Idi Amin, Heavyweight Champion
Only 10 years prior to the arranged coup of 1971 which he used to upset the then Government and seize control of Uganda, a 6-foot-4, 270-pound Idi Amin was the country’s heavyweight boxing champion for over eight years. A previous officer in the British Colonial Army before turning dictator, Amin was additionally a competent rugby player; however he was not the brightest player on the field. Armed force authorities considered Idi Amin who would later become the murderer of up to half a million Ugandans-as an impressive fellow and a good rugby player who had big bones and virtually no brains, as explaining things to him was like teaching in kindergarten.
Ayatollah Khomeini, Philosopher and Poet
For the vast majority of his grown-up life, Ruhollah Ayatollah Khomeini was an educator and speaker, principally of Islamic mystery and rationality. Preceding leaving on his central goal to transform Iran into an Islamic religious government, Khomeini, impacted by Aristotle and Sufi supernatural quality, penned no less than 25 books and treatises, and even some unique lyrics. One sonnet, distributed in an Iranian daily paper only four months after Khomeini issued a fatwā against creator Salman Rushdie in 1989, starts:
I have ended up in jail, O darling, by the mole on your lip! / I saw your debilitated eyes and got to be sick through adoration.
While it shows up the Ayatollah is receiving a poetic persona to express a more supernatural adoration for God, his vigorous words are not what you’d anticipate from your normal mullah.
Timothy McVeigh, Decorated Veteran
Four years prior to the Oklahoma City shelling in 1995 that slaughtered 168 and left hundreds more harmed, terrorist Timothy McVeigh was a soldier in U.S. Armed force taking part in Operation Desert Storm. On the second day of battling, McVeigh expertly beheaded one Iraqi fighter and shot another to death, terminating them both from more than a mile away; for these he got a Bronze Star. McVeigh was sentenced to death in 1997for his criminal acts, President Bill Clinton ensured via a special enactment to inhibit McVeigh from getting any military honors that should have accompanied his burial/
Harvard’s Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, that it is quite difficult if not impossible for a simple craftsman, artist or researcher to progress into becoming mass killer as there are a myriad of social, good and political deterrents in the way of such a negative career path
Still, even today, we may need to watch a previous ophthalmology trainee (Bashar Assad) or a Jesuit-prepared optional teacher (Robert Mugabe), among numerous others. One may never tell what they would grow up to become.
