In the Oliver Cromwell thread, multiple posters mentioned Cromwell is still considered by the Irish as a symbol of evil. In your country, who do the public view as villanous no matter what the public’s political beliefs/ethnicity? And who is the great hero of your country?
For the U.S., the heroes are obvious:George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. I don’t think the U.S. has a true shared villan: George III’s former villan status has been changed by different views of history, while the Confederate leaders and generals are more viewed as good men fighting for really bad things than true villans. Richard Nixon looked in the 70s to be a national villan, but by his death he’d become an elder statesman.
I think the US is too fractious to agree on anything these days. Even Lincoln and Washington get their black eyes, though yes: they’re probably the closest we have to national heroes.
Villains? Even harder. Benedict Arnold, maybe? Jefferson Davis?
Oh! I was too busy searching back into antiquity. How about Osama bin Laden for the US’s national villain?? I’ve never heard any American who was for him, even if they were against the way in which he was killed.
Or, frankly, Hitler. Yeah, he works for a lot of countries and yeah he never invaded the US, but he is pretty universally considered the face of evil in the US.
US Secretary of War who started the US Cavalry using camels in the American desert.
Cool dude!
Richard Nixon was a villain. I and many others would say Dick Cheney is one.
Hitler and Mussolini were bad guys.
Stalin and Lenin. Ivan Grobney, aka Ivan the Terrible.
I’d say Cromwell was. King John has a biography entitled, “The Maligned Monarch.”
What about Richard III, his body recently discovered?
If they have to be from here, I’d nominate Timothy McVey for US Villain; I doubt too many of even the most extreme political types would say he did the right thing.
Spain’s National Hero is El Cid Campeador, whose claim to fame is… well, being a warlord who killed a lot of people. Oh, and something about his corpse being propped in a horse to scare the enemy with his presence. What? It’s what we’ve got, okay?
National Villain? Probably dictator Francisco Franco. National Socialist ruler from mid XX century who was even too useless to do anything of note, so it’s not even a Mussolini-type villain. Embarrassingly enough, you look at film from that era and you may realize that he acted and talked… well, like somebody with a severe mental disability.
Yeah.
We’re talking political leaders only? Can answer both criteria for one person as far as the UK goes - Margaret Thatcher.
Ok, serious answer. Hero is obvious; Churchill. Or Elizabeth I. In WWII it was Monty, although he was a few wickets short of a cricket match if you want my personal opinion.
Villain bit more tricky; Henry VIII, perhaps - mostly remembered for beheading wives. Douglas Haig, maybe - the extent to which he responsible for the butchery in WWI is debated, but he took a lot of flak for it.
Norwegian chiming in. A commonly recognized national hero around here is actually a bit hard to think of, if we have to stick strictly to politics. I guess maybe Fritjof Nansen, the polar explorer who also dabbled in politics, statesmanship and humanitarianism, and received a Nobel Peace Price. Otherwise, if we’re not talking politics, it’s whatever doofus won the latest international cross-country skiing event.
Picking the national villain, however, is easy. That would be the man who was such a lowlife that his name has become a synonym for a despicable traitor: Vidkun Quisling.
I’ve heard “Qusiling” as an insult, now I understand why.
Jose Rizal; a lugubrious but effeminate runt whose only accomplishment was to publish two novels written at the high school level. The American occupiers chose him over revolutionary leaders such as Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Aguinaldo as the Philippines’ national hero because he displayed qualities desirable for pinoy “goo-goos” as they called them back then.
He’s not really held up as a symbol of evil the way Quisling is in Norway, Cromwell is in Ireland or Hitler is in…everywhere. When someone says “Timothy Mcvey” in conversation, chances are they’re talking about either the man himself or a very similar terrorist. He’s not a commonly used stand-in just for the general idea of “an evil person”. So while your certainly right that he’s pretty universally disliked, I don’t think he qualifies for the OP.
The US usually has a rotating set of dictators that take their turn as a sort of boogey men that serve as a byword for “evil dictator”. When I was growing up it was Saddam, the Kim Jong Il, then Ahmadinajad, now…Kim Jong Un maybe? But none of them have had much staying power in the popular imagination after they lost power, so I don’t think they count either.
I’m not Canadian but my ethnicity could best be described as “Canadian-American” and I live right near the border.
Hero is easy. If it has to be a politician it’s Tommy Douglas, the man generally given credit for creating Canada’s national health care system. If not, then it’s Terry Fox.
Villain? If you’re in a mood to jest, you could say that Canadians are too polite to have one. When he left office, Brian Mulroney was probably the least popular PM in history. Of the folks in my generation, though, I’d say a lot would go with Janet Jones. She’s Canadian hockey’s Yoko Ono.
I’d agree, but it’s kind of sad, really, that it isn’t Sir John A. MacDonald, who legitimately deserves the honor, whereas Douglas and Fox do not.
Canada has no national villain because it doesn’t have a national tragedy.
I second the vote for Benedict Arnold as our national villain. Nobody loves a traitor.
The thing is, he was no terrorist out to destroy the west. He was a reasonably nice kid who got frustrated with the army, among other things, and turned into a sociopath. He has my pity. Bin Laden doesn’t.
For Panama, Balboa is the national hero, and his adversary, Pedrarias, is the national villain.
Balboa arrived in Panama as a stowaway to escape his creditors in Hispaniola. He soon took over the governorship of the settlement through charisma and leadership (and due to incompetence of the official leaders). He moved the settlement to a new location, then assisted by his native allies crossed the Isthmus and found the Pacific. Unlike most of the conquistadors, he had the reputation of treating the Indians comparatively well. (Admittedly the bar was pretty low.)
But Balboa had no royal appointment. Eventually the Spanish crown sent out Pedro Arias de Avila, known as Pedrarias, to be the official governor. Balboa accepted the new arrangement, and served as subordinate under Pedrarias. But Pedrarias resented that Balboa was much more popular than he was. He eventually had Balboa arrested and executed on trumped up charges. Pedrarias was notorious for his ruthlessness and cruelty.
Pedrarias founded Panama City in 1519, but there are no streets named after him, no monuments, no statues, no coins. Instead the major waterfront avenue is called Avenida Balboa, on which there is a large monument and statue to Balboa. Balboa is featured on Panama’s coins, and he also has given his name to one of the most popular beers.
I would say that the US’s most reviled villain is John Wilkes Booth. Who could be a worse villain than the murderer of one of the national heroes?
I wouldn’t count foreign leaders as “national villains” of the US. They are enemies of the US. A true national villain has to be one of our own.
Not to hijack the thread, but equating Dick Cheney with Stalin, Lenin, and Ivan the Terrible is a wonderful example of ludicrously rabid partisan politics at its finest. I personally equate Bill Clinton with the Hillside Strangler, Richard Speck, and the Russian hordes that raped millions of German women in 1945, but that’s just me
Richard Nixon has been at least partially rehabilitated in the public eye, and he was never all that much of a villain to begin with, as he was more regarded as the one who got caught rather than anyone who wasn’t doing the same things everyone else was.
Our US national villain is probably still Hitler, as WW2 is still embedded in the national consciousness. National hero? Probably still Abraham Lincoln.
It’s hard to say who Israelis consider their modern heroes (we have no shortage of ancient heroes, but they don’t really count for the purposes of this thread). Our history is to recent, and too political, and we aren’t really given to mythologizing, anyway. I’d say that most Israelis would agree that the two most important people in its history were Theodore Herzl, founder of the Zionist Movement and the guy who came up with the idea of founding the country, and David Ben-Gurion, the nation’s leader during the decades prior to and following its foundation. Whether or not they were “heroes” is open to debate, although they wee undoubtedly extraordinary men.
For actual heroes, in the sense that most people here think of them as such, you should probably look to a someone like Josef Trumpeldor, a genuinely romantic figure respected by both the political left and right, and whose death in 1920 essentially started the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Villain - Hitler. No-one else comes first.
Albania’s national hero is George Kastrioti Skanderbeg. Not sure about the villian.