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From their clarifying response to their own comment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38930441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38930441

taeric 3y ago
Ah, I wasn't expecting to read down then up. :D This thread would have made more sense under that clarifying response. Reading that, I suspect my guess was fairly accurate? They were somewhat more effective than a lot of others we discuss on not just killing people, but effectively erasing their existence in the process.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  I see what you mean, and maybe that's what they were getting at after all. Still I think it gets into a history vs historiography thing. If something makes it hard to reconstruct what happened around it in history, was that thing necessarily bad? It certainly makes life harder for historians. My understanding of history as a professional discipline is that historians mostly try to excise value judgements like this from their practice. Individuals are free to feel how they feel about past events, but historians trying to understand and accurately place those events into context are not. To a historian the question of rehabilitating the mongol khanates should have no meaning, because they were never "dehabilitated" in the first place. They were simply a thing that we used to know slightly less about (partly because of their own actions!), and now can see a little more clearly.
  - taeric 3y ago
    I think there is a subtlety there. Historians would not necessarily hold ancient people to modern standards. That said, they do not have to ignore their impact on others and can take aim at not holding some practices in good terms. Consider, do we look neutrally on infanticide? Now, granted, this does seem to largely be a "western" thing? We are more than willing to criticize our roots and ancestors. It does seem that this is getting silly where our willingness to discuss "bad" things in our history has blinded a lot of people into thinking that other cultures do not have similar items they needed to grow from. As an easy example, it is baffling to me how slavery and minority oppression is largely viewed as a US thing. Edit: Consider, we would accurately call the practices described as genocidal. You can say that neutrally, sure, but I don't think any modern person should aspire for a genocidal society?

taeric 3y ago

Ah, I wasn't expecting to read down then up. :D This thread would have made more sense under that clarifying response. Reading that, I suspect my guess was fairly accurate? They were somewhat more effective than a lot of others we discuss on not just killing people, but effectively erasing their existence in the process.

giraffe_lady 3y ago
I see what you mean, and maybe that's what they were getting at after all. Still I think it gets into a history vs historiography thing. If something makes it hard to reconstruct what happened around it in history, was that thing necessarily bad? It certainly makes life harder for historians. My understanding of history as a professional discipline is that historians mostly try to excise value judgements like this from their practice. Individuals are free to feel how they feel about past events, but historians trying to understand and accurately place those events into context are not. To a historian the question of rehabilitating the mongol khanates should have no meaning, because they were never "dehabilitated" in the first place. They were simply a thing that we used to know slightly less about (partly because of their own actions!), and now can see a little more clearly.
- taeric 3y ago
  I think there is a subtlety there. Historians would not necessarily hold ancient people to modern standards. That said, they do not have to ignore their impact on others and can take aim at not holding some practices in good terms. Consider, do we look neutrally on infanticide? Now, granted, this does seem to largely be a "western" thing? We are more than willing to criticize our roots and ancestors. It does seem that this is getting silly where our willingness to discuss "bad" things in our history has blinded a lot of people into thinking that other cultures do not have similar items they needed to grow from. As an easy example, it is baffling to me how slavery and minority oppression is largely viewed as a US thing. Edit: Consider, we would accurately call the practices described as genocidal. You can say that neutrally, sure, but I don't think any modern person should aspire for a genocidal society?