DC Mongolian Community pushes for Genghis Kahn statue

[Barnabas]

I was joking :P

But it surprises me that since you studied arabic you dont have a very sympathetic view of islam,.

If Islam had never existed, would christianity continue spreading east or zoroastrian repression would not have allowed that?

[_BuRjaCi_]

I wonder if someone will write a tousand years from now how Hitler was an enviromentalis because he refuse to allow millions of body's go to waste and made soap and buttons out of them and even used them for a carbon-neutral energy source (furnace).

[BeBMan]

Originally posted by snoopy369

All of it was entirely, unquestionably true.

"Unquestionable true" is nothing, esp. not something we know only (or at least to a large degree) from medieval sources.

But even if it is true, I agree with Ozzy's post.

It's absurd to refer to something like "ardent free trader" in light of his other actions. It's also rather questionable to point to "religious wars" or "crusades" as if the violence and wars of others (like Mongols) are per se of a higher value because they didn't have a religious background.

[Drake Tungsten]

(Prior to that it had been a city further south, I forget which.)

Kaifeng

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by BeBro


"Unquestionable true" is nothing, esp. not something we know only (or at least to a large degree) from medieval sources.

But even if it is true, I agree with Ozzy's post.

It's absurd to refer to something like "ardent free trader" in light of his other actions. It's also rather questionable to point to "religious wars" or "crusades" as if the violence and wars of others (like Mongols) are per se of a higher value because they didn't have a religious background.

I ask again. How do his other activities make him any worse than any other warlord, or King, of the time? Other than the fact that he succeeded where others failed, not one bit. The Crusades were just as barbaric, the Inquisition far worse, the 100 years' war ... All rife with people killing a lot of people, because they believed it the right thing to do for their god or country. Genghis killed people to enhance the safety of his own; he did not consider non-Mongols to be his concern. If they wanted to swear fealty to him, then great! If not, then make sure they can't stab him in the back, as pretty much everyone else did.

Revisionist history is comparing people of a time long past to our modern standards, ignoring the time and place in which they lived. That's BS. Frankly, not one of you Khan-haters has shown any evidence of any of his horrific acts - many of which spread via word of mouth, and as I said earlier, were intentionally fanned by his own soldiers as to lessen the likelihood of the next city over resisting - and thus lessen the necessary killing, on both sides. All I've heard is people giving me the fifth grade history lesson about him, the validity of which has been questioned by the only researcher to bother looking into the facts of the matter.

You guys going to go after Darwin next?

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by OzzyKP


Ok, that's all you need. No other words need to be said. If he murdered millions, then end of story he has no business being honored in this country or any other. Nothing else about him is relevant.

FDR murdered millions. Churchill murdered millions. Washington murdered as many as the British tossed at him. Lincoln murdered half a million of his own people.

How are they any different? Yet we seem to have statues of them everywhere...

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by snoopy369
The Crusades were just as barbaric, the Inquisition far worse, the 100 years' war ...

We shouldn't have statues to Inquisitors either.

[snoopy369]

My point is that for the standards of the time, he was acting as everyone else was. Perhaps at the time this was necessary to ensure the survival of one's people...

Certainly you would not blame a caveman who spots another caveman he's never seen before for hitting him over the head with a rock, to ensure he doesn't later get hit himself, right? Yet now that's called "murder". Because now we have laws and governments to ensure the caveman is safe from the other caveman.

Back in the thirteenth century, and particularly in Asia, the international situation was no different from the caveman - total state of nature, every man for himself. The bigger the nation, the more safe its people. Who could blame Khan for wanting a larger empire, to keep his own people safe?

Why don't y'all go read up on this subject, then come back and tell me you understand it all and still believe what you do.

[LordShiva]

Come now, you're not saying that Genghis killed all those millions as far away from his home as Persia because he was scared for his safety?

[snoopy369]

He didn't do much in persia, that was his children. He stopped in Russia, which would be where the various hordes of other-barbarians kept coming from and attacking his homeland.

So yes, I would. Just remember that in those days, attacks could come from rather further away than one would think, particularly with mounted tribes.

[LordShiva]

He's also said to have raped more women than any other person in human history.

[snoopy369]

Heck, just read the Wiki. Even its rather mundane treatment of the subject illustrates how each time a major 'barbarity' (such as with the Khwarism) occurred, it was because of a significant barbarity done to him first - in that case, he tried to open trade with the Khwarism and got his envoys sent back to him, headless.

Don't any of you read? Or is this just one of those 'religious' things I don't understand.

[LordShiva]

From the wiki:

For example David Nicole states in The Mongol Warlords, "terror and mass extermination of anyone opposing them was a well tested Mongol tactic." In such cases the Mongol leaders would not give an alternative choice but ordered massive collective slaughter of the population of resisting cities and destruction of their property. Only the skilled engineers and artists were spared from death and maintained as slaves if they agreed to surrender. Documents written during or just after Genghis Khan's reign say that after a conquest, the Mongol soldiers looted, pillaged, and raped while the Khan got the first pick of the beautiful women. Some troops who submitted were incorporated into the Mongol system in order to expand their manpower; this also allowed the Mongols to absorb new technology, manpower, knowledge and skill for use in military campaigns against other possible opponents. These techniques were sometimes used to spread terror and warning to others (see above).

There also were instances of mass slaughter even where there was no resistance, especially in Northern China where the vast majority of the population had a long history of accepting nomadic rulers. Many ancient sources described Genghis Khan's conquests as wholesale destruction on an unprecedented scale in their certain geographical regions, and therefore probably causing great changes in the demographics of Asia. For example, over much of Central Asia speakers of Iranian languages were replaced by speakers of Turkic languages. According to the works of Iranian historian Rashid al-Din, the Mongols killed more than 70,000 people in Merv and more than a million in Nishapur. China reportedly suffered a drastic decline in population during 13th and 14th centuries. For instance, before the Mongol invasion, unified China reportedly had approximately 120 million inhabitants; after the conquest was completed in 1279, the 1300 census supposedly reported roughly 60 million people. [13] How many of these deaths are facts and directly attributable to Genghis Khan and his forces is substantially unclear and are usually taken with speculation.

Property and culture

His campaigns in Northern China, Central Asia and the Middle East caused massive property destruction for those who resisted his invasion according to the regions' historians; however, there are no exact factual numbers available at this time. For example, the cities of Herat, Nishapur, and Samarkand suffered serious devastation by the armies of Genghis Khan[14][15]. suffered similar destruction. There is a noticeable lack of Chinese literature that has survived from the Jin Dynasty, due to the Mongol conquests.The lack of mongoloid swordsmen allowed for complet mongol destruction of lower east southern Uzbackstan.There is one secret of Ghengas Khan that often goes unnoticed. He was gay. He had at least 14 husbands and with them he would perform strange rituals. Ghengas Khan also had a pet water buffallo named Hingpung choo wung foo ding ling ping.

His contemporaries and successors may have done the same or worse, but that doesn't mean this guy deserves to be honoured.

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by LordShiva
He's also said to have raped more women than any other person in human history.

Said by whom? Nothing I've read, by anything close to an informed source, has suggested this. He had several wives, some of which were with him at any given time on the trail, but most if not all of those were as voluntary as any marriage was at the time, made to make peace with another tribe.

He actually significantly changed the Mongol way, taking them from rapers and pillagers to the mindset of actually keeping some of the territory intact. Perhaps this is some of the problem - people combining 'mongol' with 'Khan'.

Khan changed a lot of what is to be Mongol. The tribes, when he was a young boy, simply raped and pillaged each others' camps, and that was the end of it. W00t, plunder and women. Khan became who he was, because he realized that wouldn't work. Conquest, instead of pillaging, was the way to go.

Some of the hardest things he had to do in creating his empire were to stop his troops from focusing on the pillaging; to split up the plunder as a group rather than just taking what each could carry; and to realize that just raping and pillaging everything wasn't a good idea.

He actually killed some of his own men at one point, when they stopped to plunder a town before finishing the conquest of the region. That was one of the turning points in his career, as after that he established his control over the group and ensured that his riders were no longer raiders, but an army.

[snoopy369]

Did you finish reading that Property and Culture bit?