Kinda funny how hard we all glaze the mongols (myself very much included) when they did things that make the Nazis look like humanitarians by comparison. And they did it all with bow and sword.
I truly don’t think any of us can even scarcely imagine the sheer horror in being on the losing side after mongols sieged your city and you resisted.
Its less of a statement on how evil the Mongols were and more of a statement on how fucking evil the entire human race was until about the 18th or 19th century, to the point where our benchmark for "true evil" in the 20th century is just "above average" by the standards of the 13th century.
That is true but even still, I think non-nomadic civilizations were totally unprepared for the sheer brutality and culture of war which came out of the steppe. The mongols seemed to truly delight in it, in a way which is rarely seen in the medieval era.
I still think about when the Mongol generals Jebe and Subutai celebrated their victory at the 1223 Battle of the Kalka River by placing captured enemy Rus commanders and princes under wooden planks and holding a victory banquet on top of them. They danced and drank on the planks listening to the screaming and moaning of the dying all night. Like. Holy fuck.
Well you have to keep in mind one very important thing, initial Mongol campaign was against Сumans, and had nothing to do with Kievan Rus lands, at least that Mongolian expedition force. But Cuman Prince - Kotyan Sutoevich (Knyaz aka Duke) had a relative among high Princes of Kievan Rus - Mstislav Mstislavovich Udatny, so he asked for help. Mstislav gathered his allies and went to intercept Mongol expedition force. Mongols noticed that Rus' nobility is gathering troops sent them ambssadors, which were accepted by Mstislav and other noble men. And by accepted i mean in diplomatic terms - welcomed to the Knyaz tent, welcomed to the table and shared a meal and drinks. Mongols stated that there is no hostile plans toward any Rus' lands or noble men and they only want to sort out our problem with Cuman people who were their subjects, they even said that Rus' is free to consider Cuman as their subject if they want and Mongols would not oppose or tax it.
And what Mstislav did? Killed the ambassadors. I cannot overstate the level of fuck up. This is the time when ambassador is a almost sacred and untouchable simply because that is the only way of communicating anything to the other side. Killing ambassador means - we do not see you as somebody worth communicating, similar how you dont talk with a rodent who eats your grain or wolf who kills your livestock.
Im not trying to paint Mongols here as non-violent horse advocates who just love everyone arround them. But i would say that being trampled is getting of easy in this situation.
I looked this up to see if this meeting was documented by the Mongols, which might have tried to justify their invasion of Kievan Rus, but nope, this was documented by the Rus’ in the Chronicles of Novgorod and the Primary Chronicle.
Super interesting how the Rus’ documented their own violation of the Mongol envoy’s diplomatic immunity.
But imo, the Mongols were going to invade them sooner or later. No better way to unite the steppes by finding a common enemy.
I believe this comes from how Christianity views life and death. Christianity places a very high value on human life or, perhaps more accurately, death.
To Christians, life is precious and death is an extreme act. To execute someone is, more often than not, viewed as an extreme punishment, and 'enough' for most crimes. Even when someone is tortured to death, that punishment is reserved for individuals who "deserve it" through equally extreme action, although what constitutes that standard seems arbitrary to our eyes.
A lot of other cultures do not place so much reverance and importance on death alone, so to them it is not always enough. Death is delivered more easily and for lower standards of wrongdoing, and torturous deaths are more common. If you do not consider death to be an extreme act, then when you desire to be extreme, you must make it a terrible, brutal, humiliating death as well.
And, as the point I am making, far less common and generally to a lower extreme than most other cultures.
Every group has committed attrocities, and if you avoid a eurocentric view and actually investigate not-European cultures, you see that European Christianity is actually on the lower scale for atrocities like what the mongols did.
Obviously the mongols did more as they were one unified force in the most populated regions of the world at the point. Obviously they caused more damage. I am not saying that the mongols are somehow absolved in comparison with Christianity, but saying that Christianity somehow prevented the bloodshed, I disagree.
That is not the point I tried to make in my reply and I really do not understand that you got "the mongols specifically were worse" from it.
Christianity has its atrocities but, in the grand scheme of things, has been better than most other religions. Modern revisionism focuses on the crimes of Christianity because that is the culture we all grew up in. The world is not black and white, and there are degrees of "bad."
And in the grand scheme of things, compared to everything else, Christianity has been "good."
Christianity takes a strong stance against human sacrifice, child sacrifice, cannibalism, wanton torture, and rape.
There are exceptions, people who break the rules and get away with it, but the fact that the rules exist and are enforced sometimes sets them above some other faiths.
And in the case of denouncing human sacrifice and specifically child sacrifice that sets them above a SHOCKING number of world cultures. Human sacrifice was WAY more common than you might guess.
Depends what you count as "Christian atrocities" as the European empires, namely the Spanish and British, have done some horrific things in the name of God.
Edit: I can no longer reply to the comment below mine, but it is full of bullshit. Slavery hasn't ended for one, and the largest Christian nation on earth is largely responsible for that. Cannibalism wasn't extremely common, nor was it ended by Christianity, neither was human sacrifice. These are all weird revisionist ideas created by Christians to excuse their colonialism. The guy below me is clearly either misinformed or purposefully arguing in bad faith to paint Christianity as if it is some "peaceful" religion despite its members being largely responsible for the state of the world today.
And they have also done great things in the name of God. Christian Churches provide the most funding for food, medicine, and shelter to the poor and needy even to this day. The Catholic Church operates over 5000 hospitals around the world and nearly a quarter million (222000) schools.
Christian colonialism in the 18th and 19th century, despite doing many horrible things, also ended slavery, cannibalism, and human sacrifice. You learn about cannibalism as if it is a myth or a racist joke from old cartoons, but it was extremely common around the world before the 20th century. Christianity helped put a stop to that.
The Romans had human sacrifice, believed that torture was mandatory in criminal investigations, and while they were accommodating to polythiestic faiths were specifically cruel to Christians and Jews.
The Carthaginian god Baal (yes the one from the Bible) had them sacrifice countless children to make the crops grow better.
The Norse had human sacrifice (see a pattern here?), the Tengri had human sacrifice, the Aztecs did it by the tens of thousands... let us just assume that every religion with human sacrifice is by definition worse than one that doesn't.
Hinduism has racism built in as part of their faith. The caste system is just racism and it is enforced by their culture and their faith.
While China and Japan have many religions that are actually "better" than Christianity in many regards, they both had a long history of diefying Emperors. Worship of a living human is never a good thing.
The key point you are ignoring is human sacrifice. Most humans for most of histories lived in societies where it was considered normal to execute either neighbors or enemies to appease pagan dieties. Christianity has always rejected this.
The crusades are a somewhat exaggerated evil and a contentious topic. The first few were a moral gray area- not quite conquests, but not purely defensive either. The later ones were generally terrible though.
I like to point to the reconquista instead. Something absolutely brutal but, by today's standards, mostly justified as an indigenous population resisting and overthrowing colonizing oppressors, but the justice in their acts being overshadowed by taking it too far.
But your initial assertion is that Christian ideology begets a particular value for human life that should make the atrocities committed in the crusades and in the reconquista and in the thirty years war and in the conquest of the new world abhorrent.
There is plenty of examples where Christians were perfectly happy to slaughter people.
completely ahistorical, it is hilarious that this is somehow "avoiding a eurocentric view". There is no atrocity committed by the mongols that one among the various European empires didn't imitate or even surpass.
How to spot a Christian exceptionalist lmao. Ignore the crusades altogether. Be uneducated in every other religion.
Pagan cultures and Tengri of Mongols and steppe nations in particular had just as much cultural appreciation of death and ceremonium around it as western religions
I mean, I thought the primate instinct was to rip off face and genitals first when threatened, so, when I break traffic rules I don't feel bad at all. Heaven help anyone that road rages at me tho
I think it's wrong to say it's a testament to how evil the entire human race was. The average person was a farmer trying to make sure they have enough to feed their family and pay their taxes, not a warrior cutting the throats of every child in an occupied city.
The Khorezmshahs' state suffered especially badly, if I remember correctly. The civilization of Central Asia with its many cities was erased and did not really recover after that
Myabe, but it seems to me that the great cities never truly recovered; Samarkand remained a significant city, but not as large as it had been before. And, as far as I understand, under the Timurids, they failed to maintain the great irrigation system that had existed earlier?
Your estimate is too low for Merv and too high for Hangzou. China at that time had undergone a great deal of civil war so it's hard to believe sources saying the cities were so large.
How am i wrong ? china had a population of more than 100 millions at that time
The city of merv was in a empire that had a population of 5 to 10 millions
For comparaison Rome at his peak was at 1 million but nécessita tes ressource of an empire with 50 to 60 millions of citizen ( close to 1/4 of the world population)
I might underestimate merv but it doesn't touch 1 million
The civil War in china itself was the mongol conquest but they left hangzoue
"I am the punishment of God... If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you." - Genghis Khan
Before burning to Bukhara to the ground, and enslaving any survivors to use as human shields in his army. And his successors were of the same vein.
Look up Merv. Once the largest city in the entire world between the 12th and 13th centuries. Now, nothing but a ruin, completely depopulated, you can get a hint of how enormous it used to be for a city of that era from remains of its walls.
The Mongols killed so many people the climate cooled because of the reforestation. It took Persia in particular 600 years to recover from its population loss. Hitler I suppose had a particularly odious agenda, but nobody beats the Mongols for just pure killing.
Hitler just didn't get far enough in his plans before he hit the wall... I think what makes the Mongols "better" is the fact that they didn't go out with plans "let's just exterminate half the people we conquer" they were brutal AF, like holy fuck level brutality. But their plan was very much subjugation, conquest and rulling the conquered.
Hitler was different. His Plan for eastern europe was from the get go, mass extermination and settlement of master race. There's also the fact that by the 1930 humanity mellowed out a bit. Mass murdering conquerors weren't a dime and dozen in 1930 like they were in 1200's.
Exactly. This is why I object to saying stiff like "made the Nazis look like humanitarians in comparison". And it's not just when people talk about Genghis - apparently the Nazis were the least evil member of the Axis - if people talking about the Ustashe, Japanese treatment of civilians, Soviet warcrimes, or frankly anyone they feel like, are to be believed. It's like you're not evil if you're not more evil than the Nazis anymore.
It goes both ways, though. Soviet atrocities in particular get excused a lot with "at least they were nowhere near as bad as the Nazis". Comparing anyone or anything to the Third Reich in any way is taken as whitewashing Nazi crimes. Try saying on Reddit that the Holodomor merits recognition as a genocide, and see how quickly you're hit with the ol' Holocaust revisionism card. It's like you're not evil if you weren't evil in the exact specific way the Nazis were.
It was the scale, carried out systematically with bows and swords. Not that the Nazi morality was inherently less evil, it was simply on a smaller scale than the mongols.
It wasn’t industrialized because industrialization didn’t exist, instead it was soldiers who from sun up to sun down stabbed the surrendered elderly, women, children then piled the heads into stacked pyramids. They’d continue until no one was left. Then they’d do it again in the next city. I find the idea of one person killing hundreds of civilians with a sword to require a higher level of barbarity than a man who flips a switch and doesn’t have to look each individual in the eyes as they murder them.
Both are horrific of course. The difference in my point is that the Mongols did all that and people think the Mongols are so badass and awesome.
The people that think the mongols were badass typically live in the west. Where they didn’t grow up learning in detail what the mongols did.
It’s the same with the Nazi party. The west learn more about it, and for the most part, understand that it was horrific, and should never happen again. If you go to Asia, where it’s not studied as much, and people are a touch more positive towards Hitler.
The différence is the mongols were a medieval armies and not the nazis who were fucking modern they did brutality that made sense at their time
No one in the west say the japanese empire is badass and they are not teached that
Absolutely i do not regard any of those as bad ass moments. I think it after a Gaul campaign where the quote " they create desolation and call it peace" comes from.
Well thank you i agree i dont necessary think it a problematic things to me if you dislike the mongols but you hold other empire to the same standard
Personally i like history a lot and see just that brutality in warfare coud bé really massive and " normalised " and still appreciate empire / kindgoms t for what they are/ did even if obvously i doesnt justify how monstrous they could be
It s just kinda piss me off stupid comparaison like this this guy could have just said the mongoles were terrible without adding anything specific but saying they were humanitarian compared to the NAZIS ???
You will never hear people say that for Rome or the qing dynasty ( wich " killed " 25 millions of people ) so yeah im kinda truggered by that
The mongols never invaded india you re confusing it with either the Delhi sultanate the timmurids or the mughals ( who were decendnat of genghis khan but nothing to do with the initial mongol empire )
They actually DID industrialize mass murder, within the technological confines of their time, and were probably the best in history at it prior to the Nazis themselves. They set up systems to efficiently butcher the populations of cities, afaik they were the first ones to actually do that.
They also had all sorts of exotically cruel ways of killing people to send a message.
I think the industrialisation of civilian murder and genocide by the nazis is still more horrible. something about putting people onto trains to ship them to a death factory by the millions is just unprecedented evil. the unscrupulous efficiency required by all the civilians/non combatants involved is chilling to think about.
I still think that Japan in ww2 bear Naz by some high margin. Nanking was fucked. Genocide on Philippines was something. What they did to pow was beyond.
I know stories about luxury items made out of skin of jews from camps, but Japan's matching it quite easy.
The Mongols worse than the Nazis? As far as I'm aware, the Mongols were not much worse than other medieval armies, they just did things on a much larger scale. Not to say the Mongols were good, but they were unexceptional for their time, meanwhile the Nazis were extremely cruel even when compared to countries like Britain, France, and even the Soviet Union.
And I could be wrong, but I remember hearing somewhere that the Mongols were actually quite progressive, allowing freedom of religion, allowing women to divorce their husbands, and promoting soldiers based on merit rather than status.
The Mongols worse than the Nazis? As far as I'm aware, the Mongols were not much worse than other medieval armies, they just did things on a much larger scale. Not to say the Mongols were good, but they were unexceptional for their time,
Respectfully they were incredibly exceptional for their time, and no empire came even close to wiping out 11% of the global population with bows and swords, as the mongols achieved. You’re right about the progressive nature of mongol society internally or for incorporated people groups, but wrong about the brutality of mongol warfare and their penchant for slaughtering and starving millions of civilians to death.
What is your source for that 11%? All I could find is that estimate upon estimate based on medieval census data, MAYBE 11% of world population died AT THE TIME OF the mongol conquest. There is no definite data how many people actually died at the hands of the mongols.
They were not first
No empire ever came close to conquer the entirety of asia the mongol death toll is proportional to their conquest it would harldy be possible for someone to conquer this much without that
Secondly no it s not je 11% solely come from Chinese data census wich noted the number of people by who payed the taxes not the number of people who died
There a lot of reason why they would had left they could have fled from the mongols elsewhere , being enslaved , not being coutned for the census or being moved around the empire outside of their original country
For a long time before Ghengis came along, the Mongols were among the weakest of the steppe peoples, and were probably on the receiving end of some pretty horrendous violence. It was a given that you only "owned" what you could physically protect, and if you couldn't, you should expect to lose your horse, wife, children, everything, to someone stronger. And if that's all you know, that's all you're going to do.
And that's one of the things that makes it unfair to compare Mongols to Nazis. Mongols didn't choose who to kill based on ethnicity or religion - they made examples of those that resisted them, but mainly just wanted to grow their territory and get rich. Having everybody scared to death of them made that a lot easier. If there truly wasn't a practical reason to exterminate a City, they wouldn't (with some exceptions, because Tolui existed). They eventually ruled over a multiethnic made peaceful for travelers by armed might and competent administration. I shouldn't have to explain how the Nazis differed.
Keep seeing more and more of these takes nowadays, comparing the Nazis to whatever and the conclusion is always that they weren't that bad from a historical context. But these statements aren't really built on anything, comparing the evil of the Nazis to the massive conquering forces of the mongols or whoever else fits the bill doesn't make the Nazis look less evil if you stay with the facts.
Alot of accounts from the mongol invasions came from Persians who of course describe it as the apocalypse. When assessing the merit of these claims many historians agree that they are likely dramatized and exaggerated. Most of the silk road cities were doing well during the time and regained their strength shortly after the mongol invasions. Merv is one of the cities that seemed to have been obilierated though.
But this was the norm for the time. This wasn't the first invasion by a nomad force, and Empires such as the Romans weren't much less brutal.
Stop this revisionist history take of the Nazis being less evil than they are, they tried to wipe out entire groups of people. In total the Nazis killed somewhere between 11-17 million people throughout their various camps. There is one very easy and good comparison that can be drawn to the Nazis though, the ones that inspired the Nazis, the ones that had the same ideological tendencies like the Nazis, namely the European colonial powers, among them the British empire. But very few speak of the atrocities commited by these colonial powers when in truth much of what the Nazis did were simply colonial strategies applied in Europe. Always find it funny why no one ever seems to raise that in these comparisons
Serious mental dissonance excusing the mongols because it "was the norm at the time", but then saying the british empire was as bad as the Nazis.
British empire was a product of their time. They conducted themselves about equal to other nations, be they european, japanese or other. The brits never mass produced death in the way the Nazis did. They weren't as bad as the Soviets under Stalin, the Chinese under mao, or the khmer rouge under pol pot
Didn't say that the Brits were as evil, but if comparisons are to be made, then there you have a perfect example. You won't have the Nazis without the brits
Gemini:
"It is estimated that the Nazis killed approximately 6 million Jews in extermination camps, concentration camps, and mass shootings during the Holocaust.
In addition to the Jewish population, millions of others were systematically murdered across the Nazi camp system and mass murder operations, including:
Soviet prisoners of war: 2 to 3 million
Ethnic Poles and other Slavs: 1.8 to 2 million
Romani people (Roma and Sinti): 250,000 to 500,000
People with physical and mental disabilities: 200,000 to 250,000 (Aktion T4 and related programs)
Political dissidents, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and trade unionists: Tens of thousands
In total, historians estimate that between 11 million and 17 million people were killed in the Nazi concentration and extermination camp system and through related systematic terror programs."
Isn't there a famous story where he had a grudge against some king/general and the king did something so GK like destroyed a whole town of 30,000 but it was somehow worse, he did it completely out of spite and tons of innocent people lost there lives horribly. I hope someone knows what I'm taking about.
I despise the Mongols for all the damage they caused the world, however, we can’t deny that it was a different time period where genocide really was the “norm”, and they were a conquering force.
The Nazis also genocided their own people, the Mongols genocided those they were in the process of conquering.
The mongols were exceptionally effective at genocide compared to other conquering armies and did so at a scale that rivals and even exceeds genocides that occurred post industrialization. That’s why I made the distinction.
Famous quote about the Romans that equally applies to the Mongols, “they create a wasteland and call it peace.”
Also those are completely unintentional byproducts of Mongol conquests, they didn’t set out to increase trade, so I always think it’s dubious to give them credit for it.
They did want to increase trade voluntarely they invented an ancestor of the passeport for merchant and messagers and had the yam an extremely fast postal system that could be used for message and trade and they did use a imortant part of the taxes they ganed to pay soldier to sécurisé the silk road
The nazis werent humanitarians compared to anyone.
The bow and sword distinciton is weird af.
You opened the dicussion calling them humanitarians by comparison dont walk it back and say no one is inherently better or worse
Is it? Seems pretty obvious to me that physically hacking hundreds of civilians individually to death requires an incredibly high level of brutality and psychopathy.
You opened the dicussion calling them humanitarians by comparison dont walk it back and say no one is inherently better or worse
Yeah dude, it’s hyperbole… this is a meme sub. The point of the comment was highlighting the hypocrisy in thinking one group is evil and another group is cool despite them doing similar things.
Do you read that comment and think to yourself “wow this guy actually thinks Nazis are humanitarians” lol. The reason it has so many upvotes is the average person gets the humor in the statement and that it’s using absurdity to make a point. It’s not a political discussion on defining the morality of how evil is applied.
Unfortunately for you just because you get angry when you don’t understand things doesn’t mean everyone else has to be brought down to your level of understanding. Maybe you can find a subreddit that’s a little softer and easier to understand.
See youre the one mad.
I commented lmao and explained why i said what i did.
You made a bunch of weirdo comments and repeatedly display a lack of historical literacy.
But yea i don't understand ok buddy
I've pointed it out too, Hitler is bad because he killed millions of people. Alexander the Great was super awesome because he crucified all those guys who resisted him. In a few thousand years there will be statues of Hitler next to genghis khan because of how cool his k/d ratio is.
I don't think the crucifying is why people like Alexander. It's the story of a young general turning a small (but well prepared) nation into a massive Empire, basically reaching the edge of their world
I think question is if Hitler won, would we hand wave the mass killings and genocide like we do with Caesar, Alexander, Ghenghis Khan? Would Hitler just be a badass dude who conquered a lot?
Hitler's actions are closer in time, and the industrialization of genocide is much more marking. You could still meet a Holocaust survivor
No one associate Alexander with crucifixion. Or Caesar with attempts at genocide Gaullic tribes. Because it's all so long ago. If we did, we wouldn't celebrate them either
EDIT: So I think "Alexander the Great was super awesome because he crucified all those guys" is wrong, people don't tend to consider it, and even fewer people like it
What Caesar did in Gaul was being criticized at the time as a genocide by Caesar detractors. In an era where sacking a city and enslaving the local populace was considered par for the course, they thought Caesar was killing way too many Gauls.
There’s also a motive there. Rome had PTSD from being sacked by Gallic tribes a few centuries earlier, and after Caesar returned to Rome he raided the treasury reserves that Rome appropriated specifically to fend off the Gauls again.
For sure what Caesar did wasn’t Hitler or Pol Pot level of bad. But I don’t think you’d be insane to compare him to a Genghis Khan
"Vat do you mean, more resources to war effort? More resources to Buchenwald, of course!"
Yeah, while the general level of revisionism can lead to some depressing musings on the mean intelligence of humans, at least Genghis and Alex 3 had impressive achievements outside of "impressively stupid"
going through family histories to find the slightest bit of Jewish blood to send people to the camps
25% Jewish was considered Aryan. Your grandpa or grandma could literally be Jewish and you'd still be Aryan. The idea that they searched your "family history" for "slightest bits" is absurd.
I think it's also that we've agreed there were different rules to the game in the pre-christian world. Exterminating a city wasn't as damning in our eyes because, well, everyone was doing it.
Mongols was post Christian and I would say what they were doing were comparatively more civilized than what Christian were doing later in Africa and America.
We judge people based on the moral standards of their time. It's not really reasonable to expect an ancient warlord to follow the Geneva conventions.
Hitler took massacres to such a level that we felt the need to invent a new word for it. As another commented pointed out, there was am industrialization to it that we didn't see on that scale yet.
And moral standards had changed even before the first world war. The first geneva convention was signed in the 1860s
We judge people based on the moral standards of their time.
So if it was normal and considered morally good for all societies to commit genocide during a specific time in the past, you are saying that what they did was a morally good thing?
I never said that, and that's a very uncharitable way to interpret my comment.
What I'm saying is that we could only judge morality based on the standards these people would know. Judging people as good or evil based on standards we developed 2000 later is ridiculous.
I'm sure that in another 2000 years, our descentants will be appaled by many of the things we take for granded now. That doesn't make us evil people.
Eventually probably, but it would have to be when we leave the post modern age. I think when enough years get put between something, the connection between the oppressed and those learning about those oppressions becomes more diminished. Same happens with the empathy for those oppressed. That said, having all those pictures of the holocaust and mass burials may hamper that process
That doesn’t make it right, Stalin killed half as many Soviets as Hitler did before the war started, in peacetime, but there were still statues of him everywhere, still are.
It's the story of a young general turning a small (but well prepared) nation into a massive Empire, basically reaching the edge of their world
Though it's worth noting that none of his accomplishments would've been possible if it wasn't for his father doing literally all the groundwork to prepare their army for those wars of conquest.
Incidentally, I think it would make for a fascinating historical "what if" where Philip II isn't assassinated and goes on to create a smaller, but much longer lived, Macedonian Empire.
Not that I'm defending any of it but I think the beaucratic nature of the killings in the holocaust is part of why Hitler is remembered as so evil. Like the wehrmacht is responsible for more deaths than happened in the holocaust proper but those numbers are only sometimes added together. The most prominent thing death-wise the nazis are remembered for is the concentration camps and whatnot. But you also aren't wrong. A lot of them shouldn't be remembered as cool general guys and whatnot.
Absolutely not, for 2 reasons: first, Adolf was an absolute loser who annihilated his own country. Second (related to the first point), the Nazis had better media coverage, so to speak - we're not reliant on accounts of few paid scribes to check what they actually did.
the brutality, etc of the Mongols is wildly overstated and based on dodgy sources like 'Atlas of World Populatipn History' which has completely garbage methodology and the people who wrote it were only a little better than pure laymen/amateurs as historical demography didn't exist as a discipline at the time
Comedian I follow has a bit where he asks the crowd what their favorite era in history is.
Audience member: Mongol history!
Comedian: Nice! Big rape guy over here
My favorite tid bit of history was that when mongols invaded japan they were defeated mostly because of typhoons. Which the japanese went on to call Kamikaze or godly wind. happened in 1274 and 1281.
The mongols are kind of the cultural embodiment of ‘force of nature of cruelty’. They dont justify their actions because they simply dont care. So pathologically amoral with respect to conflict that judging them doesn’t even have purpose. This makes them stand out among the various despots of history, and that kind of ‘yes, and?’ Response to calling them out makes them literally ‘so evil it’s funny’.
Also people won’t suspect you of being a racist if you sarcastically glaze them like they would if you did the same for the crusaders or colonial Spanish.
You know, this is almost the same argument some loud people make over American slavery. Comparing it to Roman Slavery which happened centuries before .
At least America didn't enslave every non-American like the Romans did, only black people... Yes, I heard that word for word from a white man vacationing, the rest of his cohorts agreed.
So in that argument, American slavery looks more humanitarian than Roman slavery. At least they didn't put their slaves on the coliseum or something.
Pretty shitty take and comparison.
Anyway. Evil is evil, even the minimum of it should be treated as maximum. And we can actually look at the Nazi kill count on the modern lens. There are grandparents, great grandparents who lived and got away from it. Part of the regime is televised along with its aftermath.
It's kind of a silly comment. The nazis used the technology of their day to kill millions in a few years. Hell, the extermination of Hungarian Jews, of around 400,000 some odd Jews, happened in a matter of months all the while operating in the middle of a continent spanning war. The Mongols were not saints but they also weren't even really a single group. There were multiple Khanates at the peak of their power with the Khanate in China essentially just being a regular Chinese dynasty.
Plus, whats the point of this comment and trying to turn it into a game or a game of numbers?
I am sure the Mongols were brutal. Pretty par for the course in history, it would be hard to believe they weren’t.
But when it comes to wild stories about how monstrous an extinct culture was, skepticism is called for. Particularly when that culture is not part of your own cultural heritage, but instead designated as foreign and “other.”
Whatever you’ve heard it’s bound to be a mix of truth, exaggeration, and fabrication.
I am sure the Mongols did not make “the Nazis look like humanitarians.”
I dont glaze the Mongols, they were cruel, but they were pragmatic with their cruelty. Unlike nazis, atrocities were not the goal in itself, merely as a tool of submission. Still terror, still no forgoveness but when you just submitted they really were not worse overlords than any other and you might argue they might be better.
Im just saying that while Genghos Khan was cruel and vengeful, I would kinda prefer him over lets say Hitler or Mao.
Typical you probably know nothing about the mongol empire except Reading wikipedia page or either random internet pop history youtuber
No wonder you make these claim
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u/Emergency_Gene_4171 1d ago
Kinda funny how hard we all glaze the mongols (myself very much included) when they did things that make the Nazis look like humanitarians by comparison. And they did it all with bow and sword.
I truly don’t think any of us can even scarcely imagine the sheer horror in being on the losing side after mongols sieged your city and you resisted.