What the monsters of history were before they became monsters
12 min read
The Boy Who Painted Postcards
In 1908, a 19 year old had just lost his mother. All he wanted was to go to art school and become an artist, but he kept being told no, that he was not good enough. Over the next two years, he drifted from one cheap room to another, and for a while he lived in a shelter for homeless men. So what did he do? He painted small pictures of buildings, copied from postcards, and sold them to make a living. We all know this boy’s name, and the man he grew up to become. Everyone calls him the bad guy, the villain and many other names. But ask yourself one question: is that what he thought of himself?
In every book I have read and every story I have heard, the hero and the villain are very clear. But my interest in history has taught me one thing. History is never simple. It is never black or white, never just good or bad, and more often than not, the truth lies somewhere in between.
The Book on My Bedside
A couple of days back, during a business meeting, one of my friends said to me, “I like how you write your articles. You have an interesting approach. Do you read?” I told him sometimes, but that I am more of a visual learner and I read very slowly. He laughed and said, “It’s okay if you read slowly. I know you are interested in history and that kind of stuff, so I will send you a book I found very interesting. It can change your entire point of view.”
To be honest, I was skeptical. We are trained to think a certain way from the time we are young. But it is history after all, and history has always interested me, so I said yes. And that got me thinking: the villains we know today, did they ever think of themselves as villains?
I will try to answer that in this article. My attempt is not to change how you think, but to put my point forward and help you ask yourself one simple question: what if?
The King They Do Not Burn
Let me start with one side of the story we rarely hear. We have all watched a Ram Leela at one point or another, and there is a part where they burn an effigy of Ravan. But first and foremost, he was a Brahmin, which means he was a scholar. Second, he was one of the greatest devotees of Lord Shiva. And on top of all that, he was the king of an empire, just like his enemy on the field, Lord Ram. So no matter what happened on the battlefield, a king, whether he won or lost, was given his last rites with all the honours due to a king.
Not just that, there are many places in India and abroad where people treat him with respect, even though they know what he did. In Bisrakh, near Greater Noida, people believe he was born there. They call him Maha Brahman and perform yajnas for him during Navratri, and to them burning his effigy would be like killing a Brahmin. In Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh, he is the son-in-law, because Mandodari is believed to have come from there, and the town even has a statue of him that stands 35 feet tall. Near Jodhpur, the Moudgil Brahmins perform his shraddh on Dussehra instead of celebrating. And in Kanpur, there is a Dashanan temple that opens only one day a year, on Dussehra, when people gather and chant Jai Lankesh.
Even the story has his side. In his eyes, taking Sita was revenge for what Lakshman did to his sister Surpanakha when he cut off her nose. Now, none of this changes what the Ramayana says. What he did was adharma, and these towns know that too. But for some people in this country, the most famous villain we have is also a scholar, an elder, even family. Both things live side by side, and nobody there seems to find that strange.
A Villain in Svarga
Suyodhana, better known as Duryodhana, the biggest villain of the Mahabharata, is greatly lauded for his friendship with Karna. He made Karna the king of Anga when many people around him belittled Karna because of his birth. And even after Karna found out that his true birth mother was Kunti, the mother of Duryodhana’s biggest rivals, the Pandavas, their friendship never wavered, not even for a minute. More often than not, that friendship is still the benchmark we use today.
Then comes his own claim. He always believed that as the eldest son of the reigning king, he had the strongest claim to the throne, not the Pandavas. So in his eyes, he was defending his inheritance, not stealing someone else’s.
It is also sad that when Yudhishthira entered heaven after the war, he found Duryodhana sitting on one of heaven’s most prominent seats. The great sage Narada told him that those who died following Kshatriya dharma reach this state, and that there can be no enmities here.
In a village in Kerala, people climb a small hill to pray to Duryodhan. The story goes that he once drank toddy offered by a woman of a so called lower caste and never asked who she was. The epic does not forget the dice game. Neither do they. They simply remember something else too.
Postcards From Vienna
Now let’s talk about a young man who wanted to be a painter, but life had other plans. We all know him as one of the biggest villains in modern history. His name is Adolf Hitler. But before the mass murders and the conquest, nobody asks one question: what did young Hitler want to be? And what made him the man we know today?
Here is a surprising fact that not many people know. Hitler did not start out wanting to conquer the world. He wanted to be an artist, and he applied to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. In 1907 he was even good enough to pass the first exam, but his sample drawings were judged “unsatisfactory, too few heads.” In 1908, when he tried again, he was not even allowed to sit the exam. The academy said he had more aptitude for architecture than art. It makes you wonder: what if he had been let in? How would the world look then? What would people say about him today?
The second turning point in young Hitler’s life was his mother’s illness and her death from breast cancer. She was treated in Linz by their Jewish family doctor, Eduard Bloch, who charged the family very little and sometimes nothing at all. When she died on 21 December 1907, Bloch said young Adolf was the saddest man he had ever seen. Hitler even sent him postcards of gratitude from Vienna. Now stop and think. What would it feel like to lose the person you love the most? What would that do to a young man’s mind?
Then came the poverty. After his mother’s death, between 1908 and 1910, he drifted between cheap rooms and at one point lived in a homeless men’s shelter. From 1909, he tried to get back on his feet by selling small watercolours of Vienna’s landmarks, mostly copied from postcards.
Then came the war. He enlisted in the Bavarian army in 1914 and served as a dispatch runner. And he was not just any soldier. He was decorated, receiving the Iron Cross Second Class in 1914 and the Iron Cross First Class on 4 August 1918. In October 1918, near Ypres, he was caught in a British mustard gas attack that left him temporarily blind. He was sent to a hospital in Pasewalk, and it was there that he learned Germany had lost the war. It is said he buried his face in his pillow. Stop and think again. What would your reaction be if you heard your country had lost a war you were told it was winning, a war you had fought on the front lines and nearly lost your sight for?
After the war came the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and later the Great Depression. Millions of Germans were angry and wanted someone to blame, and Hitler gave them an enemy to point that anger at. In his point of view, he was not acting against humanity. In fact, he believed he was doing the opposite: the Lord’s work. In his autobiography, Mein Kampf, he wrote:
“Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”
The scariest part in all this? He could look at one Jewish doctor and see a kind man. He chose not to see the other six million. That is the part that frightens me. It was not that he could not see. It was that he decided not to. In his point of view, he never thought he was the villain. He thought he was the only one brave enough to save Germany.
Man of Steel, Boy of Verse
How many of us know that the big bad Stalin was sent to a seminary because his mother wanted him to become a priest? At seventeen, he was writing poems about violets and the moon. Georgian schoolchildren learned them by heart for decades, often without knowing who wrote them.
In his point of view, he was defending the revolution and building socialism against saboteurs, kulaks and “enemies of the people.” In his own mind, the terror was hygiene.
There is a famous line people put in his mouth, about one death being a tragedy and a million being a statistic. He probably never said it. It actually came from a French joke in 1924. The real numbers do not need any help. In just two years of what is called the Great Terror, around 680,000 people were executed, and millions more died in the labour camps and the famine.
Ordinary Résumés
And this did not end with the Second World War. Look a little closer to our own time and the pattern keeps repeating.
The Gentle Teacher
Take Pol Pot. Before he was Pol Pot, he was Saloth Sar, a young man from Cambodia who went to study in Paris. When he came back, he became a teacher at a private school in Phnom Penh, teaching history, geography and French literature. His students remembered him as soft spoken and gentle, a good teacher. In his own mind, he was building a pure Cambodia, a nation of farmers that depended on no one. When the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, they emptied the cities, shut the schools and treated educated people as enemies, teachers included. In less than four years, around 1.7 million people died, almost one in every five Cambodians. The gentle teacher did that.
The Champion They Cheered
Then there is Idi Amin. He had very little schooling, joined the army in 1946, and was Uganda’s boxing champion for nine years. When he took power in 1971, people danced in the streets of Kampala. He released political prisoners and promised elections. He called himself a soldier, not a politician. A year later, he gave Uganda’s Asians, many of them Indian families who had lived there for generations, 90 days to leave with almost nothing. Tens of thousands lost their homes and businesses overnight. By the time he was gone, estimates of the people killed under his rule ran from 80,000 to 300,000 or more. The man people cheered for became the man they ran from.
The Man in the Mirror
Now for the question we have been building up to through this entire article. Did they think of themselves as villains? Or even as negative characters? I believe none of them did. I think they saw themselves as people doing the right thing for their people, as victims of oppressors, maybe even as healers of a broken nation.
So no, I don’t think any of them ever saw the villain in the mirror. They saw a man who had been wronged, and a world that needed fixing.
That is what makes them frightening. Not that they were different from us, but that they began so close.
I don’t know exactly when the painter became the Führer, or when the poet became the man who signed the lists. I am not sure they knew either.
The Echo
The book is still on my bedside. I have not finished it yet, but I think I already understand what my friend meant.
The next time you are sure you are the good guy in a story, try telling it once from the other side.
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