Bullies in History and Today
The last thing we should do with any bully in history is honor or celebrate any actions that harmed our ancestors. Or any ancestors. They ought to be ignored and forgotten.
But there is nevertheless some benefit in knowing what they’ve done and to whom. It teaches us how to recognize similar actions in our own cultures and “leaders” today.
True leaders do not organize us to benefit themselves, but to meet our common needs. That’s the difference between a bully or parasite and a true leader. Seeing how some in history—and today—fail at this most basic qualification of leadership helps us to hold current leaders accountable, and shows us how to train up future leaders for our common benefit. Bullies manipulate, push, deceive, threaten, harm, take. Some do this in crude and ugly ways, others with great showmanship and style, often with fancy political, social or religious titles. None of that costuming or pageantry should fool us. We know them by their selfish and cruel actions.
Bullies, like parasites, thrive on confusion, fear, and the normalization of their own bad behavior. They rarely begin as monsters; they become powerful, in part, because people look away, accept excuses, or buy into the myth that domination is necessary or inevitable. Whether in the home, the schoolyard, the workplace or the halls of government, the logic is always the same: “My needs come first, and anyone who resists deserves to be punished.” When bullies gain control of institutions—armies, churches, media, companies—the damage can multiply on a scale that changes history.
I. The Tactics and Masks of Bullies
Bullies do not always use the fist or the whip. Their power may come from words, threats, rules, or even the selective distribution of favors and rewards. Some are obvious: the dictator who jails dissidents, the corporate boss who fires whistleblowers, the cult leader who weaponizes faith to control followers. Others hide behind carefully crafted personas, cloaking their selfishness in “vision,” “strength” or “tradition.” Bullies are experts at rebranding abuse as leadership, coercion as order, and cruelty as “just the way things are.”
Bullies often claim to protect the group, the nation or the “greater good” while actually protecting their own privilege. They divide communities, set one group against another and teach followers to fear or hate outsiders. They demand loyalty and punish dissent, sometimes through open violence, more often by shaming, scapegoating or isolating critics. The bully’s greatest weapon is the culture of silence that grows around them: people who have learned, by hard experience, that speaking out comes at too high a cost.
II. Historical and Modern Examples
- The Schoolyard to the Throne: History is full of bullies who moved from petty tyranny to national catastrophe. Napoleon, who once bullied classmates, went on to subjugate a continent. Hitler turned personal resentment into an ideology that justified the destruction of millions. Stalin wielded paranoia and purges to cow an entire society. These are extreme cases, but they are instructive: The habits of bullying, left unchecked, scale upward with terrifying results.
- Colonial and Imperial Bullies: Colonizers—whether Spanish conquistadors, British governors or Belgian kings—rationalized exploitation and mass murder as “civilizing missions.” They justified theft, violence, and oppression with religion, science or manifest destiny. The indigenous, the poor and the powerless bore the brunt, while the bullies wrote the histories.
- Bullies in Modern Society: Today’s bullies are not always in uniform or seated on thrones. They run companies that punish whistleblowers, orchestrate smear campaigns online or wield bureaucratic power to grind down opposition. Police officers who abuse authority, political leaders who demonize minorities, “influencers” who stir up hate for clicks—these are the bullies of our time. Their methods may be less bloody than those of the past, but the patterns are the same: domination, humiliation, the pursuit of power for its own sake.
III. Why We Must Resist—And How
The lesson of history is clear: bullies will dominate as long as they are allowed to, and the costs are always paid by the vulnerable. Bullies thrive where people are isolated, atomized or too scared to speak. But their power is brittle. When communities organize, support one another, and name abuse for what it is, bullies can be stopped and even changed. The antidote is not more bullying, but solidarity and the creation of systems where leadership is earned by service, not seized by force.
We must not allow bullies—whether grandiose or subtle—to take, threaten or force their will upon us or others. We really must leave them to history and make a future without them in charge of anything. That means building institutions that reward empathy, accountability and fairness. It means refusing to honor “strongmen” for their cruelty or excuse injustice for the sake of order. It means holding up models of leadership that empower rather than subjugate; that include rather than exclude; that teach rather than threaten.
Bullies must always be resisted and restrained. The work is never finished, but every act of courage, every refusal to submit, every exposure of abuse, moves us closer to a world where true leadership prevails—and the old habits of domination lose their power.