Asklemmy

Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, “The Man Who Saved America.”, hands down. He single-handedly defeated a fascist overthrow of the U.S. government in 1933. AKA, the Devil Dog. He is not in history books because fascist are still in control.

Diogenes

John Stark, one of the rescuers of the Donner Party.

In Summit Valley the remaining rescuers discussed what to do and took a vote to save only two of the children in Starved Camp. That might have been all they could manage. The others would have to stay behind.

John Stark, above, could not abide that. That meant that nine people, mostly children, would die on the mountain, exposed to the elements down in a very deep hole in the snow. John Stark decided he would save all nine, “Already shouldering a backpack with provisions, blankets, and an axe, he picked up one or two of the smaller children, carried them a little ways, then went back for the others. Then he repeated the whole process again and again and again. To galvanize morale, he laughed and told the youngsters they were so light from months of mouse-sized rations that he could carry them all simultaneously, if only his back were broad enough.” Once they were out of the snow he would eat and rest he said, but not before. He saved all nine. That is extraordinary and that is heroism. It was also heroism he never got contemporary credit for.

John Brown Fidel Castro Joseph Stalin

Enkidu. Dude was pivotal in providing companionship to the king that stopped, or at least slowed, his general rape and molestation of the lower classes.

Harriet Tubman

Alan Turing. My government did him dirty.

Churchill. Without him it's not unlikely that the UK would've accepted Nazi Germany's peace offer.

Marquis de Lafayette

Fought in American revolution, key figure in French.

Born into aristocracy them said fuck that let's go see what liberty is about. Tried his best even through events spun out of control. Always stuck up for the people despite his position.

Abolitionist. Tried to get Washington to free slaves as example, left Lafayette on read.

"If I had known that by fighting for America I was creating a nation of slaves, I would have never raised my sword." - butchered to a certain degree but sentiment remains.

Guy was pretty neat, found himself in some of the most important events I'm history and stuck to his ideals his whole life. Admirable.

Heroes have a way of always disappointing. There's people like Malcom X, John Brown or Thomas Paine who I'd say were the good guys of their time, but I really try not to lionise them beyond the flawed humans they were.

Julie d'Aubigny

Lenin, architect of the first successful Socialist revolution and state.

Cassius Marcellus Clay was the son of one of the wealthiest slave owners in America and grew up to be the single most influential and most dangerous abolitionist in American history. He had so many duels with slavers, and won so many of them, that he became statistically the most dangerous duelist to ever exist in North America.

When his cousin, Kentucky senator Henry Clay ran for president, Cassius wanted to come campaign for him down South. Henry vetoed this out of concerns that Cassius would come down south and duel so many slave owners to the death that it could be considered election interference.

The Fat Electrician has an excellent video on the life and times of Clay, I highly recommend it. And if you're wondering, yes, Muhammad Ali was named after this Cassius Clay.

Marcus Aurelius and his reflections on stoicism.

King was largely reviled in his time. The almost universally loved King of today is a sanitized, defanged, ahistorical version. Mandela is another example, but there are many.

V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution:

What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the “national-German” Marx, who, they claim, educated the labor unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory war!

Richard Stallman