ITT: Historical figures who are portrayed as evil but in reality did nothing wrong

Literally the only correct answer so far.

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This sweet old man.

D'aww

>only I may worship god, but it takes a lot out of me to do that so I need you all to help by worshiping me
monotheism egyptian style

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inb4 hitlerfags

jel' to sloba milosevic

please come back

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If only he and Alexander had been content with one less eastern campaign...

Agreed.

>pic
Modern people treat him like a piece of shit because he owned slaves and slept with some of them. As if that wasn't a) common, or b) somehow invalidates him as one of the greatest statesmen and polymaths of the 18th century.

This

I love Gladiator but fuck Ridley Scott for giving Commodus such an undeserved reputation. He couldn't have invented an emperor?

Crazy

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>Undeserved reputation

Commodus being fucking awful is literally the cause of the crisis of the third century. Commodus had a shit reputation long before Gladiator was a thing.

Shit at least the movie made him a decent villain rather than the pathetic LARPer he actually was.

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Alexander Hamilton was everything Thomas Jefferson wished he could be, which is why by the time he became president he abandoned his principles and ruled like an able, powerful president.
Hamilton...
>never once lived by the sweat of another man's brow
>pulled himself up by his own bootstraps
>maybe not as visionary as a polymath like Jefferson, but one of the most competent men of his day
>all of his predictions actually panned out

Conservatives and lolbertarians hate him because he's got a swanky Broadway number in his honor and people generally hold him up as a shining example of government that actually works.

>Son of one of the most principled and wise men of the ancient world, still fucked up beyond all belief
>Bankrupted the Roman Economy through role playing as Hercules and throwing big fucking games
>Caused a crisis of national security
>Not bad

Aurelius should have smothered him in his sleep

>a
>fucking
>larping
>faggot

he well deserves his horrible reputation
how could his wise father fuck up raising him so badly is beyond me

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this fucking meme gets me everytime

we miss you uncle Adolf ;_;

As much as I adore that movie, it always irked me that it reduces the complexities of Roman politics down to Republic = good, Empire = evil which isn't even close to historically accurate as the Principate maintained a democratic facade and most people thought of the Emperor as a protector of the Republic, not as someone undermining it. It's just a tired Hollywood meme and a relic of the Bush years.

No, the movie flanderized him into this maniacal sister-banging psychopath.

Frankly, what would have been more horrible/awesome to me would have been if the movie showed him acting like the historical Commodus, dressing up like Hercules, utterly fucking embarrassing senators with his tawdry arena displays, shooting animals by the dozens, forcing gladiators to take a fall while he murders them. Heck there was one instance where Commodus ordered the praetorian guard to round up all the cripples in the city, and he has them all tied together on the floor of the arena in the shape of a person, and then Commodus went around one by one clubbing them to death, and then announced that he had killed a giant. The Empire had just been devastated by a plague and while the state was teetering on the brink of collapse Commodus was blowing it's rainy day fund on lavish, extravagant parties for himself.

That would have made him a far more sinister and interesting villain imo than just some power tripping emofag perving on his sister because that's what all emperors do and that's why empire is bad...

Happy birthday to the greatest American President of the last 150 years.

Mah Nigga Cao Cao

He really did nothing wrong. Even in the Three Kingdoms novel, I never saw him as a villain even though I was supposed to. He was extremely prideful, but at the same time he was always holding back the extreme personages of the empire.

>did nothing wrong
dude was an inbred nightmare and he still had the audacity to try and set himself up as the only true god incarnate, pissing off half of Egypt in the process. He built a fucking ghost town of a royal city in the middle of nowhere, with what may have been one of the shittiest places of worship in all of Egypt in an aesthetic sense (literally an open courtyard with a tiny as fuck podium for Pharoah to stand on and a couple pillars, cheap bastard). His religion was so bad that it literally collapsed overnight as soon as he died and not just his name but his entire family was struck from the records wherever the priests could find them. Christ's sake, his hormones were so fucked up that you could barely tell the effeminate fuck apart from his wife.
Kindly erase all instances of your name and kys, OP

The eternal Frank strikes again.

ABRRRRRROOOOOOO

How did his reputation get so tarnished by this cartoon?

JOHN.FUCKING.RATCLIFFE
>Just wanted to peacefully trade with the natives
>They murder him

The South was too stubborn to listen to reason and see that industrialization was inevitable.

So instead they listened to the cries of their widows and children.

the problem is that he knew slavery was wrong yet still participated in it because he couldn't imagine things any other way

the decline of the roman empire starts with him

>trusting the ancient sources blindly

He was a mediocre emperor scapegoated by writers looking back at the crisises they faced during the 3rd century and associating correlation with causation.

In reality, taking away Commodus doesn't prevent the Crisis. It doesn't prevent the Antonine Plague, or inherent instabilities within the Roman state.

he didn't actually look like that, it's an intentional stylistic depiction to make him look androgynous, reflecting the Aten's nature as both mother and father of the world. There are other depictions of him where he is presented in a much more conventional manner, like this one.

Hatshepsut built a ton of statues of herself as a man, it wasn't because she was actually masculine it was to fit in with her propaganda.

>come into power with a large treasury
>die (by being stabbed in the back while taking a piss so you drown in your own urine no less) with a mountain of debt
unforgivable

whoops, forgot my pic

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No, I hate him because he wanted America to become a carbon copy of the empire we rebelled against.

>burn atlanta down because muh union
ya fuck off

youtube.com/watch?v=jrYlR6RwRCw

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McCarthy was right. You can disagree with the methods he used, but to claim that there weren't Russian agents in the State Department is unequivocally false.

Because newags didn't know his reputation was shit long before fucking Futurama.

For a while it was vogue to doubt everything that the Romans wrote down as propaganda until they started finding the actual sacrificial pits where Carthaginians slaughtered babies, and people realized that maybe the Romans were a little more competent than we were giving them credit for.
Commodus's unforgivable crime was that when he went into power was when Rome needed a strong leader more than ever and he was not a strong leader. First rule of leadership is that everything that happens is your fault
That was Caracalla who was stabbed in the back while taking a piss.

Commodus was drown in his bathtub by his wrestling coach

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal
The cartoon had nothing to do with it

I mean it worked.

>given shit republic
>tried his best to save it
>killed by a bunch of tryhard traitors

He's shifty

What' the name of the movie?, i would love to see good adpation of Cao Cao

DOMITIAN
O
M
I
T
I
A
N

Also as an aside, how fantastic is that bust? He looks regal as shit.

Honestly though. Give it fifty years and his reputation will be restored.

I'd say western media doesn't portray him as evil but misguided

honestly he's not a black and white figure but he's probably given a generous amount of praise considering that whilst yes he did pull Russia out of Feudalism and improved the quality of life he was still quite authoritarian and he did some reprehensible things

>That was Caracalla who was stabbed in the back while taking a piss.
oh shit you're right, my bad

Hitler

he did many things wrong, even if we ignore all the mass murder he intentionally started a war that his nation couldn't win, then when his leadership had led Germany to absolute disaster he blamed his subjects for not being strong enough to realize his obviously brilliant plans then shot himself.

If he was evil then George Washington was evil

He did nothing wrong. Sacrificed himself for the sins and future of western europe. He truly carried the cross

Babyface

>Sacrificed himself for the sins and future of western europe.
...By causing the deaths of millions of Europeans and the destruction of hundreds if not thousands of villages, towns, and cities.

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He was misunderstood but where would we be now

Remember dresden. Those bastard allies and japs.

A ko drugi

I disagree, if Commodus had ascended when Lucius and Marcus did in reality then that would have been when Rome needed a strong ruler. As it was Commodus inducing a schizophrenic government wasn't nearly as catastrophic as it could have been since Marcus had in the past decades beaten the agitating tribes into submission and secured a peace with Sassanid Persia that lasted throughout his reign.

Commodus did bring an unprecedented time of games to rome though. Only to be killed by marcus' greatest general under the guise of a gladiator

Why are you listing Authoritarianism as a negative? Human beings need Authority for group cohesion.

authoritarianism =/= government

ultimately the elevated status that the totalitarian ideals gave the government just ended up creating another ruling class

>Why are you listing Authoritarianism as a negative? Human beings need Authority for group cohesion.

>Not posting the statue
Pleb

Actually did my Master's research on him, facinating figure.

has the fedora meme come full circle now? It used to be about people bragging about their unique personal qualities.

I don't mean totalitarianism, just Authoritative leadership. If we are to look at the bolshevik revolution objectively, an Authoritative leader is paramount to the success of the movement.

Assassins creed real

Wt did the bolshevik revolution lead to

The 2010 Three Kingdoms series.

Narcissus wasn't a general and was really a gladiator but you're probably memeing Russell Crow.

The Soviet Union.

He had actually worked tirelessly since Watergate to redeem his reputation. By the time the 90s rolled around, while he was in know way fondly remembered his disapproval rating was nearly as bad as you might think. fast-forward after his death and suddenly he's Saddam Hussein on steroids. I think futurama had a lot to do with it.

>He had actually worked tirelessly since Watergate to redeem his reputation

So did Herbert Hoover after the Depression, but it didn't help much.

Once you fuck up hard, that is what people will remember you for above almost all of your other accomplishments.

I've always thought of the fedora as being for someone who thinks they are superior for no reason, or someone who values ideology more then facts

if you mean that in a "what did they ever do for us" kind of way, which I hope because I don't want to share a board with people who haven't heard of the russian revolution, the bolshevik revolution improved literacy and reduced starving, in Russia at least, and while pretty shit in a lot of ways you'd have to be wilfully ignorant to claim it was bad for the average person.

if you mean that honestly then what the fuck are you doing here

>implying the Great Depression was hoover's fault

His methods were antithetical to political freedom.

The whole point of the United States is you are free to believe whatever you want. He didn't just go after "Russian agents in the State Department," he went after ordinary citizens and entertainers under the pretense that he and other elites knew what was "UnAmerican."

>implying culpability matters when it comes to public perception

Only fascists and the descendents of aristocrats think he was evil.