When a black doorman tried to halt the altercation Cobb stabbed him. He died of cancer in 1961. Only four people from baseball came to his funeral. Man sure gave a lot of money to charity in later years, though.

July 16, 1960. Albert Kesselring. One of the many problems with...

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 00:05:47 -0400

July 16, 1960.

Albert Kesselring. One of the many problems with the second world war is that a myth arose that seperates the regular army from the SS. Rank and file, this may be true. When you get up to flag rank, boy alot of those guys ordered alot of dead civilians. After the war a multitude of British officers campaigned for a lenient sentence for Kesselring who had been sentenced for death. He was released in 1952. He executed uniformed soldiers under Hitler’s Commando Order. He randomly executed civilians in response to resistance actions. He used enslaved Jewish labour. Died in 1960.

July 15, 1979. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz Bolaños. He was president of...

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 23:59:40 -0400

July 15, 1979.

Gustavo Díaz Ordaz Bolaños. He was president of Mexico in that revolutionary year, 1968. Before his political career he was a professor. Later, when he was president, the students at National Polytechnic Institute began a program of peacefull resistance. He cracked down. They armed. He sent the army into the school and fifteen students died. There was a massive protest in response to this. The government seems to have sent snipers into the protest. The government snipers fired at the government forces. This was the justification that was used for the Mexican forces to spray fire on the unarmed Mexican citizens. At least fourty four people died. Why did all this happen? Because the President wanted everything to go well for the 1968 Olympics which were held in Mexico City. He died of cancer eleven years later.

I regret to inform you nobody terrible died today. Well, the founder of McDonald’s and Billy...

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 23:42:02 -0400

I regret to inform you nobody terrible died today. Well, the founder of McDonald’s and Billy the Kid but I love chicken nuggets and the Young Gun movies.

July 13, 1793. Jean-Paul Marat. A scientist, a doctor, a...

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 18:58:21 -0400

July 13, 1793.

Jean-Paul Marat. A scientist, a doctor, a sometimes court fixture. In a revolution the bloody minded are often the technical ones. The French Revolution, that long bout of foreplay to Napoleon, was a bloody time and Marat’s rhetoric helped make it so. Enemy of the People. That term had honorable use in Roman days. Marat transformed that phrase into it’s modern form, the appellation murderous revolutionaries hurl at any poor sod they happen to disagree with or dislike. So many good humans have been murdered over the last two centuries for the crime of being an Enemy of the People. Marat’s radical newspaper was of course titled “Friend of the People.” Friends of the people, along with public safety committees, are often monsters. In 1790 he warned against mercy, saying that beheading five or six hundred people would secure freedom. How casual that extra hundred heads was to him. His great coup was the fall of the Girondists, their principal crime being resisting the worship of the guillotine as a sign of progress. A young woman, a Girondist, requested an audience with him. He was in his bathtub but decided, hey, let her in anyways. The ending to this encounter was not perhaps as happy as he hoped. At the end of a fifteen minute conversation she stabbed in the chest and inspired the fantastic painting above.

July 12, 1945 Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen. Guernica! Died...

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 23:51:57 -0400

July 12, 1945

Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen. Guernica! Died of a brain tumor.

July 11, 969. Olga of Kiev. So being a lady in the dark ages...

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 22:09:35 -0400

July 11, 969.

Olga of Kiev. So being a lady in the dark ages probably wasn’t a bag of smiles. Especially when your husband was killed in battle, leaving you as regent till your three year old son grew up. Still, excuses excuses. Her husband Igor was slain by the drevlyans. The drevlyans sent ambassadors to seek her hand for their prince. I understand that was probably too soon on their part but her response was to bury the twenty ambassadors alive. Then she accepted the wedding proposal but insisted they send their best men to escort her. She locked all these nobles in a building and burnt it down. Later she slaughtered a big drunk army at a party and razed a city that had surrendered. A late conversion to Christianity has her counted as a saint.