22 January 2008 - 1:50Good Guys and Bad Guys

Today is Martin Luther King Day in the US, and it reminded me of a book I’ve been wanting to write.

I was reading Joseph Stalin’s biography (because I’ll read anything) when it struck me that even through all the damage he caused his own country the historians say that ‘it is unclear if Russia would have enjoyed the same economic growth without him’.  He killed the heads of business, science and religion, imprisoned hundreds of thousands without cause, created starvation during years of plenty, and they wonder if things would have been worse without him?  Ugh.

It made me realize that historians and thus history books are unwilling to clearly label rulers of the past as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.  They will hedge.  Now, in some cases there is quite a bit of gray, particularly the farther back you go, but there are some really clear cases of good vs evil in history that we should be able to point to in order to help future generations avoid really, really bad rulers and tend towards the moderately saner ones.

So I wanted to write a book, ‘Good Guys and Bad Guys’, that takes 5 leaders who had incontestible “good” records and 5 leaders who were simply bad people.  Now, you could pick a whole lot more than 5 good and 5 bad guys in the course of history, but I wanted to write something short and to the point.  Most historians can’t name even one of each.

Here’s my list of Good Guys: Martin Luther King Jr, Mohandas Gandhi, Mohammed Yunus (of the Grameen Bank), Nelson Mandela, George Marshall (of the famed Marshall plan to rebuild Germany after WWII).  These were more than good men, they were great men.  Even when they bested their foes they turned victory for themselves into victory for all, bringing peace from war and justice from inequality. 

The Bad Guys: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Robert Mugabe, and Frank Lucas (american drug smuggler).  The first four are well known- they came to power on a message of hatred and violence and brought it to their neighbors and to themselves.  The last figure is representative of an entire class of evil, the criminal leaders who bring destruction to their own neighborhoods under the guise of ‘opportunity’.  Lucas, along with other criminal leaders such as Danilo Blandon ended the trend of freedom for their minority communities and did them more harm than the Jim Crow laws a century before.

The cast was chosen not because they are novel choices, but because they are so obvious.  They offer a quick and obvious set of characteristics by which to choose for and against your leaders.  The lesson here is that the bad leaders are not merely “tough” (and thus somehow better to have on your side than working with the opposition), but “evil”, and thus the most damaging (as proven by history) to their own people and those people who are closest to them.

(1) Do they act for or against the Declaration of Human Rights? (2) Do they advocate peace and a better future or demand hatred and war?

There may be shades of grey, but some men are so dark that the light cannot be seen.  Distrust them.  And other men shine so brightly they could make white look dull.  Follow them.  By their hatreds or their dreams you will know them.