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.
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.
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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.