by Cracked. com
FIGURE 3.12 Churchill following WWII, at the peak of his popularity.
THE TRUTH: Winston Churchill was booted out of office within two months of the Nazi surrender.
FIGURE 3.13 Churchill, moments later.
The people he saved turned him out on his butt. “Thanks for nothing, Fatty. We’ve got it from here.”
Only months before the election for prime minister, Churchill was rocking an 83 percent approval rating and had the gratitude of a war-torn nation. Churchill and his Conservative Party believed he could win the election on the strength of his personality. After all, this man had just whipped the biggest monster the world had ever seen; what was a measly general election after that? The only problem was that Winston’s personality, while eerily great for battling Nazis, was not the best temperament for peacetime. And everyone knew it. The man loved war.
The peace agreement was barely on the table when Churchill accused his opponent of using Gestapo measures to implement his socialist agenda. That’s right—Churchill was calling political opponents “Hitler” before anyone else. And the truth is, he was already planning to invade Russia, which would have been a shitty move for just about everyone involved. If Winston Churchill had had his way, there wouldn’t have been a Cold War. Just a very hot World War III between nations with nuclear weapons.
So maybe the British people knew what they were doing after all.
THE MYTH: Hitler was a charismatic genius whom we barely stopped from taking over the globe.
Hitler is one of the only folks in history we’ve raised to the status of supervillain. He dominates the villain role in our collective consciousness so much that he’s the go-to analogy for almost any Internet flame war, despite most participants of flame wars having living memories dating back only to the Spice Girls’ breakup.
There are a few things that everyone likes to say about the man: “He was crazy.” “He was evil.” “He sucked.” “Look at that stupid mustache!” “Who does this asshole think he is—an asshole? He’s right if he thinks that.” But beyond all of the negative stuff, there are two vaguely positive things we tend to grant him: He was a cunning military strategist, and his passionate, borderline-unhinged public speeches really seemed to get the crowds whipped into a frenzy. We’ve all seen the footage of him standing at the podium like a man possessed, his eyes wide, his hands gesturing sharply, followed by a reverse shot of a German crowd just eating that shit up. You can’t teach that type of crowd control. For all of his many faults (honestly, how hard is it to get into art school?), when Hitler had the mic in his hand, the German people seemed to truly believe that there was no other party like the Nazi Party, because the Nazi Party don’t stop.
THE TRUTH: Hitler was just a PR-savvy, self-obsessed douche bag who knew how to manipulate the media and his public image.
All this Hitler talk is getting a little heavy for us. Let’s take a trip to the present. You know those awful modern celebrities, like the Kardashians and Paris Hilton, who become famous even though they have no discernible skills? In most cases, the reason those people are famous is because they are more image-conscious and shrewd about their image than people with actual talent. Their number one skill is a willingness to do ridiculously vain and self-obsessed things that most people would be too ashamed to do.
You now understand Hitler’s rise to power.
For instance: Every one of those public speeches where it seemed like he might spontaneously take a bite out of the podium? All an act: There was nothing spontaneous or passionate about them. Hitler would hire a private photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, to take pictures of him while he practiced his speeches (see Figure 3.14). Hitler would run through his awful rants and audition a variety of poses, hand gestures, and bizarre expressions, all while Hoffmann snapped pictures. Hitler would then review the images and decide whether to include a given gesture in his speech.
FIGURES 3.14 Too crazy-looking. Not crazy-looking enough. Perfect!
Hitler would also set up special photo shoots with Hoffmann. There are a number of images of Hitler posing in different outfits and in different locations, as seen in Figure 3.15, in which he’s captured looking like the shittiest American Eagle model in Germany.
That picture, and others like it, were banned by Hitler because it looked ridiculous. Hitler knew that image was everything. He wasn’t going to let any silly pictures surface, and he wasn’t going to step out in front of the public without practicing his “tough-guy face” a few hundred times. He was a showman and a shrewdly manipulative narcissist, but he wasn’t the spontaneous, passionate “man possessed” that historians and filmmakers would lead you to believe he was.
In fact, those impassioned speeches and evil pep rallies that seemed to whip all of Germany up into a murder-lust weren’t even all that effective: Hitler’s approval rating rarely broke 40 percent. And that’s despite murdering anyone who could be considered his competition.
Hitler’s real strength lay in his ability to surround himself with people much smarter than he was. Germany’s successful invasion of France, for example, had very little to do with Hitler, probably because he was too busy managing the Battle of Dunkirk (300,000 Allies escaped!) and the Battle of Britain (Germany’s first major defeat in the war!). The Nazis were pretty damn effective, as long as that pesky Hitler wasn’t getting involved.
So to recap, despite his low approval rating, he managed to get a great deal of Germany to agree to some spectacularly bad ideas because they were in an extremely rough spot. And despite being a tactical doofus, the Nazis ran shit all over Europe, thanks to some favorable conditions and slow responses from other world powers. Hitler got a lot done by being terrible at everything. It’s useful to think of him as an evil Forrest Gump, stumbling his way ass-backward from one success into another, over and over again for reasons that have less to do with things like “skill” and “charisma” and more to do with “the statistical inevitability that some stupid asshole will get extremely, ridiculously lucky once every century.”
Also, we should probably point out that Hitler slept through most of the Allies’ storming of Normandy and never woke up before noon. He also took twenty-eight different medications to treat his chronic flatulence, one of which is now known to have been, essentially, meth. This both explains why he was always flipping out like a lunatic behind the scenes and suggests that those flip-outs were probably punctuated by spurts of unintended flatulence. Please join us in laughing at him.
FIGURE 3.15 “Oh, hello! You’ve caught me enjoying the frigid wilderness in short-pants. Do you like my knees?”—Chill Hitler
Guy Fawkes Was Not an Anarchist
THE MYTH: Aside from the A-within-a-circle scrawled in every middle school bathroom on Earth, the seventeenth-century English revolutionary Guy Fawkes is probably the most prominent symbol of anarchy.
This is because he attempted to blow up Parliament in order to destabilize the British government.
THE TRUTH: He was blowing up Parliament because he thought it was too liberal.
While anarchists may be right that Fawkes was the only person ever to enter Parliament with honest intentions, they’ve forgotten what those intentions were. Fawkes wasn’t trying to destroy an evil theocracy; he was trying to install one. Fawkes was a fighter for Spain and the Catholic Church. His goal was to end the slightly more egalitarian Protestant revolution in England by restoring Catholic dominion. If the Gunpowder Plot had actually succeeded and Fawkes had had his way, Britain wouldn’t have looked like a punk rock album cover; it would have looked more like an Osmond family album cover . . . if the Osmonds stood around in smoking piles of rubble and blood.
FIGURE 3.16 The complete Guy Fawkes costume ensemble was proven far less popular with online vigilantes.
Machiavelli Was Not Machiavellian, Just a Misunderstood Satirist
THE MYTH: In the early 1500s, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote a political treatise called The Prince that is essentially a how-to guide for being a succes
sful tyrant.
FIGURE 3.17 “‘What the people don’t know won’t hurt them.’ —Machiavelli” —The Internet
It is addressed directly to the Florentine dictator Lorenzo de’ Medici and teaches him to divorce ruling a people from any obligation to ethics or compassion. Instead, it urges him to concentrate on the struggle to obtain and preserve power. It is pragmatic to the point of ruthlessness, and everyone who reads it is immediately struck by Machiavelli’s heartless approach to governing, which is both brilliant and evil. To this day, the word “Machiavellian” is one of the last adjectives you want to hear used to describe a political rival.
THE TRUTH: The Prince is the most misunderstood satire in all of history.
Everything Machiavelli ever wrote, before and after The Prince, insists that “Popular rule is always better than the rule of princes.” That’s because Machiavelli was actually a huge advocate of free republics and hated the idea of monarchies.
The Medici family in particular, the same family to which he dedicated The Prince, really pissed him off. See, Machiavelli worked for the Florentine Republic right before the Medici stepped in and insisted they were in charge from now on. Oh, and they also tortured Machiavelli before casting him off into exile for being revolutionary. So why would an exiled, disgruntled writer suddenly try to help the reigning prince to be more merciless?
Well, he wouldn’t. Without the context of the rest of Machiavelli’s work, The Prince makes him look like a blatant asshole, when in fact he was actually a very sneaky asshole. After the pamphlet was circulated around Italy, if the Medicis made any move that seemed to earnestly follow the ideologies of The Prince, the public would be so furious at their arrogance that it would likely incite a revolution. So through his sarcasm, Machiavelli could effectively bind the hands of the ruling family, ensuring that the people would be looking for any parallels between the actions of the Medici family and that horrible pamphlet they’d just read.
Unfortunately, even today Machiavelli never gets the credit he deserves for his powerful satire because it was so well written that everyone took him at his word. It would be the equivalent of Jonathan Swift being remembered by history as that awful lunatic who wanted London to start eating the babies of poor people.
3.C
History Doesn’t March Forward
It Does the Electric Slide and Teleports Around Like the Indian Boxer in Punch-Out!!
It’s pretty amazing that, despite all the dips and dives and twists and turns of history, we’ve been able to accurately plot the details of most major events from their beginnings at point A to their eventual conclusions at point B, filling the space between with bountiful details. And by “amazing,” we of course mean “completely and totally inaccurate.”
The truth is, history is a lot like a pieced-together account of a drunken night out, Hangover-style. We kind of know the gist of everything that happened, and we could swear we remember all of the important details, but the complete and total set of historical facts? Well, that’s just not going to happen. In fact, you’d be amazed at what humanity has been able to forget, lose track of, or just stumble ass over teakettle into long before we had any right.
The Fascinating Stuff We Don’t Know
THE MYTH: All of the most important books and historical records we could ever need are readily available at our fingertips. Although wars and plagues and all manner of disasters may have tried to destroy our important stuff, we kept it safe.
THE TRUTH: All of the classic books and artistic works that managed to make it this long are great and we’re super thankful to have them . . . but they kind of pale in comparison to all of the stuff we’ve lost.
In fact, the world would be a very different place if a few pages hadn’t been misplaced (or burned in a fire). Here are just a few of the great works we’ve forever lost to history.
The Gospel of Eve, by Unknown
A sexually perverse book of the Bible. Church officials weren’t fond of it, going so far as to accuse the book of being responsible for people “eating semen as a religious act.” Delicious!
What’s the Big Deal? Let too many people catch wind of this freakfest of a Bible book, and the church will have a lot of explaining to do for the two thousand years or so of celibacy that it imposed on people. You can’t expect to tell people they could have been guiltlessly boning all this time without there being some blowback. If you know what we mean.
Why We’ll Never See It: In the fourth century, church leaders like Epiphanius lashed out against the book, because some people just don’t like to party. Eventually, all of that incessant complaining worked and the Gospel of Eve fell out of favor with church officials. The pope might have a copy or two lying around, but don’t expect the Vatican to let you download it to your Kindle anytime soon.
On Sphere-Making, by Archimedes
A how-to book on the vast array of steampunk wonders that ancient Greece had to offer. Everything from orreries to astronomical clocks—Archimedes knew how to build them. And in the epic On Sphere-Making, he was telling you how you could be just like him!
What’s the Big Deal? The Greeks mastered mechanics in ways that even modern standards can’t compare to, and Archimedes was the most skilled among them. A book explaining his work would have massive implications for society at large. Ideally, it would mean we could finally build that steam-powered BattleMech we’ve been dreaming about, but that’s not guaranteed.
Why We’ll Never See It: If any copies even still exist, they’re probably buried at the kind of location that requires excavation equipment, or else they were torched when Rome burned down the Library of Alexandria. The only reason we even know about On Sphere-Making is because of Pappus of Alexandria, a fellow mathematician who wrote some glowing, awestruck testimony about the book. So we know two things about On Sphere-Making: Whatever it was, it was really awesome, and we can never read it. It’s like the Hoverboard of ancient Greek literature.
The Rest of the Epic Cycle, by Various Authors
The other six books of the epic saga of Troy. Everyone is familiar with The Iliad and The Odyssey, but the story of the Battle of Troy is far grander than two books can ever do justice to. That’s why there aren’t just two books. There are eight. The problem is, only the two that Homer wrote withstood the elements long enough for someone to realize that we should maybe have a couple more copies on hand for future reference.
What’s the Big Deal? The Battle of Troy is probably the most famous nonreligious story of all time, and the impact of The Iliad and The Odyssey on literature as a whole is nearly immeasurable. Not having the whole thing is one massive literary cock tease.
Why We’ll Never See It: Because nobody bothered to save a single copy. The only reason we even know about them is from references made to them in other literature of the time.
Hermocrates, by Plato
The rumored third book in Plato’s unified field theory trilogy. The first two books, Timaeus and Critias, are basically transcripts of one of the greatest thinkers of his or any time discussing how the universe happened. This would be more of that. It’s pretty damn important.
What’s the Big Deal? Heads up, fantasy nerds. The unified field theory trilogy was the seminal source for the theory of Atlantis, the legendary island civilization that sank into the ocean for some mysterious reason. If the lost third book in the trilogy is out there, who knows? Maybe it has directions to the place.
Why We’ll Never See It: Nobody knows where it is. Some even theorize that Plato never got around to finishing it. In his defense, he was probably too busy knowing how every damn thing in the world works to dedicate enough time to finishing it.
The (Supposed) Lost Sayings of Jesus
The Q Document, as it’s called, allegedly contains most of the collected teachings of the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth. This one document is the suspected source for many of his quotes in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. If it exists, it would include monumental sayings like the Golden Rule, Be
atitudes, and the Lord’s Prayer, all gathered together in one smoking-hot collection for the first time ever!
What’s the Big Deal? You don’t really need us to answer that, right? Just think of how Western society would have evolved if we had specific teachings from Jesus on matters like women’s rights and abortion and slavery. This document could have altered history in every imaginable way.
Why We’ll Never See It: Scholars have basically theorized the Q Document into existence. They know the four Gospels must share some common source material based on way the stories overlap, but if Indiana Jones couldn’t find it, we’re guessing it’s not turning up.
The Rare Books Section at the House of Wisdom
The rarest of rare books from the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, housed in the Grand Library of Baghdad.
What’s the Big Deal? The House of Wisdom was basically the Library of Congress of its time. It contained some of the oldest books ever written from across three different continents. The card catalog alone would be considered priceless. You could have walked in with a checklist of animals and plant life that are extinct today and likely found volumes of information about each one.
Why We’ll Never See It: Because the Mongols invaded the city where the House of Wisdom was located and, in the process, tossed every single book into the Tigris River. The water ran black with ink for six months afterward. A pretty sweet outcome in the visual sense, but certainly not worth losing all that history.
Ab urbe condita libri, by Livy
A detailed history of Rome. All of it. From its Trojan forefathers to the reign of Caesar Augustus eight hundred years later. That means there’s information about the Roman Empire in this collection that literally is not written down anywhere else. It was said to weigh in at a staggering 142 volumes, and all who saw even a glimpse of it agreed that it was a marvel.