9. 1936: Jesse Owens PWNS Adolf Hitler

As shown in the movie Contact, somewhere right now aliens on another world are receiving the first ever radio signals from earth. And they are going to translate them. And they are going to track the signal to its source. which will bring them here. And they are going to want to talk to this Hitler guy who is, for all intents and purposes, the Ambassador for the Human Race in outer space. Imagine the looks on their faces when we tell them: "Oh yeah. Him. Well, he just so happened to be the THE MOST EVIL HUMAN BEING EVER, AND WE FOUGHT A WAR KILLING 100 MILLION PEOPLE GETTING RID OF HIM." They'd probably say something like "Whoa. Bummer." Because, y'know....they're surfer aliens.

America, Germany, Japan. It's like World War II started right there on that podium.

Not to say that Hitler wasn't a total asshole up until the whole killing people thing. He told us exactly what he was going to do in that book he wrote. Why wasn't anyone paying attention? Maybe they were too mezmorized by his revolutionary ideas, like how he got a car for every German. Every one. Seriously. That's unprecedented for the 1930s. Started a company for it and everything. Called it the People's Car. Or in German: Volkswagon. Of course, no one was really paying attention when he converted all the car factories to tank factories a few years later, but they didn't care, because they all had cars. How can you be mad at a guy who does that? And then he built interstates--autobahn--for them to drive their cars on (and also to move his tanks from one end of the empire to the other really quickly when the war he'd invent in a couple years invariably turns into one of those two-front kinds).

Anyways, I'm digressing. Hitler loved technology. And evil Nazi scientists were at the forefront of everything. That's why the Americans always boasted after the war that their evil Nazi scientists were better than the Soviet evil Nazi scientists. So it was that Hitler made his evil Nazi scientists broadcast the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games on TV. To show the world German ingenuity, engineering, and propaganda. And swastikas. The trailer went something like this (cue Don Lafontaine--movie voice guy): "In a world of depression and despair.........one man fights for justice. Now all that stands between him and greatness.......is something else. Leni Riefenstahl and Jery Bruckheimer bring you: Triumph of the Black Guy."

Because it was around about this time that black people started winning, like, everything in the Olympics. Except swimming. And Jesse Owens was the Carl Lewis of the age before there were Carl Lewises. He won 4 gold medals, beating out upstanding, pure Aryan germans every time. You can imagine Hitler was pretty miffed at that. Not only did he not shake his hand or hand him the medal, but he was later on quoted as saying that it was unfair to have a negro in the Olympics, because negroes were technically not human. They were animals.

This is one of those controversies that gets more and more controversial as time goes on, and as Adolf more perfectly fits the role of worst. human. ever.