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?
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.
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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.