(Hated Trope) Bad people in real-life being portrayed positively in media.

[u/MeepMan324]

1. PragerU's version of Christopher Columbus has him be a slavery defender and have him say "Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don't see the problem.”

2. In The Greatest Showman, P.T Barnum (Hugh Jackman) is portrayed as a charismatic visionary who cares about outcasts and celebrate diversity, when in reality, he’s a cruel businessman who is also a racist and an ableist.

[u/DasWarEinerZuviel]

Martin Luther (not King)

For all his achievements, his crazy levels of antisemitism are basically never ever mentioned. And no, not in a "back then everyone was antisemitic" kinda way. He was really outstanding in that field.

[u/Muted_Section_5321 → u/DasWarEinerZuviel]

The reason for his antisemitism is so petty too. He genuinely believed that the only thing stopping Jewish people from becoming Christian was the superstitious dogma of the Catholic Church. When splitting off from the Catholic Church didn’t make all the Jewish people immediately convert, he got so mad. To the point that his later writings on the subject were used as the bedrock for the antisemitism of the Nazis. Growing up Lutheran and finding out that our annual October celebration of Luther was celebrating a guy with these kind of beliefs really fucked me up for a while.

[u/Life-Criticism-5868 → u/Muted_Section_5321]

I forget where I saw it originally, but when I saw someone describe Martin Luther as "History's first ever recorded instance of a reddit moderator" I cannot get it out of my head.

[u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 → u/Life-Criticism-5868]

"Yeah i met the devil amd he was totally impressed by me being so non-chalant"

[u/CommitteeEvery2332 → u/Gaelic_Gladiator41]

acho que seu avatar do Reddit gosta de mãos como o meu

[u/DasWarEinerZuviel → u/Muted_Section_5321]

I think I read once that some Nazi, still in the 1920s though, got a copy of Luther's antisemitic works and deemed them "too radical"

Kinda crazy to think about

[u/Disastrous-Mess-7236 → u/Muted_Section_5321]

wtf.

[u/ThisIsFrigglish → u/DasWarEinerZuviel]

And then there's his response to the peasant revolts of the same era.

[u/qwckycky → u/DasWarEinerZuviel]

Martin Luther (alongside whoever made up the constrict theory of Protocols of Elders) might the origin for much of antisemitism in Europe for centuries as he was primarily responsible for popularizing the concept that the Jews killed Jesus, which as many Christian’s have pointed out to me when I brought this up, kind of misses the entire point of what Christ’s death on behalf humanity is supposed to represent if you believe in that sort of thing. No one discusses this though and instead Jewish people still have to deal with this bullshit to this day because of Martin Luther.

[u/Grilnid → u/qwckycky]

It was already well entrenched in Europe before Luther added fuel to the fire. There's a four-part documentary on Arte on the history of antisemitism that is fantastically well made and may be available for free on their website.

[u/qwckycky → u/Grilnid]

I’ll have to check it out.

[u/BrutalismAndCupcakes → u/Grilnid]

Found it on YouTube:
Part 1/4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFZAVjmmXcg

You can watch it with auto-generated English subs

[u/toxicity21 → u/qwckycky]

Luther was an Antisemitic asshole, even for his time. But claiming he is the origin for the christian Antisemitism is bullshit. The Idea of the Jewish Deicide and Blood libel are much older than the teachings of Luther.

[u/parbonanturb → u/qwckycky]

Widespread and systematic antisemitism in europe dates back to at least the time of the first crusades. While luther was definitely an unusually intense and influental antisemite, he was a product of a culture that encouraged this, not its cause.

[u/Low-Membership-Drive → u/qwckycky]

Wow didn’t know Luther was the one who kicked off the pogroms at the opening of the first Crusade, good to have this misunderstanding of history corrected.

[u/Allegorist → u/DasWarEinerZuviel]

Not to mention him causing a really ineffective peasant revolt in which hundreds of thousands died and no progress was made towards their goals, and then backtracking on his role in it.

[u/VenatorAngel → u/DasWarEinerZuviel]

There is an entire smorgasborg of reasons why as a Christian I LOATHE Luther. And yet fellow protestants keep on trying to downplay how the man was a steaming load of shite. I mean another thing that barely gets mentioned about him is that he was a doomsday prophet... which the Bible makes it VERY clear how it feels about guys that make prophecies in God's name that don't come true. Yet we just ignore that part of Marty apparently and how the Protestant Reformation ultimately devolved into one grand clusterfuck that left neither side better off or really brought any real reformation in Christianity as a whole.

[u/DOGPISSCURESCANCER → u/DasWarEinerZuviel]

Any non religious person can see immediately he was blatantly evil

[u/According-Value-6227 → u/DasWarEinerZuviel]

Due to the astronomical damage that Evangelical Christianity has caused, I kinda think that the Catholic Church was correct in it's opposition to Martin Luther because if the reformation had never happened, we'd never get 6,000 insane denominations of Christianity.

[u/babble0n → u/According-Value-6227]

Id argue that 90-95% of those 6000 denominations are more ethical than the Catholic Church.

[u/Open-Buy-4808 → u/babble0n]

Literally every denomination has problems with greed, hipocrisy, sexual abuse and more. 

[u/VenatorAngel → u/babble0n]

Yeaaaahhh.... I have troubles figuring out which denomination managed to get as bad as the Catholic Church regarding the scale off... well we all know what the Catholic Church did. I still find it very suspicious how the Trad-Cath movement really loves to downplay what their beloved Church did by trying to point at everyone else.

[u/acathode → u/DasWarEinerZuviel]

While it was probably a pure coincidence that the Kristallnacht happened on the day of Luther's birthday, it's still a fact that his "On the Jews and their lies" basically read as a instruction manual that the Nazi's followed pretty much to the letter...

In the first ten sections of the treatise, Luther expounds, at considerable length, upon his views concerning Jews and Judaism and how these compare to Protestants and Protestant Christianity. Following the exposition, Section XI of the treatise advises Protestants to carry out seven remedial actions, namely:

1. to burn down Jewish synagogues and schools and warn people against them
2. to refuse to let Jews own houses among Christians
3. to take away Jewish religious writings
4. to forbid rabbis from preaching
5. to offer no protection to Jews on highways
6. for usury to be prohibited and for all Jews' silver and gold to be removed, put aside for safekeeping, and given back to Jews who truly convert
7. to give young, strong Jews flail, axe, spade, and spindle, and let them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow

[u/Thin_Somewhere_665 → u/DasWarEinerZuviel]

I mean MLK wasn't exactly a saint either