Persian empire (now Iran) was created by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC (his mother was Mandane) after defeating his despotic grandfather Astyages – king of the Medes (Median empire) who he demoted to be governor of Parthia. Astyages (585-540 BC), (his name means ‘sacker of cities‘ in Greek) was the son of king Cyaxares.
Make-up worn by fashion-overconscious women can be very injurious to the skin and body. Belladonna eye-drops applied as deadly nightshade to make the pupils dilate so as to give a wide-eyed look, does increase the heart rate, blurs vision and causes glaucoma and blindness.
Wax make-up once used to hide the scars of chickenpox and smallpox did in fact melt the face when too close to a fire. Ceruse make-up that has been used to whiten skin complexion raises the blood pressure, causes loss of hair, impotence, loss of sleep, loss of hearing, kidney damage and even death.
Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584) was Russia‘s first Czar (Tsar), and the equivalent of Dracula before Joseph Stalin’s communist state terror of last century.
Ivan created Oprichniki – Russia’s first secret police, massacred a whole town’s population after sealing off the town – Novgorod – and torturing the people. Despite his intellectual upbringing, he murdered his own son and heir in ordinary anger, and his wife was poisoned.
Heroin was made a popular addiction drug by Bayer Pharmaceutical Products, the German firm that synthesized the drug and marketed it as a miracle painkiller and a wonder cure for pneumonia and tuberculosis in 1897 when these illnesses still had a high death toll on human population.
Invented in 1874 by C.R. Wright, an English chemist, heroin as drug was tested on workers at Bayer’s where it was claimed that it made people feel heroic. Hence they gave it the trade name ‘heroin‘, and marketed it as a substitute for morphine and codeine.
Surprisingly enough, professional medical journals all accepted and helped propagate the huge scheme across Europe, the USA and the rest of the world. Thanks to some alert medical doctors, the American Medical Association declared heroin to be a habit-forming and therefore an addictive drug in 1906, paving the way for its prohibition by US law in 1924.
Despite that law, Bayer continued to make huge profit from heroin as other manufacturers pitched in to supply the world. Meanwhile, Bayer brought another so-called miracle drug – aspirin into the market.
Genghis Khan (1162-1227) ruthlessly marauded Persia, Russia, Afghanistan and central Asia in 1219. He created the Mongol empire, and opened up the Silk Route.
Born in Hentiy, Mongolia to a father who was head of the clan until murdered by the Tartars, Genghis Khan developed wicked traits to extremes. His only education was in Yurt. At 13, he killed his half-brother for stealing his fish, encouraged a cult of fear around himself, was fearless in war, fought for thousands of kilometres, raped women, burnt homes, seized possessions everywhere, but was scared of dogs.
His son Ogedai Khan, and grandson Batu laid waste Krakow in Poland, Hungary‘s Pest (now Budapest) and were stopped in Austria thousands of kilometres from Mongolia only by the news of the death of the ruling Khan.
Addiction: Free trade is when Britain forces China to legalise the trade in opium* smuggled by fleets of British merchant ships so that the Chinese population could get addicted to illicit opium habit.
Indeed 12 million Chinese became opium addicts by 1830′s. When the high penalties imposed by China on the selling or smoking of opium had too little impact because of huge-scale smuggle by the British, the Chinese government seized and destroyed 20,000 chests of opium from British merchants.
As a last resort, the Chinese government then tolerated cheaper local opium production to hurt the imports from British merchants, but promptly closed off their huge country – China – to any form of trade with the outside world. Even so, Britain provoked a war in 1842 by sending its navy to sail down into the Yangtze river, and eventually forced China to yield control of Hong Kong over to England.
China did not reopen contacts with the rest of the world until the advent of US president Nixon, thanks to Henry Kissinger’s Shuttle diplomacy in the 1970′s.
A female equivalent of Dracula was Hungary‘s aristocratic Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1614) – the well educated countess who mutilated, tortured and murdered over 600 girls and young women just to bathe in their blood and rejuvenate her missed youth.
Her uncle was king of Poland, her cousin prince of Transylvania and her husband count Ferencz Nadasdy- the Black Hero of Hungary in the battle against the Turks. Despite all first-hand evidence against her, she was not sentenced to death but was only locked in her castle, out of fear of her strong connections.
Dracula‘s widely known morbid imago stems from the horror practices of prince Vlad III Dracula (1431-1476) nicknamed Vlad Tepes, alias Vlad the Impaler.
He skinned and boiled people alive, and dismembered over 100,000 persons, just to amuse himself that those victims were lazy, poor, ill or ugly. He said he did all that so nobody would be poor in his realm.
Violence was in his blood. His father – Vlad Dracul became prince of Wallachia in 1437 after the ruling prince was murdered in cold blood. To prove loyalty to the Turks in 1442, this father gave his two sons Vlad and Radu as hostages to the Turks, until the father was murdered in 1447. Radu then stole Vlad’s kingdom.
Democracy and freedom fighters were treated with extreme brutality by the Romans. In 73BC, the dead bodies of 6000 of the slaves who revolted and were recaptured together with their leader – gladiator slave Spartacus, were all laid along the Appian Way to rot away for years as deterrent to other slaves.
Whole tribes of the ancestors of today’s Dutch, Flemmish (Belgian) and German people were wiped out by Rome’s heroic Julius Caesar who, oddly enough, is glorified in the German word Keizer meaning emperor.
Idi Amin (1925-2003), alias Butcher of Uganda was born in Koboko, Uganda to a farmer father with 32 children. His big size soaring at 1.93 metres gave him the name Big Daddy as military dictator of Uganda with ruthless traits of megalomania in words, food taste and dress – full of barges and titles he awarded himself.
He was even cannibalistic according to reports, and extremely boastful as reflected in his own very words “I consider me myself the most powerful figure in the whole world“. Not only did he expel 40,000 Ugandans of Asian origin, he – Christian – openly supported Islamic terrorists, created four separate secret police forces that competed against each other in terror, tried to cleanse out the Langi and Acholi ethnic groups, and murdered about a half million of his subjects.
Idi Amin gave himself the audacious title – Lord of all beasts of the earth, and fishes of the sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in particular.
Pol Pot (1925-1998) – Brother Number One, real name Saloth Sar
Born in Prek Sbauv, Cambodia to a farmer family, Pol Pot lived with an older brother who was a clerk in the court of the royal palace in Phnom Penh.
From failed attempts in high school education, carpentary and radio electronics, POl Pot rose to become the leader of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge (Red Khmer named after the old kingdom of Khmer that founded Angkor temple city).
His four-year dictatorship killed 1.7 million Cambodians through overwork, starvation, execution for the least complaints, and disease; all because this ignoramus had no idea what leadership is about, and yet was power drunk. He abolished schools, banned money, private property, religion, music, holidays, romance in any form and medical systems.
His devastating impact on his country is hardly surprising. What is surprising is how he got away with all that, and without the least remorse. He was even never punished for his horrible crimnes that left Cambodia with the highest stockpiles of sorted human skulls, leg bones and other skeletons of his people.
Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) – alias Uncle Joe, Soso, Koba
Born in Gori, Georgia to an alcoholic cobbler father and a strict mother, Communist Russia‘s despotic leader who at one time was in a seminary trying to become a priest until he was expelled. He knew no feeling of love; not for his own son nor daughter, nor for his wife who was driven to commit suicide.
Power-drunk as Secretary General of Soviet Union‘s Communist Party, Stalin purged intellectuals, deported millions of people to perish away in the polar-cold dry wastelands of the Gulags, savagely killed 40 million of his own subjects, created the Iron Curtain that isolated Russia’s Soviet Union, and deliberately caused famine in the Ukraine. His slogan for solving any problem was “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem“.
Free RSS feeds