Blessed are the peacemakers, right? The people who experience violence up close and personal and, rather than dole it back out, somehow find an alternative solution. Sure, these types of people don’t usually get blockbuster movie franchises made about them, but we’ll sure as hell stop to applaud them here. So here’s to the ones who, whether by Jedi mind trick or just pure audacity, resolved violent conflicts while using their indoor voices.
5. John Rabe: The Living Buddha of Nanking
In popular culture, the roster of surprisingly awesome Nazis pretty much begins and ends with Schindler’s List. In reality, there were no doubt lots of compassionate people who just got swept up in Hitlermania; it’s just that it’s hard to do a list of “5 Nazis We Admire” without upsetting the advertisers.
In 1937, Japan invaded China and captured Nanking, the capital. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians were at the mercy of the invaders. What started thereafter was an inconceivable slaughter of a type so sanctioned that competitive civilian murder received news coverage back home, along with other atrocities so horrifying that a Cracked article has no place even hinting at what they are. But there was an organization called the Nanking Safety Zone, run by 22 Westerners from around the world, that was supposed to function as a haven.
One of these people would be credited with patrolling the streets and personally intervening to stop murders and prevent rapes. And rather than being some trained super soldier, he was just a guy who worked for the phone company and had been a member of the Red Cross. Soldiers naturally didn’t take too well to this, and more than once Rabe found himself looking down a gun barrel. But what Rabe had to protect him was an armband with a swastika on it (oh, and he looked like an Indiana Jones villain):
This guy actually wrote letters to Adolf Hitler requesting aid in stopping the atrocities being committed against the Chinese, which shows that even though he was with the party, he wasn’t so much with the program. Who knows how this guy reconciled being a compassionate humanitarian with belonging to the most monstrous political party the world has ever known. Maybe he just liked the uniform? It probably did bring out his eyes.
“Swastikas make my ass look incredible.”
After the jordan 10 war, the Nanking Safety Zone organization was credited with preventing the deaths of an estimated 250,000 Chinese people through personal intervention, sheltering, and international pressure. Rabe himself went home to Germany in 1938 to do lectures and presentations about Japanese atrocities until the Gestapo arrested him for that, marking him as probably one of history’s most oblivious heroes.
After the war, Rabe was denounced as a Nazi and became impoverished. But for many years, he and his family survived on care packages jordan 6 from the very Chinese citizens he’d helped to save and who’d given him the nickname “the Living Buddha of Nanking.”
On May 5, 2010, a group of 750 militia members invaded the refugee center. Shocked and offended at the fact that a group of over 90,000 people was led by a woman, they took Abdi prisoner and ransacked her hospital, emptying clips into medical equipment, smashing windows, and making threats.
Abdi stuck to her belief that she shouldn’t be intimidated by insane people with guns, even if the odds were 750 to 1. She stood up to the militia commanders imprisoning her, berating one of them with “I will lead my society. You are young and you are a man, but what have you done for your society?”
Typical hostage gynecologist, making this all about gender.
After five days, she was released unharmed, but still pissed. We apologize to the entire Somali community.” Note: We cannot guarantee the same results if you ever find yourself in that situation.
3. Wade Watts Takes on the Klan With the Magic of Friendship
Topical Press Agency / Stringer / Getty
Reverend Wade Watts was a representative of the NAACP in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when he did a radio debate with Grand Dragon of the KKK John Lee Clary in 1976. After Watts threw his opponent off his game with the novel tactic of telling him that he wouldn’t hate him, Clary insisted to Watts that he’d made a personal enemy, although Watts didn’t seem to agree.
“Look, can’t we just try to see eye to eye here? Oh . right . never mind.”
Clary’s Klansmen started off small: They burned a cross on Watts’ lawn. Watts’ response to the sight of a bunch of costumed men making death threats was to point out to them that Halloween wasn’t for a few more months and to leave it at that. Their next attempt to scare him was to burn down his church. When Clary called him up to rub the threat in over the phone, the first thing Watts said was “Hello, Johnny” (we like to think Clary must have said “Uh, hi” in response).
The final stroke was when Clary saw Watts in a restaurant eating chicken. He got together a group of 30 Klansmen and surrounded him. Then Clary told Watts that he and his buddies would do to Watts what Watts was doing to that chicken he was eating.
There are a lot of places the story could go from there maybe Clary flies into a rage and starts a riot, or quietly plans to destroy Watts behind the scenes. Instead, the Klansman Clary slowly started to realize that maybe he and his white robed peers were the bad guys.
Good guys are less prone to posing with brass knuckles and daggers.
So in 1981, Clary left the Klan. And, when being a former Grand Dragon hurt his career prospects like hell, he eventually decided to call up Watts. Watts offered to let him come speak at his church (against his own congregation’s wishes), saying, jordan 5 “You know where it is, you burned it.”
Clary ended up becoming a preacher at that very institution, and one day used his Klan robe to shine a black man’s shoes on national television. Clary also started a program that helped former anti racial group members start anew after leaving their organizations. It just goes to show that while it sure helps to have (figurative) balls in the face of violence, having a heart is important, too.
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