The best leaders of your country

[sb666]

Who are your favourite leaders who were the head of the country you live in or are from.
Gough Whitlam introduced free health care, free education, destroyed conscription and gave women equal pay.
John Curtin saved us during World War 2.
Paul Keating man was hilarious.

 

[Colour Scientist]

Spoiler

Mary Robinson, the first female President of Ireland. She transformed the position (although it's still largely a figurehead position), did a lot of good for the country, worked with the UN and is just an all-round awesome do-er of good deeds.

 

[Catfood220]

I'm from Britain, my government is full of idiots.

Having said that, I used to like Tony Blair until he decided that he was going to ignore the collective will of the nation and follow a retard into an illegal war. He lost my vote that day.

 

[Sixcess]

Spoiler

The best we ever had.

 

[Sixcess]

Winston Churchill was a fucking criminal. Almost as bad as the leaders of the axis.

How so?

[sub]I have the feeling this thread will soon be moving to the religion and politics sub-forum...[/sub]

 

[Bertylicious]

Spoiler

The best we ever had.

He really wasn't. Neville Chamberlain was loads better and gets a bad rap.

Now Paddy Ashdown; that's a man. Best leader we never had.

 

[MrPeanut]

The best leaders of your country

Still yet to come.

The agenda of past leaders is something akin to: making the country an axis puppet->making the country a soviet puppet->being corrupt dickheads

Eeeyup.

 

[Sixcess]

His treatment of the Germans after WW2 was rather horrid. He wanted to kill everyone.

Churchill was out of office within 2 months of the end of the war in Europe,so he had little to no say over post-war Germany. In any case do you have any source for this allegation? At all?

Every leader in WW2 was a fucking scumbag, on both sides, and every one of them did their fair share of atrocities, be it executing jews, sending jews to Germany to be executed, torturing prisoners.... Which is why it pisses me off when one of them is portrayed as a hero. People need to fucking wake up and realize neither Churchill nor Hitler were heros.

You're generalising way too much to be making any valid point here. Wars are not fought by saints - it's a nasty, brutal business and if we did bad things we did so because the alternative was much much worse.

There are many legitimate criticisms that can be made of Winston Churchill, even of some of the things he did or had done during the war - he himself had definite qualms over Dresden for example. But to compare him to Hitler and his gang - some of the worst people who ever lived, not only for what they did to other nations, but what they did to their own country - is ill informed and simplistic at best.

 

[Sixcess]

Wars are not fought by saints - it's a nasty, brutal business and if we did bad things we did so because the alternative was much much worse.

Which is exactly the point I am making.

No, the point you were making was that there was no difference between Churchill and Hitler - or to put it a different way, that there's no difference between killing enemy soldiers in combat and killing civilians in concentration camps.

EDIT: Just an example of what a fucking nutjob Churchill was: after the second world war he said that if one day England found itself in an economic slump simular to the one Germany found themselves in before Hitler took over, he would want a man like Hitler to lead Britain. Lovely.

By which he meant that Hitler presided over perhaps the most spectacular economic recovery of any nation, ever. Which he did. In the 20s and 30s, in no small part due to the crippling conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was in a terrible state - which paved the way for Hitler to take power in the first place. And in less than a decade he took this ruined, bankrupt nation and made it a global superpower.

The mass of people did not support Hitler in the 30s because he wanted to start a world war and kill jews. They supported him because he gave them food, jobs, security, and restored the pride of the nation.

In retrospect it could never last - but in the short term Hitler did good as well as evil, and that is what Churchill meant.

 

[ClockworkPenguin]

None of the monarchs, because they were either basically dictators or ultimately powerless. Cromwell was a nasty piece of work. My history isn't good enough to know much about the early Prime Ministers.

So I'll go with Clement Atlee, who at a time when the country was recovering from war, and with greater debt and deficit as a ratio of GDP than we have today, still managed to create the NHS and set the foundations for the welfare state.

 

[sb666]

Ignore this post I dont want to start a debate or anything.

 

[Esotera]

I suppose I could be cliched and say Churchill, but that sort of disregards the fact that he wanted to continue WWII indefinitely by attacking Russia, and was pretty damn crazy in other respects.

Therefore, I'm going to go with King Arthur, as no politician could possibly match him.

 

[bobmus]

I personally would always vote for Saxon, but maybe that's just down to John Simm's charisma...

EDIT: POST 900 BABY

 

[RustlessPotato]

Well i'm from Belgium, so I'm not sure if I even can count it a country.

 

[Jon Shannow]

Clement Atlee, is one of the best Prime Ministers Britain's had.
If we're allowed to go far back i'd go with Lord Palmerston, Pitt the Younger and possibly Pitt the Elder

 

[Colour Scientist]

The best we ever had.

Not really, his memoirs (which were carefully constructed by a team of people) were the only real source people had on WWII for a long time which created the image that Churchill was the Mastermind behind the Allied victory and an all-round superhero. It was a pretty genius move really, seventy years later and people still see him as the icon he presented himself as in the memoirs.

I'm not saying he wasn't a good leader but the image he created (or rather they created) with his memoirs has only really been challenged in recent years and even then it's largely limited to history circles. It's an image that people are very reluctant to let go of.

 

[Gentleman Adventurer]

Andrew "Old Hickory" Jackson

Yeah, he messed up a few times.(Indian removal and the destroying the Federal Reserve) But he almost beat to death the man that attempted to assassinate him and was an expert duelist and that's fucking awesome.

...his face was the last thing you saw before a brutal beating with a hickory cane...

 

[BlackStar42]

Hmmm...That's quite a tough one, most of them are utter shite. I'd tentatively go with Elizabeth I, what with the whole Renaissance we had going on and all. Plus, there was the beating the Armada, which was nice.

As to the whole Hitler debate, the dude bastard was utterly incompetent but he had the luck of the devil. Best leader I can think of for Germany would probably be Bismarck, THE Magnificent Bastard.

 

[Sixcess]

I suppose I could be cliched and say Churchill, but that sort of disregards the fact that he wanted to continue WWII indefinitely by attacking Russia, and was pretty damn crazy in other respects.

"Operation Unthinkable" was I suppose you'd call it a feasibility study. He wasn't alone in thinking about this and who's to say he was wrong? If Hitler was the worst monster of the 20th century then Stalin was quite possibly the second worst and Churchill knew it - comparing an alliance with Stalin to an alliance with Satan:

"If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."

The Soviet Union was diametrically opposed to the western powers, and was aggressively expansionist. Had Stalin decided to keep going after taking Berlin there would likely have been very little Britain or France could have done to stop them. There's reason to believe that Truman's use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was in part a demonstration of power aimed at dissuading the USSR from further agression.

In the end it was decided that the western powers would not win a war with the USSR. Instead we had 40 years of worldwide tension, the soviet occupation of Eastern Europe and proxy wars in the middle east and elsewhere during the Cold War, which itself almost led us to global anihilation. Perhaps Operation Unthinkable was a missed opportunity.

 

[Crazy Zaul]

Well as crap as Tony Blair was while he was in government, you gotta give him credit for making shitloads of money as a peace adviser or whatever since then, despite the fact that he started the war. That is kinda genius.