Why Should Long Dead Kings like Richard III be Rehabilitated?

History if always written by the victors and those who are defeated (usually in battles) are vilified and depicted for posterity as embodiments of all the qualities, which should be loathed. 

This seems to be a general rule ranging from Egyptian Pharaohs of the old kingdom (3^rd millennium BC) to the Republican and Democrat presidents who take turns occupying the White House in Washington, USA even in our iHistory age.

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Occasionally, by a twist of fortune, some hapless ruler, much maligned by the derisive and venomous propaganda of their successors are indeed rehabilitated. 

The latest one with such luck is Richard III, the last English king of the House of York (1483-1485). Shakespeare portrayed Richard III as an ugly hunchback, “rudely stamp’d”, “deformed, unfinish’d” and who cannot “strut before a wanton ambling nymph”. It is so easy to imagine Richard III, like Gollum in the Lord of the Rings contorted in self-loathing and hissing out "I am determined to prove a villain / And hate the idle pleasures of these days." It is also Shakespeare’s genius, which has made Richard III utter some memorable quotes like:

•  “Now is the winter of our discontent" (a phrase later used to refer to James Callahan’s 1978-1979 prime ministership in England)
• "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!"

The Crimes of King Richard III

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• Coming to power by employing questionable means (having Edward IV’s marriage declared invalid as he was still legally married thus making Edward V illegitimate and thus not eligible to become a king)
• Getting rid of two young princes by having them murdered
• Beheading people like the Duke of Buckingham who rebelled against him

All these were pretty standard stuff in those days, anywhere in the world except rather often among some tribes for whom we contemptuously use names like aboriginals or primitives.

Coming to power by questionable means – Well, that’s pretty common in ‘civilized’ democracies also today. Countless voters then lying in their graves secured the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, George Bush Jr. also came to power using ‘questionable means’ not to talk of Silvio Berlusconi.

Getting rid of people who challenge our ideologies and ‘way of life’ – nowadays we use names like war on terror, ethnic conflict, regime change or finding weapons of mass destruction to justify similar actions.

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Politicians turning things upside down to serve regime interests as in the case of Anna Politkovskaya is also pretty common nowadays.

Achievements of King Richard III

They are rather impressive, especially considering his short reign of 2 years 1483-1485. In fact, some of his ideas were centuries ahead of their times.

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• Council of the North did begin to improve conditions for Northern England as before that most economic activity centred on the capital alone. 
• Court of requests, an institution that enabled poor people who could not afford the expensive lawyers in the formal courts could have their cases heard officially (Kleineke, 2007)
• Judicial bail system, to secure the rights of the accused and protect them from imprisonment before trial and not have their property seized. 
• Rescinded the ban of printing and selling books.
• Ordered the translation of the written laws into English from traditional French. 

Compare fairly and without bias the achievements of Richard III to 10 years of Tony Blair’s (1997-2007) or 8 years of George Bush Jr.’s (2001-2009) ‘reign’ and their ‘body count’ and both of them may have to hang their heads in shame sitting in jail. You may like to place your bets on the likelihood, but that is most unlikely to happen even in 2014!

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Rehabilitation of Rulers Maligned by Subsequent History

The recent rehabilitation of the last Plantagenet king of England, Richard III after his remains were discovered under a car park in Leicester, UK may start a boom of making maligned ‘villains’ appear transformed as heroes from under the veils of infamy. Now there is a campaign in Scotland to rehabilitate the blood-tarnished image of the 11^th century king Macbeth.

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Cleopatra VII, who ruled Egypt for 21 years, lost her kingdom, regained it, lost it again and was good at ruling an empire has been painted as a wanton and lusty temptress. That she probably was, but she was infinitely more. Speaking nine languages, having great political acumen and charm, she seems to have been totally devoted to her country. This would be a not so common trait among contemporary politicians. Is it time to rehabilitate Cleopatra?

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Stalin, the big daddy of baddies, with a killing toll of about 20 million (Robert Conquest: The Great Terror, 2007) is fast being rehabilitated in certain quarters. Though other may not like it, neo-Stalinism is here to stay. Neo-Stalinism is, according to Frederick Copleston, S. J., 

"..not exclusively an expression of a desire to control, dominate, repress and dragoon; it is also the expression of a desire that Russia, while making use of western science and technology, should avoid contamination by western 'degenerate' attitudes and pursue her own path."

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Mao Zedong, the burly moonfaced demigod of China has been re-elevated to his demi-god status in modern China. Anyone who even went near him and can dictate, write or afford ghostwriters has written eulogies like his last concubine (Zhang Yufeng) and his bodyguard (Li Yinqiao) did.

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Pol Pot, a heavyweight baddie, who killed 1-3 million people (out of a population of 8.4 million), is fairly advanced on the way to rehabilitation. Wasn’t it so that the British and Americans voted in the UN to legitimise the defeated regime of Pol Pot (Pilger, 2005)?

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When is the biggest of the baddies, a certain Austrian postcard painter, who killed 30-50 million people, although using other methods than badly painted postcards, going to be rehabilitated? Or is he going to perpetually anchored in a repository of history's worst baddies along with Nero, Chengiz Khan etc.

Small disclaimer here: This last item was just out of academic interest. I am not even remotely interested in Austrian postcard painters and their politics.

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Adolf Hitler is actually getting rather popular in India, for very different reasons though. The brand just arouses people and they buy. Anti-semitism or the hate messages of his don't have any place there, but he is seen as a cool and tough guy who can make trains run on time, a kind of Marlboro man among leaders. Of course the fact that he opposed and fought Britain, and this hastened Indian independence is also an argument though very few Indians nowadays even think of this aspect.

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Should History be Rewritten?

The commercial angle and the attraction of theme parks á la Osama Bin Laden in Abbotabad as has been suggested by DavidMitchell of the Observer is one approach, good for the local economy.

Seriously speaking, yes, history should be continuously re-examined and re-evaluated in the light of new findings. Consider, for example the debunking of the Aryan Invasion Theory (Metspalu, 2011). 

This debunking of the Aryan invasion theory allows us:

• To see matters in an entirely different perspective without the burdens of racial and ethnic propaganda
• We can appreciate the achievements of other peoples and nations
• The agendas of hate or maligning others may give way to genuine appreciation and universal brotherhood.

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Sources:

• Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs, Edited by John Pilger. Vintage Paperback, 2005, £8.99
• Hannes Kleineke, ‘Richard III and the Origins of the Court of Requests’. The Ricardian, Vol. XVII, 2007, pp. 22–32
• Metspalu, Mait. Shared and unique components of human population structure and genome-wide signals of positive selection in South Asia. American journal of human genetics. 09.12.2011. Volume: 89 Issue: 6 Page: 731

How Will Posterity Treat Osama Bin Laden?

For almost a decade he was the top of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List and the media’s pet bogeyman in the West. 

His death from ”Ballistic Trauma” (being shot in plain English) became a global media event instantly. Planes flying into the twin towers in Manhattan - this iconic image has spread globally and is probably forever associated with Osama Bin Laden. 

What kind of role would posterity give him?

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How Osama Bin Laden Became the Big Baddie

Daddy bin Laden was a collossal achiever by any measure. Osama bin Laden’s father, was in illiterate poor lad from a poor area called hadramaut or ”death is among us” in Yemen. This poor lad became the personification of the American dream. He reaches Jeddah, begins as a porter and starts his own construction business to eventually become the favourite royal architect and the richest non-royal in the country. Religious and very loyal to his regal patrons (In 1964 he saved the broke royal house by lending them money when Prince Feisal deposed King Saud), he gave a personal touch to recycling. He divorced almost all of his 22 wives, never keeping more than four at a time.

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Daddy bin Laden (on the right) with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia in mid 1990s

He divorced his tenth wife, Osama’s mother, soon after the kid was born. Then daddy (with 54 children) recommends his mother to an associate, who marries her and they have four children. So Osama grows up in a household with three half-brothers and one half-sister. Though attending university, he never got a degree or acquired a profession. Being born very wealthy in Saudi Arabia, one doesn’t even have to think of such banalities as earning one’s living by working.

Photo source: Osama in Oxford, UK on a visit with family in 1971. (second from right)

At 17 Osama or Usama marries his first cousin, a Syrian woman, the first of his six wives, two of whom he would later divorce. He would father 20-26 children with his wives. Here is a link to his family tree.

Photo source: 17 year old Osama Bin Laden with family in Falun, Sweden (second from right)

Osama is seen as handsome, has polite and refined manners, loads of money and is considered gifted. Here begins the central problem of all gifted persons – what do with this gift? He has no role model except daddy, against whom he has to rebel. He can’t direct the fire, the daemon in himself to a cause. He doesn’t have the Moses-like quality of transforming an entire civilization like Kemal Ataturk. He is not willing to personally suffer the hardship of long marches like Mao Tse Tung as he travels always with his retinue of wives and children. 

Osama’s charisma is compelling but he definitely wasn’t an intellectual speaking many languages after personally experiencing the injustices of foreign powers like the swashbuckling Che Guevara in his travels. He seems to lack the spiritual depth of T E Lawrence fighting for the Arab cause. Compared to Muhammad Ahmad (1844-1885), the Mahdi or the Bin Laden of the British Empire, Osma also did not personally lead successful battles. 

Photo Source: Muhammad Ahmad, The Mahdi

So the directionless 19-year-old lad arrives in Afghanistan to join the defensive jihad of the Palestinian Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. The Mujahideen, set up and funded by the USA welcomed him, his sincere and principled devotion and his money. After Soviet Union withdraws in ignominy from Afghanistan, Osama returns to Saudi Arabia a hero. Disappointment creeps in when it dawns upon him that the regime in his own country doesn’t want him. He turns against them. Expelled to Sudan, he becomes the ultimate outsider with no country, no tribe no social class or group to call his own and fight for. He finds his home in an idea of Jihad where innocents can also be slaughtered. 

Though the outsider’s angst and miseries are a prophet’s teething troubles, few become prophets. A person destined to be a prophet, rejects the bustle of society, ventures alone into the desert and descends into himself.  The loneliness may not bring him proximity of his chosen vision of divinity, but he hears in the solitude something more than the echo of the impulse that brought him there.

Osama's Main Target Becomes America

Osama chooses to appear as a prophet, without the schooling of the lonely dark night of the soul. 

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He takes over from Ayatolla Khomeini to rant against the moral corruption of America and their allies. His enemies want him to assume that role more than anyone else as it gives them a justification for wars and acts of retaliations. Ironically he becomes more of their creation than his own. Rather than growing to take in life as it is and could be, he becomes a pipe through which events unfold, often in spite of him. His existence and his death ultimately serve them more that his followers.

The war he joins is one of preaching and not of fighting because in preaching he finds his cause. Egoistically he aligns himself to the locus of the moving finger of history, where all great empires crumble under their own megalomania, mostly due to economic, social and moral corruption. This was the undoing of the Soviet Union, with the help of USA, and now it was to be America’s turn.

He would have liked to give America a chance to redeem itself by reconnecting its activities with the lofty idea that is America, the noble vision of the founding fathers. The rulers of America couldn’t care less, he felt, eerily like the unabomber Ted Kaczynski, PhD. This frustration echoes in Osama's statement. 

“We were fighting against the communists since 1979, and now the United States was pressuring us to cooperate with those very same communists. The United States has no principles. To achieve its own interest, it forgets every principle.” 

When a person resorts to violence or terrorism against a society, what else does the system do but return the favour! An individual can turn the other cheek, but can a state law enforcement system do so?

American propaganda leaflet in Afghanistan. Bin Laden second from left (note the raised finger).

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Towers, Airplanes and America as Important Symbols for Osama’s Life

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As a poor boy, Osama’s father had dreamt of building towers and that is how he became rich. He was the first private citizen in Saudi Arabia to own an airplane and was killed in an air crash in Saudi Arabia in 1967, due to the American pilot’s landing error. His eldest half-brother Salem (the next head of the family and who had a British wife) accidentally flew his plane into power lines in San Antonio, Texas and was killed. The iconic image of the planes crashing into the twin towers in New York in 9/11 sealed his fame as the world’s most known baddie.

What do the Jokes About Osama’s Death Reveal?

Most of the American jokes about Osama’s death continue the work of the seals, taking pot-shots at the favourite bogeyman to score domestic political political.

• "The Republicans are so happy about bin Laden they've granted President Obama full citizenship." —David Letterman
• "Osama Bin Laden's supporters want to rename the Arabian Sea where his body was dumped Martyr Sea. Really? Martyr Sea? Hiding in your bedroom for six years? How about Chicken of the Sea?" –Jay Leno
• Breaking News: Donald Trump is now on a quest to see his death certificate...
• Osama's last words: "Man, I just got my iphone 4, too! How did they find me?"

Here's a pre-Ballistic-trauma joke about Osama

• Osama Bin Laden seeks out a fortune-teller, since he knows there is a price on his head. The fortune-teller says, "You will die on a major US holiday." 
• Bin Laden says, "Which one?" 
• She replies, "Doesn't matter! Whatever day you die, it's gonna be a major US holiday."

The best Osama death joke is from DanaArikane who wrote: "They should have captured Bin Laden alive and made him continually go through airport security for the rest of his life." This would vibe with everyone who goes through airport security.

Deathers probably love this one.

• "What? Not only did we kill Bin Laden, we killed him in Abottabad! Abottabad sounds like name most New Yorkers would have invented for the fictional place they would have loved to kill Bin Laden." –Jon Stewart

Conspiracy theorists would love this one:

• Obama overheard during Bin Laden raid: "Are we shooting this in the same studio where we faked the moon landing?"
• There is a new Cocktail called Osama. 2 Shots and a splash of water!

This one is for people who hate President Obama:

• Obama - The first black guy that has ever had to convince the world he did do the killing.

In Pakistan and the sub-continent, the Pakistani army are the butt of local jokes.

• "No honking: the army is asleep" and another read as: "Public Service Message from the Army: Stay alert. Don't rely on us."
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• "Pakistan radar system for sale: $99.99, buy one, get one free (Can't detect US helicopters but can receive Star Plus.)"

Pakistani blogger Syed Ali Abbas Zaidi posted some of the best bin Laden jokes on his blog: 

• "It has been recently revealed that Osama bin Laden was a visiting faculty at Pakistan Military Academy, where he was teaching Global Terrorism 101"
• "Osama Bin Laden's Facebook status has not changed from RIP. It was Resting In Pakistan before".

Not Jokes but Prayers for Osama bin Laden divides Muslims

Though most Muslims did not like Osama or his negative message of hate and violence, some still continue to revere him.

In Kolkata, India, the Shahi Imam of Tipu Sultan mosque, Maulana Nurur Rehman Barkati, held special Friday prayer for the "peace of the soul" of bin Laden.

In Chennai, the imam of a major mosque on Anna Salai Road announced prayers for bin Laden, and many people responded by praying.

The Al-Qaeda has vowed to avenge the killing and so the senseless killing of mostly innocents goes on and on.

Osama as The Frankenstein of the Media Age

When 9/11 happens, Osama denies twice and then almost reluctantly claims responsibility. Later he begins bragging about planning them. He continues his preaching and his stature grows as the media credit him with all kinds of evil acts and machinations. He became the justification for two ongoing wars, though the UK government officially admits that the case against him would not be a prosecutable case in a court of law. 

Interestingly, Osama has played a significant role in US presidential elections. He dutifully turned up when with some kind of diatribe and venomous preaching or evil action whenever there was a need to swing public opinion. So, now he can be killed, sorry, subjected to ballistic trauma, but he can’t be debogyfied. So the pathetic aging man (probably only a citizen of Bosnia at that time) sitting in his luxury home next to Pakistan’s West Point military academy and watching videotapes of himself reading hate messages will continue being the worst of the baddies.

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Would historians a century from now be tempted to say that Osama was successful in bringing down not one but two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the USA as the costs of these wars are many trillions of dollars and not even the mighty US economy can bear it for too long? This is extremely unlikely!

The likelihood that he will soon be forgotten and end up as a footnote in history is also very  probable.