IIRC napoleon was surprisingly common, also genghis khan or attila the hun
Very popular in WW1 to call the German army a nation of Huns.
Was this to other them in an orientalist way? I’m familiar with the Germans being referred to as Huns during WW1, but never gave it much thought.
There was a sizable community of Germans living in the US at the time, so its certainly possible that this intended to differentiate the Wicked Foreigners from our Righteous Domestics. But also, a lot of German communities and families changed their names and abandoned their cultural touchstones to avoid looking too German during the first war. So, idk.
This was sandwiched between the Chinese Immigration (Exclusion) Acts of 1885 and 1923, so there was definitely an abundance of anti-East Asian sentiment, particularly out west.
I remember hearing that Americans were calling sauerkraut “liberty cabbage” back then lol
I wouldn’t have believed that if I hadn’t lived through the “freedom fries” days.
But also, a lot of German communities and families changed their names and abandoned their cultural touchstones to avoid looking too German during the first war. So, idk.
Including, hilariously, the British royal family - in July of 1917. They were hedging their bets on who would win the war.
I cbf looking now, but the keiser compared the german fighting spirit to that of the hun during the later part of the 19th century, scramble for Africa propaganda about how good germans will be at conquest
shouldn’t be hard to find the origin with a quick search but this is my recollection from the last time I looked
jacobin, robespierre, napoleon
Pharoah
From my very light reading of pre-20th century history, the name Metternich (referencing Klemens Von Metternich, Austrian Chancellor and architect of the pre-1848 repression in Europe) comes up a lot in mid-to-late 19th century writing, but the dude was alive.
Usually there’s also a lot of references to either the Kaiser or the Tsar, but both are still reasonably controversial rather than generally repudiated like Hitler today. Depending on their political leanings they also usually reference characters from the French Revolution, like Robespierre, Napoleon, Saint-Just, Louis himself, Marie Antoinette (or the Habsburgs in general) or even the Marquis de La Fayette.
But the sad truth is that there were a lot of horrible events before Hitler, for which the perpetrators never faced justice, and were even celebrated as heroes.
People like George “Town Destroyer” Washington (1, 2, 3), Rochambeau, various Catholic Church members in Canada (and elsewhere too), and fucking Columbus. I could go on listing other genocidal leaders directed towards Africa or Asia, Latin America rather than just North America but I think you get the point.
As Aimé Cesárie put it very well:
First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated” , all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.
People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind-it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.
your choice of racial slur
I remember reading a
thread on /r/AskHistorians years ago asking this question, and one of the higher up answers was “Judas”, at least in European contexts.Anyway, antisemitism cropped up out of nowhere in the 1980s with the authoring of the Hamas charter and … /s
Napoleon was also pretty popular apparently, same or similar thread
nero
