Who in history has been looked at as a hero when they were actually a terrible person?

 

There’s too much in the list of “nasty shit Gandhi said or did” for me to mention, but I’ll give a try anyway and mention a few:

1. Gandhi was a mean-spirited husband who compared his own wife to a cow “docile but meek and dull”
2. Gandhi advised his wife against using British medicine, causing her to die from an illness he later survived by taking… drum rolls please… the exact same medicine he told her not to use! Dick move.
3. Gandhi wanted to prove his chastity by… sleeping naked with young girls, washing their naked bodies and having them was his…
4. These young girls were under age, just teenagers, fifteen, sixteen years old
5. Two of these girls were his own grand-nieces, granddaughters of one of Gandhi’s siblings — he was a trusted figure of authority to them
6. He’d advise Hindu Indians to pretty much bend over and “take it in the bum” whenever someone would offend, attack or assault them
7. He was quite cautious in approaching Muslim Indians but forced his Hindu countrymen to walk a tight-rope; he measured with double standards and was quite unfair
8. If a woman was raped, Gandhi said, she better not resist and “act dead”, it’d be better for her to just ‘give the rapist what he wanted’
9. If his own daughter was to be raped, Gandhi would prefer to kill her instead, he said, in order to ‘preserve her honor’ — what his daughter might have to say of this was of little consequence

The more I read about Gandhi, the more he comes across as a rather sorry excuse of a human being. Did he do some great things, accomplish amazing feats? Well, yes. But it does not negate or undo the awful things he said and did, in my opinion.

Sometimes my inner cynic feels the former colonial powers were all too eager to make a man like Gandhi into a saint, instead of a more militant, radical and ballsy Indian patriot like, for instance, Bose. The way the Spanish preferred writer José Rizal to be the Filipino national hero and not the rebel Bonifacio who actually took up arms against his oppressors. Or how America loves to worship MLK but gets uncomfortable with Malcolm X…

No, Gandhi was the perfect choice for ‘sainthood’. He was flawed. Heavily flawed. And he wasn’t as radical, or as keen to “drive out the colonialists”. In many ways, he was as meek as the wife he so despised. India deserves a better national hero. As do many other nations.

One can do great things and still be a terrible person. And Gandhi, I feel, is a prime example of this. A pervert, a bigot, two-faced and slimy, but revered as a saint because he died a martyr’s death and freed a nation. He was like Moses’ perverted Hindu brother.