I dislike Oliver Cromwell, who born on 25 April 1599, in much the same way oceans are “damp”. That is to say, I dislike him a LOT. In fact, I loathe and detest him with the fire of 1000 suns.
Why? Because he committed an ethnic cleansing, that’s why. Moreover, the people he attempted to destroy just happened to be my genetic forbearers, the Irish. In his attempts to drive the Irishness out of the native Irish, Cromwell condoned:
the wholesale burning of crops, forced population movement, and killing of civilians. The policy caused famine throughout the country that was “responsible for the majority of an estimated 600,000 deaths out of a total Irish population of 1,400,000” … In addition, the whole post-war Cromwellian settlement of Ireland has been characterised by historians such as Mark Levene and Alan Axelrod as ethnic cleansing, in that it sought to remove Irish Catholics from the eastern part of the country, others such as the historical writer Tim Pat Coogan have described the actions of Cromwell and his subordinates as genocide. The aftermath of the Cromwellian campaign and settlement saw extensive dispossession of landowners who were Catholic, and a huge drop in population. In the event, the much larger number of surviving poorer Catholics were not moved westwards; most of them had to fend for themselves by working for the new landowners.
Basically, Cromwell killed almost half of the people in Ireland and tried to crush the life out of the rest by stealing their land and treating them like subhumans. He also condemed a further 50,000 Irish citizens to de factor slavery by forcing them into indentured servitude. All in the name of God, whom he assumed was a fellow anti-Catholic, Puritan, asshat like himself.
I hate people like that. HATE them.
From the little of him he sure was an ASSHAT.