10 Injustices By The Good Guys Of History

History loves a hero. We carve them into marble, name airports after them, and quote them on motivational posters.
But when you zoom in, even the “good guys” of history sometimes did things that look a lot less heroic up close.
This Listverse-style countdown walks through 10 injustices carried out by people and institutions we usually put
on the moral high ground from founding fathers and freedom fighters to peacekeepers and public health officials.

The goal isn’t to cancel every statue in town. It’s to show how complicated real people are, why “good guy vs. bad guy”
history often leaves out crucial victims, and how understanding these darker chapters can make us smarter, more honest
about justice today.

1. George Washington: Father of His Country, Master of Hundreds

In American classrooms, George Washington is the flawless founding father: the general who won independence and the
first president who voluntarily gave up power. Much less airtime goes to the fact that he enslaved more than 100 people
he legally owned and controlled the lives of hundreds more at Mount Vernon.

By 1799, roughly 317 enslaved people lived and worked at Mount Vernon, including men, women, and children who planted
Washington’s fields, cooked his food, and maintained his home. Washington bought, sold, and rented human beings,
separated families across his five farms, and allowed harsh punishments when overseers felt productivity lagged.

To his credit (on a very low bar), Washington’s will arranged for the eventual emancipation of the people he personally
owned something many slaveholding founders never did. But that came only at the end of his life, after decades of
benefiting from slavery and without freeing most of the people whose labor made his world possible. Calling him a hero
is fine, but that heroism sits on top of a system that broke apart Black families and treated their lives as property.

2. Thomas Jefferson: “All Men Are Created Equal” (Except the Ones He Owned)

If Washington is the “Father of His Country,” Thomas Jefferson is the author of its mission statement. “All men are
created equal” might be the most famous sentence in American history. Yet Jefferson spent his life owning people,
writing openly racist theories, and expanding slavery even as he wrote eloquently against it.

At Monticello, Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people, tracked their labor in precise records, and profited from their
unpaid work. Modern scholarship and DNA evidence strongly support that he fathered several children with Sally Hemings,
an enslaved woman who was also his late wife’s half-sister. Her ability to consent in a slave–master relationship is,
by definition, compromised.

Jefferson sometimes spoke of slavery as a moral “blot” and worried about divine judgment and then did very little
about it. As president, he signed a law banning the importation of enslaved people in 1808, but the domestic slave
trade grew, and slavery spread into newly acquired territories. The man whose words fueled revolutions from France to
India never led a real emancipation movement at home.

3. Abraham Lincoln: Savior of the Union, Enemy of Civil Liberties?

Abraham Lincoln is rightly praised for preserving the Union and issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. But in the
process, he also took actions that alarmed civil libertarians then and now including suspending the writ of
habeas corpus, the fundamental right to challenge unlawful detention.

Early in the Civil War, Lincoln authorized the military to detain suspected Confederate sympathizers without immediately
giving them access to civilian courts. In the famous case Ex parte Merryman, Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled
that only Congress, not the president, had the power to suspend habeas corpus. Lincoln basically ignored him.

Lincoln also presided over a period when federal and state authorities cracked down on dissent, arrested journalists,
and shut down newspapers judged disloyal. At the same time, his administration’s policies toward Native Americans were
deeply inconsistent: he commuted many death sentences after the U.S.–Dakota War but still allowed the largest mass
execution in U.S. history and supported an expansionist vision that cost Indigenous people land and lives.

None of this erases his role in ending slavery. But it reminds us that “good guys” can stretch or break rights when they
believe the stakes are high enough a warning that still matters whenever leaders talk about emergencies and security.

4. The Allied Bombing of Dresden: Destroying a City to Defeat a Monster

World War II is often framed as the ultimate “good vs. evil” conflict, with the Allies fighting Nazi Germany and
Imperial Japan. Yet some Allied decisions still haunt historians, none more so than the firebombing of Dresden in
February 1945.

In a series of raids between February 13 and 15, British and American bombers dropped around 3,900 tons of high-explosive
and incendiary bombs on the city, creating a firestorm that killed roughly 25,000 people, most of them civilians.
Dresden was a cultural center and, while it had some military value as a transport hub and industrial site, critics
argue the scale and timing of the attack so late in the war went far beyond what was needed to defeat Germany.

Supporters of the bombing insist it was part of a wider strategy used on other cities, intended to break German logistics
and morale. But even at the time, some officials questioned whether incinerating a packed civilian city was morally
defensible. Today, Dresden has become shorthand for the uncomfortable idea that even the side fighting fascism can
commit acts that look, to many, like war crimes.

5. Winston Churchill: Defender of Democracy, Villain of Bengal

Winston Churchill is frequently ranked among the greatest leaders of the 20th century. His speeches galvanized British
resistance to Hitler; his bulldog image adorns statues and coffee mugs. But in India, especially in Bengal, many people
remember him very differently.

During the Bengal Famine of 1943, up to 3 million people died from hunger and disease. Historians debate the exact mix
of causes wartime disruption, Japanese occupation of Burma, local mismanagement but Churchill’s government played a
major role. Britain continued exporting rice from India, refused urgent requests for large-scale grain shipments, and
prioritized stockpiling food for European theaters.

Churchill’s own comments haven’t aged well. He reportedly blamed the famine on Indians “breeding like rabbits” and
reportedly asked how there could be a real shortage if Mahatma Gandhi was still alive. Defenders argue he was operating
under brutal wartime constraints. Critics say this is what racism and imperial priorities look like in practice: some
lives simply counted less.

6. Mahatma Gandhi: Apostle of Nonviolence, Early Racist in South Africa

Mahatma Gandhi is a global icon of nonviolence and civil disobedience. His campaigns against British rule inspired
movements from the U.S. Civil Rights era to South African anti-apartheid activism. But Gandhi’s early years in South
Africa featured deeply racist views toward Black Africans.

As a young lawyer, Gandhi fought to improve the status of Indian merchants and professionals, often by arguing that
Indians were more “civilized” than the African majority. In his early writings, he used racist language common among
whites at the time and referred to Africans with derogatory terms, explicitly distancing Indians from them.

Over time, Gandhi’s views evolved. He later opposed racism more broadly and became a symbol of anti-colonial struggle.
But for African scholars and activists, those early statements still sting. They show how even a moral giant can start
out soaked in the prejudices of his era and how incomplete stories of “saints” erase the people they sidelined.

7. United Nations Peacekeepers: When Protectors Become Predators

The blue helmets of U.N. peacekeepers are supposed to represent safety and neutrality. Many missions have saved lives
and helped end wars. At the same time, U.N. operations have been rocked by scandals involving sexual abuse, exploitation,
and even child rape carried out by the very people sent to protect civilians.

In Haiti, an investigation revealed that at least 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers were implicated in running a child sex ring
between 2004 and 2007, exploiting boys and girls as young as 12 in exchange for food, small amounts of cash, or mobile
phones. Many soldiers were quietly repatriated; none were criminally convicted in their home country.

Similar allegations have surfaced in missions from the Central African Republic to Congo and South Sudan. A 2024 report
found over 100 new sexual misconduct allegations in U.N. missions, with dozens of women giving birth after rape and
seeking child support. Despite “zero-tolerance” slogans, justice has often been slow or non-existent.

The U.N. remains a crucial global institution. But its peacekeeping record shows how easily good intentions can be
undermined when there’s weak accountability and huge power imbalances between protectors and the people they’re supposed
to serve.

8. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Medicine’s Darkest Chapter

Doctors and public health agencies are supposed to embody “do no harm.” That’s why the Tuskegee Syphilis Study is one of
the most chilling injustices in modern medical history and a major reason many Black Americans still distrust the
healthcare system.

From 1932 to 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service tracked hundreds of Black men with syphilis in Alabama to study the
“natural course” of the disease. The men were never properly informed of their diagnosis, and when penicillin became the
standard, highly effective treatment in the 1940s, doctors withheld it so they could keep watching the illness progress.

By the time a whistleblower leaked the story to the press, dozens of men had died directly from syphilis, many more had
died from complications, wives had been infected, and children were born with congenital syphilis. The scandal led to
sweeping reforms in research ethics including informed consent rules and institutional review boards but it also left
a deep scar of justified suspicion.

9. The 1953 Coup in Iran: Democracy Undone in the Name of Freedom

The United States likes to describe itself as a champion of democracy. In 1953, it did the opposite in Iran. Prime
Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was democratically elected and moved to nationalize Iran’s oil industry, challenging British
control. In response, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 helped orchestrate a coup to remove him.

Declassified documents show that Operation Ajax involved bribing politicians, hiring street thugs, and spreading
propaganda to destabilize Mossadegh’s government. After the coup, the Shah a pro-Western monarch ruled with
increasing authoritarianism for decades, backed by U.S. support, until he was overthrown in the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

From Washington’s perspective, this was a “win” in the Cold War and a way to protect oil interests. For Iranians, it was
a clear message that democratic choice mattered less than geopolitical convenience. Many historians argue that the
resentment seeded in 1953 still shapes U.S.–Iran relations today.

10. Chile 1973: Fighting Dictators by Backing a Dictator

Two decades after Iran, the U.S. again undermined a democracy this time in Chile. In the early 1970s, socialist
president Salvador Allende was elected in free and fair elections. The Nixon administration feared his policies and the
symbolic impact of a democratic socialist government in Latin America.

Declassified records show that Nixon ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream” in Chile and explore options to prevent
Allende from taking power or to unseat him later. The U.S. supported opposition groups and created a climate conducive to
a military coup, which finally came on September 11, 1973, bringing General Augusto Pinochet to power.

Pinochet’s regime went on to torture, disappear, or kill thousands of people. Years later, U.S. documents also revealed
how an American-born operative working for Pinochet’s secret police carried out political assassinations, including a car
bombing in Washington, D.C. For a country that preached human rights, backing a brutal dictatorship to stop an elected
socialist government is a glaring contradiction.

What These “Good Guy” Injustices Have in Common

These stories span centuries and continents, but they rhyme in unsettling ways:

• Selective empathy: Leaders often cared deeply about some people’s suffering while ignoring others enslaved workers, colonized subjects, Indigenous nations, or civilians on the “wrong” side of a border.
• Grand ideals vs. messy reality: Liberty, human rights, and peace sound great on paper. Applying them consistently, especially when money, power, or victory are at stake, has proved much harder.
• Hero worship as a shield: Once someone is cast as a savior whether a founding father, a wartime leader, a Nobel laureate, or a global institution it becomes tempting to downplay or excuse their harms.

Learning about these injustices doesn’t mean we have to throw away every achievement of the people involved. It means
seeing the whole picture: the triumphs and the people who paid the price.

Extra: of Hard-Won Experience with “Good Guys” and Gray Areas

So what do you actually do with stories like “10 Injustices By The Good Guys Of History” once you close the
tab? Here are some lived-style reflections the kind of mental habits historians, activists, and thoughtful readers
develop after spending way too much time in the archives and not enough time touching grass.

1. Treat Hero Stories Like Social Media Highlights

The glowing biography of a beloved leader is basically a carefully edited highlight reel. It shows the wins: the famous
speech, the brilliant strategy, the dramatic turning point. What it usually hides is who did the unglamorous work, who
got ignored, and who suffered as “collateral damage.” Once you realize that, you start automatically asking:
“Whose point of view is missing here?” That one question can completely change how you read a history book, watch a war
movie, or stroll past a statue in a city square.

2. Hold Two Truths at the Same Time

It’s emotionally easier to put people in neat boxes Lincoln the savior, Churchill the bulldog, Gandhi the saint, the
U.N. the global referee. Real life is messier. Someone can be genuinely brave in one context and deeply harmful in
another. You can admire Lincoln for his role in ending slavery and still be disturbed by his record on civil
liberties and Native American policy. You can credit the U.N. for brokering peace deals while demanding accountability
for peacekeepers who abused their power.

Learning to hold those contradictions without shutting down is a skill. It makes you less vulnerable to political
spin, advertising, and simplistic “good vs. evil” narratives because you’ve seen how often reality comes in
uncomfortable shades of gray.

3. Follow the Power, Not Just the Personality

A useful habit: whenever you see a “good guy” making a controversial decision, look at who has the least power in that
situation. In Tuskegee, Black men with limited education trusted government doctors in white coats. In colonial Bengal,
starving peasants were at the very bottom of an imperial hierarchy. In Haiti, poor children faced disciplined foreign
soldiers backed by the full authority of the United Nations.

Good intentions can’t cancel out massive power imbalances. Once you pay attention to who has choices and who doesn’t,
you start spotting injustices much sooner before they become the next big “how could they let this happen?” scandal.

4. Use History as a Mirror, Not Just a Museum

It’s easy to shake your head at the past and feel morally superior. “If I lived back then, I definitely would have done
the right thing” is one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves. A more useful question is:
“What today will future generations look back on and say, ‘How did they think that was okay?’”

Maybe it’s how we treat migrants, prisoners, or people in faraway war zones we only see in headlines. Maybe it’s
emerging technologies, climate decisions, or medical experiments that feel normal now but will look cruel in hindsight.
The point isn’t to panic; it’s to stay awake. The “good guys” of today including our own governments, companies we
love, or causes we support are just as capable of blind spots as Jefferson or Churchill.

5. Demand Better, Without Pretending Perfection Exists

The big takeaway from these 10 injustices isn’t “all heroes are secretly villains.” It’s that power always needs
guardrails: transparency, independent oversight, free media, strong civil society, and people willing to ask annoying
questions. When you vote, organize, lobby, donate, or even just argue in the group chat, you’re helping decide whether
your era’s “good guys” stay accountable or whether they end up on the next uncomfortable Listverse-style countdown.

Heroes are more interesting when you see the cracks. History is more honest when we remember the victims, not just the
victors. And justice today is more likely when we stop pretending that wearing the white hat automatically makes you
harmless.