Table of Contents
I’m currently almost finished Alexandre Dumas’ epic, The Count of Monte Cristo. To be honest, I’ll be a bit sad when I do. As Red Letter Media’s Jay Bauman said of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, it’s one of those cultural milestones you always think you know, because you just kind of absorb it by cultural osmosis, “But then I watched it,” Bauman said, “And it was the most epic fucking thing I’ve ever seen”.
I feel much the same way about The Count of Monte Cristo. I’d thought I’d seen enough old movies that I knew the story… but no movie can do justice to this sprawling epic. Even the recent eight-part series, great as it was, cut out so much. Still, I’m sure my family will be relieved when I finally stop talking about it.
At the heart of the story of Monte Cristo is revenge. Just how far is too far to go to avenge yourself on those who stole 14 years of your life and everything you loved from you?
As some real-life examples show, some people will go to great and vicariously satisfying lengths. All men know and revere, for instance, Marvin Heemeyer, he of ‘Killdozer’ fame. The classic story of the reasonable man pushed too far. Another reasonable man pushed over the edge, who became a hero to all good men, was Gary Plauche, who famously gunned down his son’s rapist on national television.
Here are some other epic stories of revenge.
It seems as if, in India, rape is even more ubiquitous than shitting in the street. But Akku Yadav was a rapist monster shocking by even India’s standards.
He was known to have raped more than 200 women from the Kasturba Nagar slum of New Delhi, preying mostly upon members of the “Untouchable” caste, the lowest members of India’s social hierarchy who received little to no help from authorities.
Akku Yadav also routinely bribed corrupt officials so they would drop his cases and had a gaggle of henchmen that worked at his behest. Despite countless women coming forward with allegations of rape against him, Yadav always managed to remain free to rape whomever he wanted.
In yet another web of the sort of vibrant cultural diversity that mass immigration is importing to the West, every time a victim reported him, police would let Yadav know, so he could go and threaten them with a good, old-fashioned acid attack (hey, when the Brits stop you from burning women alive, Indians have to innovate). Or just rape them again – why stop, just when he was enjoying it?
Finally, the women of Delhi had had enough. Starting with Usha Narayane, a victim who had repeatedly been harassed by Yadav.
With help from her brother-in-law, Narayane reported Yadav to the deputy commissioner, who promised that police would arrest the serial rapist. The residents of the slum seemed in little mood to wait. That night, Yadav’s house was knocked down by angry neighbors and local residents and, perhaps fearing for his life for the first time, Yadav surrendered to the police.
Of course, the women knew exactly how that would turn out: he’d just be let free to rape again. So, they decided it was lynchin’ time.
Together, they swarmed the courthouse armed with vegetable knives, stones, and whatever else that was at hand.
As he walked past the angry women in court, Akku Yadav taunted one of them, calling her a prostitute and threatening to rape her again – and the policeman who was escorting him laughed. The arrogance of the rapist and the open neglect of the police who were supposed to protect the women caused the woman to simply snap and an altercation quickly broke out.
“We can’t both live on this Earth together. It’s you or me,” the woman cried as she began beating Yadav with her sandal. The other women quickly converged on Yadav as well. The mob was so violent and overwhelming that the police guards quickly fled the courtroom, leaving Yadav to the armed mob.
The attack lasted for more than 10 minutes and left Yadav’s dead body butchered on the courtroom floor with 70 stab wounds and his penis cut off.
For once, the police acted with alacrity and tried to arrest Usha Narayane and others. At which point, the neighbourhood went I’m Spartacus.
When police tried to arrest five of the women for Yadav’s death, all the women in the village protested and soon every one of them had taken responsibility for the murder. Narayane and several other women were arrested and tried but were eventually released due to lack of evidence.
The ancient Greeks knew what was up when they made Aphrodite not just the goddess of love, but the goddess of victory in war, often depicted in armour. The Romans later called their version of the goddess, among many names, Venus Victrix (“Venus the Victorious”). Indeed, the Romans learned the hard way, in Britain, what Shakespeare would write in that land more than a thousand years later: Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Women like Mariya Oktyabrskaya.
When her husband was killed fighting the Nazis, Mariya joined the Red Army, like nearly a million other Russian women. But she took her war service personally. Real personally.
She sold all her belongings and bought a T-34 tank – which she christened “Fighting Girlfriend” – so she could kill the Nazi invaders. In order for her to make sure that she would be the one behind the wheel of the tank, Oktyabrskaya reportedly made her case to Joseph Stalin himself.
In a letter to the Russian leader, Oktyabrskaya wrote: “My husband was killed in action defending the motherland. I want revenge on the fascist dogs for his death and for the death of Soviet people tortured by the fascist barbarians.”
Stalin – no doubt aware of the propaganda value of such a request – approved her plan and Oktyabrskaya underwent five months of training. Despite the support from Russia’s leader, Mariya Oktyabrskaya was still vastly outnumbered by her male compatriots who likely put little faith in her abilities.
It didn’t take long for her to prove herself, however. In her first tank battle in October 1943, Fighting Girlfriend was the first tank to breach enemy lines and Oktyabrskaya proceeded to wreak absolute havoc against German troops, crushing many under the treads of her T-34. A month later, she fearlessly jumped out of her tank to make needed repairs under heavy fire from the enemy, hopped back in, and got back into the fight.
For Mariya Oktyabrskaya, the horrors of war only strengthened her resolve.
“I’ve had my baptism by fire. I beat the bastards. Sometimes I’m so angry I can’t even breathe,” she wrote in an emotional letter to her sister.
But, echoing the warning of Abbé Faria, in The Count of Monte Cristo, when Mariya went seeking revenge, she should have prepared her own grave first. She was killed in battle in January, 1944, in the Leningrad-Novgorod Offensive.
Still, I’m sure we’ll all agree that turning a bunch of Nazis into sausage meat with a freaking tank was a hell of a way to go out in style.
