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IMO we should not look at Genghis Kahn's Empire fondly. After listening to Hardcore History's Wrath of the Khans, I think they have been the most evil group hum
by fasteddie31003 4y ago
IMO we should not look at Genghis Kahn's Empire fondly. After listening to Hardcore History's Wrath of the Khans, I think they have been the most evil group humanity has produced so far. Time seems to heal all wounds but Genghis Khan sure seemed to have made a lot of wounds.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoWho looks at the Mongol empire fondly?
- evv555 4y agoWhoever wrote this article? Obviously, are you asking a rhetorical question?
- s1artibartfast 4y agoNot an rhetorical question at all. I didn't see any wholistic judgment of the Mongol empire in the article. The Mongols did tons of amazing, fascinating, and great things. They also did terrible and atrocious things. The later should not preclude curiosity and appreciation of the former.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoDo you really think whoever wrote this article fondly reminisces of the Mongol Empire? If I list some positives of Byzantium does that mean I am fond of whatever they did in aggregate?
- mrcheesebreeze 4y agosome mongol people to this day. People tend to ignore their ancestor's warcrimes. Even if they admit they were evil they can't bring themselves to hate them. This applies to most old empires, many people can't bring themselves to hate the entire empire despite their barbarity.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoPeople should absolutely cultivate a balanced and accurate understanding of the past. I don't think anyone should cultivate hate.
- dgfitz 4y ago[flagged]
- coupdejarnac 4y agoThis seems to be an ongoing trend, and this article continues the trend by casting the Mongols as some kind of egalitarian society. 20 years ago-ish, a book came out about Chingis Khan that extolled the virtues of his multicultural, pantheistic regime and totally glossed over the many genocides the Mongols perpetrated. Not to mention the guy probably raped more women than anyone else in history. Edit: To add to this, a lot of what is written about Mongols in Chingis Khan's time is conjecture. They were not a literate people, so there are almost no records. They were nomadic and buried their leaders in secret locations, leaving scant archeological evidence. Many conclusions that have been drawn about the Mongols are speculative. Fast forward to the Yuan dynasty where there are records in Chinese. That era and locality have better documentation.
- Apocryphon 4y agoPeople tend to have starry eyed views of successful empires that not only conquered a lot of territory, but were able to rule for some time. Because there is inherent difficulty in administering areas spanning many cultures, ethnicities, creeds. Most of those things you said can apply to the Assyrians, the Romans, the British, or any other similar empire, and people still idealize those places today. If your empire holds together long enough to get a period of Pax named after you, it means you've made it in the eyes of history.
- robonerd 4y agoMongolia today has Genghis Khan on their money, particularly the 20000 Tugrik banknote. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean Mongolians generally approve of what he did, just like Americans today don't agree with everything the guys on our money did.
- sbuttgereit 4y agoThese guys.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD1gDSao1eA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD1gDSao1eA
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bigmattystyles 4y agoNetflix’s Marco Polo did - quite fondly.
- Glyptodon 4y agoMongolia sees Genghis Khan as a George Washington type figure, which I think is relatively fair. It's not like Italy does of a lot of introspection of the "bad" sides of its Roman heritage. The Mongols were a mix of modern and violent and ruthless before he (Chinggis Khan) died that you don't really see elsewhere.
- popcube 4y agocurrently CCP
- mrcheesebreeze 4y agoI don't know if we can call them the most evil. There are plenty of contenders, even if the death rates don't match up. If we go purely by deathrates then we should pick communist china or the soviet union. If we go by barbarity the mongol empire, the timurids, and the japanese empire (talking the one from ww2) are all good contenders. Imperial japan was so bad that the nazi ambassador to china in nanking did his best to save as many civilians as he could out of sheer disgust for their behavior. imperial japanese soldiers used to bayonet babies and do beheading contests for fun. literally, their newspapers had them even keeping score over who could do more beheadings. they melted people, literally ate people on one occupied island, they did multiple genocides, they tested gasses. Imperial japan is what I consider the worst by barbarity.
- wizwit999 4y agoI mean Mongols depopulated entire large cities. E.g. the entire population of Merv, which was one of the world's largest cities at the time, was killed.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoOr Baghdad which maybe was the largest city in the world at the time it was sacked.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mrcheesebreeze 4y agoyeah but I was talking about brutality vs numbers. the commies killed far more than anyone by numbers and in barbaric ways, but their brutality was beaten by those who killed less in more gruesome ways. the mongols excelled at both but I argued by brutality imperial japan was a bit worse.
- samatman 4y agoRaw death toll and percentage of total world population slaughtered seem like the two most objective measures. The Horde win the dubious blue ribbon for the latter.
- evv555 4y agoLooking forward to the feel-good girl power articles about Nazi Germany.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- s1artibartfast 4y agoSounds interesting, I would read that. There is a lot of fascinating literature about differences in gender roles between western and eastern Germany behind the iron curtain.
- Apocryphon 4y agoThere were white supremacist women who were also pro-suffrage. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/01/05/suffrage-ties-women-ku-klux-klan-sociologist-says/4092728001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/01/05/suffra... Intersectionality cuts both ways.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoAnd Nazi Germany ironically led the world in animal rights. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_welfare_in_Nazi_Germany https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_welfare_in_Nazi_Germa... The world is a bizarre place and humans are unfathomably complex. This should be cause for curiosity and investigation into history and The Human Condition
- DoItToMe81 4y agoInterestingly, Neo-Nazi groups were some of the first to establish a relationship with the more right wing civil rights groupsm. George Lincoln Rockwell had a personal relationship with Malcom X, on the basis of shared views of anti-semitism and racial separatism. Which, of course, Malcom X would later change his opinions of and denounce.
- AussieWog93 4y ago"How Leni Riefenstahl Triumphed Over The Patriarchy"
- Glyptodon 4y agoIt's hard for me to see them as "more evil" than many other pre-modern groups. It's such an arbitrary framing.
- 1123581321 4y agoPlease substitute the term you typically use for practitioners of genocide.
- agnatic-law 4y agoIt may surprise you but basically every empire did genocide at one point or another. “Total war” wasn’t a thing in premodern history because every war was a total war.
- wolverine876 4y agoAFAIK that isn't true. Political powers (e.g., feudal lords, kings, etc.) didn't have the resources to conduct warfare on that scale. As examples, centralized government and its resources didn't exist like today, troops had to go home to plant and harvest, and armies depended on local food production in order to survive. Total war in particular usually involves civilians as targets, and most civilians were far from the battlefield. WWII changed that, when bombers could reach deep beyond the front lines. Without bombers (and missiles), London would have been untouched by the war, for example.
- Glyptodon 4y agoI agree that there's a particularly European tradition of non-total war where maybe you burn the crops and lay seige but let the peasants live because hopefully they'll eventually be your peasants, but the era was more than willing to utterly obliterate schismatics and heretics, and it's pretty obvious that various civilizations have fallen and been obliterated by conquerors of one sort or another throughout history, maybe not as a common norm, but not infrequently. Look at 1 Samuel 15:3 for example, not that I have a good sense of actual historicity of it.
- scythe 4y agoThe misery of the Mongols' wrath is made apparent by the decline of Iran and China, hitherto on par with if not ahead of the West, but some 800 years after the Empire we see the regions least affected (South India, Vietnam, Japan, Oman) still performing as regional standouts on a troubled continent. You could throw out Myanmar and Yemen as counterexamples but they've both seen nasty recent wars.
- agnatic-law 4y ago[flagged]
- stevenjgarner 4y agoOr the British Empire which intentionally starved "between 12 and 29 million Indians ... as millions of tons of wheat were exported to Britain as famine raged in India. In 1943, up to four million Bengalis starved to death when Winston Churchill diverted food to British soldiers and countries such as Greece while a deadly famine swept through Bengal. Talking about the Bengal famine in 1943, Churchill said: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” [1] [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atrocities-british-empire-amritsar-boer-war-concentration-camp-mau-mau-a6821756.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atroci...
- PhantomBKB 4y agoNot to mention the United States who killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings which caused long-term side-effects on the populace, imposed sanctions, and even today control Japanese policy decisions and have permanent military occupation in Japan.
- unmole 4y agoSlavery and oppression is evil. Genocide is objectively worse.
- belfalas 4y ago> After listening to Hardcore History's Wrath of the Khans, I think they have been the most evil group humanity has produced so far. Never forget that history is written by the victors. The Mongol Empire was replaced by the Russian Empire.
- xbmcuser 4y agoThe worst Empire in that case is USA with how they obliterated the North American populations and wiped out many tribes.
- joemazerino 4y agoWeird comment. The USA didn't treat the Indians with white gloves but there are surely more egregious examples in history. Vlad the impaler? Ivan the terrible? Various African warlords?
- d0mine 4y agoHow many Indians were there before Columbus? How many remains? Compare it with the numbers for the examples you provided.
- NotSammyHagar 4y agoYou have to separate diseases from other things. The mongols weren't responsible for the black death, plagues in Europe killed a lot of people.
- d0mine 4y agoDiseases is the official excuse for the genocide. See how long it holds if you start asking questions and looking at the numbers.
- larryett 4y agoThis is so absurd and disrespectful to the Native American warriors. Only a person completely ignorant of basically anything to do with Native American history would say something like this in this context.
- SirSavary 4y agoWhat is absurd or disrespectful about pointing out the genocide of Native Americans?
- kennxfl 4y agoOften people forget that there isn't a dominant empire that existed for hundreds of years without insane brutality and cruelty against anyone considered to be an enemy. With the area Genghis Khan's Empire had under control, I don't doubt they pillaged every opposing enemy without mercy.