[0681] Heroes
└ posted on Thursday, 7 May 2015, by Novil
- Sandra: We all know the worst mass murderers in history. But far too few people know the heroes who saved the most lives.
- Caption: Ignaz Semmelweis, Hungarian physician at the Vienna General Hospital, discovered in 1847 that the incidence of childbed fever could be drastically cut by the use of diligent hand disinfection.
- Physician: A gentleman’s hands are never dirty!
- Ignaz Semmelweis: I beg to differ.
- Caption: During the Massacre of Nanking in 1938, German businessman John Rabe established safety zones that sheltered over 200,000 Chinese citizens from the Japanese army.
- John Rabe: Would you let go for a moment? I need to go to the bathroom.
- Caption: Stanislav Petrov, lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defense Forces, may have prevented a nuclear war in 1983 when he correctly identified the launch of five American nuclear missiles as a false alarm of the Soviet’s early warning system.
- Stanislav Petrov: No, no! These aren’t nuclear missiles! These are just weather balloons!
- Yury Votintsev: Hmm…
![[0681] Heroes](/comics/2015-05-07-0681-heroes.png "[0681] Heroes")
Why do people include Mao Zedong in the collection of mass murderers?
Mao Zedong didn’t ‘kill’ those people because he was hateful, they DIED because he’s a fucking idiot who has literally no idea how agriculture or economy works, and they starved to death as a result.
Any people he might have intentionally killed himself were out of paranoia, and all the rest of the people who died were at the hands of his fanatic Red Guard, which he did not assemble himself and eventually wanted to stop them because they were being a little too enthusiastic with their anti capitalist, anti tradition killing and torture regimes, even for his liking.
His wife is more virulent than him. I’m incredibly disappointed that he was included..
nice strip! heartwarming. and not just because i am hungarian 😀 (or because i was born in 1983… )
Oh I know the Petrov one! I really enjoyed reading about that one, I thought it was the most shocking (a good kind of shocking). That dude pretty much saved Earth from nuclear warfare, it’s scary to think what would have happened if he had reported the signal as nuclear missiles – good man! (And good page, I really enjoyed this comic!)
@ Questiontroll:
Isn’t it general consensus that he also brutally massacred practically every civilization that ever refused to surrender to him… or was that Atilla the Hun?
Norman Borlaug’s food research is widely reported to have saved more than 1 billions lives.
He didn’t do it all from the comfort of a lab either. He went to asia and africa to improve agriculture. Africa almost didn’t happen because most of the western world pulled out support for his African projects because they included non organic fertilizers. He was lucky that some people remember when he saved south asia.
Speaking of south asia, while he was preparing to basically save India and Pakistan who were finally hungry enough to forgo agricultural tradition and adopt a foreign method, War broke out between them (the 1965 one) and Norman went Anyway to Both countries and started planting, if the stories are to believed, he did this with visible artillery flashes around.
Poor Semmelweis. Doctors were so insulted by what he said that for a while death rates skyrocketed because even the doctors that did was their hands were afraid to side with him because of the backlash.
The example I always like is Prince Albert, who at best is remembered as Queen Victoria’s husband and at worst for giving his name to a sex aid, but who actually prevented a war between England and the US.
Yep, Hungarians… our scientists tend to be awesome. 😀
I theorize that Hitler is actually more widely known in the globe than Jesus.
I have to disagree with Stalin being a mass murderer. He was a tough leader, cleaning every mess with a hardest possible way, but the amount of good things he made for USSR is unparalleled.
John Rabe saved those lives using a Nazi flag and was a Nazi Party member. Which doesn’t take away from what he did one bit. I’d rather like to see a movie about him, imagine it, a Nazi as the good guy!
@ HeavenlySatanic:
He was the guy in charge, furthermore he was the guy in charge people were too afraid of to say to him “this isn’t working.” Might as well forgive Stalin for going along with Lermontov, the Soviet agricultural specialist who convinced Stalin wheat would respond to the dialectic.
@ Marakas:
Putinbot found!
Being Swedish, I feel obliged to mention Nils Bohlin, who developed the three-point car safety belt into its modern form for Volvo. It is believed to have saved at least a million lives, maybe several.
My father always admired the reporter Edward Kennedy for leaking the news on May 7, 1945 (Hey, look at the date!) that World War II in Europe was over a day and a half before the news embargo about it was to end, thus preventing the deaths of all the soldiers still fighting that day. It wasn’t millions, but those soldiers would have died fighting a war that was already over.
The Wikipedia article on him is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Kennedy_%28journalist%29
What about Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution?
@ Jesse:
Ghengis predates the Ottoman Empire by over half a century. I believe the quote you make comes at the invasion of the Khwarazmian dynasty (Persian influence, not Turkish), east of present day Iraq (it’s western borders may have been slightly inside Iraq). You seem to omit the parts where Genghis first sent a caravan was attacked by a local governor and that one of the ambassadors sent to seek reparations (the Muslim ambassador, no less) was shaved and beheaded, with the head being sent back with the two Mongol ambassadors. In that light it is unfair to put him up there with the others were unjustifiably vicious.
In addition to doing a great service, Semmelweis and Rabe were treated very poorly. Semmelweis’ treatment is particularly sad given the clear results of his method. Rabe was censored by the Nazi party as far as speaking out against their ally, Japan, but seemed to be okay otherwise. But given what he did in China, he was treated poorly by the Allies after the war. Petrov indicated he was not treated poorly nor rewarded (the last due to politics), but there are several, himself include that point out that his role is exaggerated.
Marakas wrote:
It’s well within your rights to do so. Free speech and all that. But the historic facts support his inclusion.
That is not to say he didn’t implement things that brought the USSR a big step forward. He did. He also royally screwed up several times, again costing the USSR years or decades in the process or sowing the seed that would contribute to the ultimate (and inevitable) collapse of the system.
His historic role is ambiguous. As much as one would want to emphasise his positive achievements, it’s important not to forget or trivialise his flaws and mistakes either.
Kamino Neko wrote:
I once met Robert Bloch who wrote the Book “Psycho” which the movie was made from.
He said that he got to Interview Ed Gein in the Whacky Ward.
He told me that Gein was the single most Frightening person he’d ever met even though Gein was about a Foot Shorter and not exactly a robust physical specimen.
Crazy has a quality all its own.
I always liked the simmetry of the Nazi John Rabe saving Chinese from the Japanese while in Europe Chiune Sugihara was saving the Jews from the Germans.
@ Yakumo:
My mistake. The point still remains that he left no stone standing atop another.
I just want to smile.
🙂
@ Questiontroll:
Actually, the Rape of Nanking is STILL something the Japanese Government won’t apologize for, and every few years some minister or politician brings it back up and it causes quite a stir. They keep replying to the effect that ‘none of those things happened, and if they did, all the horrid brutalities and massacres in that region were committed by a previous regime, and besides, the Chinese were our enemies.’ Lots of young Japanese students are only just now learning about their great grandparent’s atrocities, and are horrified that these stories were kept from them, but still the Japanese government won’t officially acknowledge the things done during that period.
I’m pretty tired of even smart and decent people unthinkingly buying into this “Stalin mass murderer” Nazi propaganda bullshit.
Especially now, in 2015, when the whole truth is out and is readily available; when Hearst, Conquest, Solzhenitsin, Yakovlev etc. are already either exposed as frauds or themselves admitted to making this stuff up.
rape of nanking never happened. go watch your anime weaboos. why do japanese deny it so hard?
I agree, history would be so much better if we learned about the good guys as well as the bad guys. And in some cases; about the guys who were both! Learn history, or be doomed to nap in it!
English Doctor of Medicine John Snow discovered waterborne diseases and nearly single-handedly stopped the spread of one terrorising low-income areas of Victorian London.
I only know about him because he has the same name as a Game of Thrones character.
I encourage all to look at the histories of these heroes. Their “reward” for heroism was appalling. Petrov was disciplined and suffered a nervous breakdown. Rabe’s family was driven to poverty so abject that they lived on wild seeds gathered by the children. Semmelweis was beaten to death by guards two weeks after being committed to a mental institution at 47. Societies deal harshly with those courageous enough to stand up for what is right.
@ HN:
The japanese government always apologized. Every Prime-Minister issue an official apology, but then some minor politician question it and the whole World thinks that the japanese government is trying to retract it. It is like saying that an statement made by the White House or the Congress is retracted by an angry tea-party member.
And it is wrong to say that the children don’t know about the war. The japanese people always took lightly everything China and Korea tossed at then because they thought it was well deserved for their war deeds. There are a lot of examples in the Midia about how we were wrong, how it is wrong to go to war, how the Imperial Japan were monstrous. Contrary to some countries that exalts its military and glorify war.
People say that Japan is not teaching it in schools because sometimes one private school (not a public one) would adopt a book that is not so callous about the war and soon the news say that the entire country is adopting it.
Also, Japan do not deny the Nanking episode, but contest the numbers and data. The one who started the hype and the Asahi Shinbun admitted that they lied.
Many photos of the atrocities were manipulated or displaced (photos of other incidents with no japanese involvement).
There were many contradictions in the testimonies. Rabe said the casualities were around 50.000. The Post-War Tribunal said it was about 130.000 (combatents included) but the chinese say it was around 300.000 civilians. It is an impossible number that would require an Auschwitz-like infrastructure to imprison, kill and dispose of the bodies. And as it was in the nazi side, it would be impossible to hide an operation of that magnitude.
Also, if the Japanese government were hellbent in exterminating the chinese, it would not be a single german that would protect the 200.000 chinese from them. The MP would arrest him as the SS did in Germany and kill everyone in the so-called safety zone.
What’s this? Someone who knows enough history to know about the rape of Nanking?
@ Constantine:
yep. all these minorities. tatars, chechens, gypsies, prussians, killed themselves off. all 30 million
@ Yoshi:
That makes a lot of sense now.
Marakas wrote:
ethnic cleaning. ba dum tsss
“We all know the worst mass murderers in history”
Of course we do… where is Hirohito by the way?O_O
@ Arklyte:
Where is Churchill and his Queen?
@ Arklyte:
Hirohito is disputed, as most of the power in Japan at the time was in the “Big six,” or the top three military leaders and the top three domestic ones. Hirohito did not object to the invasion of china (he was more concerned with the Soviets), but he was actually against the war with America at first. (Eventually his ministers Pressured him into it, along with the US ultimatum to remove Japanese troops from Indochina)
@ Yoshi:
It might have been good riddance for those who want to whitewash history, and would be offended at mentioning the things that really happened. Then again, i might be whitewashing “recent events” by saying that.
@ Questiontroll:
There are many events that get covered up or diminished. From the WWII era alone, we talk about the Holocaust, but that is usually the only act of it’s time we talk about. Rarely talked about are the Russian prisoner-of-war camps and the actions of the invading Japanese. Both of these (in my opinion) could gain similar footing, in terms of tragedy, with the Holocaust, and since I’m not a WWII history buff, I know i must be missing some things, things that i should be embarrassed to miss.
For those who are interested in the Russian prison camps, I’d recommend reading Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936-1949, part 4.
@ epitearo:
But he was the official head of state like Stalin and Hitler? And the amount of casualties inflicted by this state since the start of invasion to China and up to the end of WWII… everything else just pales in comparison, but everyone prefers not to mention it like it never happened.
Though we get a lot of “Samurai honor” bs in movies and anime. Great substitute, right?:(
@ Constantine:
Even 50 people is already a mass murder. Yes, he probably wasn’t responsible for such exaggerated numbers, but he is still a mass murderer responsible for death of millions.
P.S.: И не надо мне тут сейчас очередные “ля-ля” про то, что “ты просто не видишь всей картины, другие не лучше” или “они заслужили”. Это ни..уя не оправдание.
Yiiiissssss! Semmelweis is a hero of mine!
I personally support the US government giving Lt Col. Petrov a pension.
He was discharged by the Soviet government for this action, and reportedly lives in poverty.
Marakas wrote:
Like REALLY kicking off WW2: The Treaty between the Moscow & Berlin?
Might as well argue Hitler wasn’t so bad because he pulled Germany out of an economic train-wreck.
@ Far:
Far wrote:
Fail of not even looking into or fat trolling?
This is the best way to give a history lesson, why don’t more people do this kind of thing?
Marakas wrote:
There was an old bastard named Lenin /
Who did two or three million men in. /
That’s a lot to have done in /
But where he did one in /
That old bastard Stalin did ten in.
Robert Conquest,
@ Far:
Double standarts all the way I guess? Like here no one likes to call it WWII and opt to talk only about a period of Great patriotic war to save yourself from truth about Poland invasion and Winter war. But at the same time no one wants to remember the fate of Second Czechoslovak Republic and their role in it(especially Poland) or Second Sino-Japanese war and Spanish Civil war.
@ VectorLightning:
too much material, too little artists and writers:)
And also a little fact that history is mostly not fun and pretty if you start digging.
One more I left out: Vasili Arkhipov. In a rather similar story to Stanislav Petrov, he prevented the launch of a nuclear torpedo while being depth charged during the Cuban missile crisis, and thus saved the world from World War 3.
@ Paddy:
@ Paddy:
+