Western culture is built on the results of the Greek and Roman empires, the Catholic Church, the English (and French/Spanish/Portuguese/Dutch) empire, and the American conquest.
No one is the villain of their own story. And these empires - not the Persian, Ottoman, Germanic, native American, Russian, and other empires which opposed them, or the Chinese, Japanese, and Mongolian, and other empires which didn't feature in their storyline - wrote the storybooks.
It's the natural way to judge things - perhaps not the most accurate or honest, but those take a lot of effort to establish.
That said, there are still people pissed about the Mongol conquest. Genghis Khan is still hated in China, and central Asia and especially the middle east.
For instance, in popular culture, such as Jinyong's Legend of the Condor Heroes, Genghis Khan is a secondary character, depicted as a smart leader who was shaped by the treachery of his own sworn brother and by the oppression of the Jurchen Jin dynasty. The reader is lead to empathize with Genghis Khan, through the eyes of Guojing, the patriotic Sung protagonist, despite the resentment that exists between him and Genghis Khan, the Mongolian leader who has decided to turn on their Sung dynasty allies.
I know Jinyong's work is fiction with a historical background, but I believe his work is a good indication of Chinese sentiments towards historical events and figures.
Chinese suffered as much as other conquered lands, to say to least. The Yuan dynasty lasted less than a century, one of the shortest period in the history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan#Mixed
Even in the fiction `Jingyong`'s book, I wouldn't say the author had a bias favor Khan, I guess smart readers could read it from the book. The Khan would massacre every one if the be-seiged refuse to surrender, and they usually would drive herds of surrendered to the gate. Not to mention in the book the Kan is Kublai instead, and he is noway the secondary character.
That's in the sequel, The Return of the Condor Heroes, which depicts events after the death of Genghis Khan.
And since you mention Kublai, Genghis Khan only started the conquest of China. He only managed to conquer West Xia before his death. The rest of the conquest of China was done by his descendants, and so I believe most of the atrocities towards the Chinese occurred then.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27mism/how_i...
As someone from the middle East (with a high chance of having Mongol blood), it does annoy me how much people are enamoured by Genghis khan. The guy was a brutal imperialist.
I was international student and met many at my university. It was mind boggling how almost everyone would celebrate their cultures' conquests & wars and at the same time call Western conquests evil and the worst thing.
It was also amazing how most of the Western students would agree that Western imperialism was horrible but never argue against glorification of other cultures horrible wars.
Are you forgetting about modern western imperialist adventures such as Iraq and Afghanistan, entering their 16th year? Where millions of civilians were and are still being killed, injured, displaced, tortured and all around stomped on in terms of human rights, led by some of the most powerful western nations in the world. These wars were cheered on by a good chunk of US and UK citizenry for years before they conveniently faded into the background.
http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/body-count.pdf
That's even ignoring the direct relations of these invasions to the more recent conflicts in Libya, Syria, and ISIS, the boogeymen armed and created by the same people who started these wars not long ago.
Western imperialism is alive and well.
And that western nations are supporting freedom fighters in Syria.
I am assuming the people who celebrate the wars of kings in their lands are more than 500 years old while Western colonialism sort of stopped just 50-100 years back.
So the Western atrocities are still fresh in the mind while people forget the 1000 year old atrocities.
E.g. when looking at Robert Mugabe's hostility towards Britain in particular (without wanting to justify his authoritarianism and violence) it is worth considering that he fought for independence, and though Britain as responsible for allowing Rhodesia to happen.
But the list is massive.
I'm not sure what a "thorough self evaluation" would actually mean. I don't think that's even remotely feasible, given the immense scope of the subject matter. What has happened is that certain elements within western civilization have focused their efforts on criticizing western civilization, some in good faith and some not, and the rest of western civilization has allowed them to do so. That is the part that is rare, just like suicide, and for the same reason.
It is rare everywhere. Even in the west.
We celebrate george washington and have statues, schools, etc named after racist slavers and genocidal murderers.
> It was also amazing how most of the Western students would agree that Western imperialism was horrible but never argue against glorification of other cultures horrible wars.
Really? You think most of us think western imperialism was horrible? We may give lip service to it, but we celebrate our heritage. From ancient greece to rome to the british empire to now our american empire, we celebrate our conquests and victories.
The standard trope amongst the british is that the british empire brought civilization and democracy to most of the world. Our justification for the american empire is that we bring "freedom" to the world.
Coming from a small European country what are the things I should be ashamed of?
Just the British and Americans? Or are Spanish/Portuguese empires also something I should be constantly aware of.
Spain and Portugal are no longer powerful nations, in either a military or economic sense (Portugal ranks behind Slovenia in GDP per capita for example).
If Italy were a super power today, they would be endlessly targeted for derision for their past connections to empire/s. It would be proclaimed that their present status was a direct result of abuses from the past and that they should feel guilty about it all.
Britain lost its empire and has persistently reduced in importance the last century, so they're rarely targeted for guilt regarding that (save for a few exceptions). It's a chapter in history books now, like so many former empires.
The Ottoman Empire? Long gone. Turkey isn't a major world power. As such, most of the world simply doesn't care about its terrible past.
Luckily I havent seen any Belgian chocolate on sale here yet, ha. Hopefully the Swiss have stayed isolated long enough to not add in any more European guilt!
https://mobile.nytimes.com/1996/12/14/world/swiss-acknowledg...
People tend to forget all the good.
The same can be said for the Romans. They slaughtered and enslaved the native peoples of the Iberian peninsula, yet they also built roads, aqueducts, introduced new farming techniques and education.
Should present-day italians feel ashamed of what their ancestors did? I don't think so.
According to your extremist logic, the following were all pretty much Hitler as well:
- Mayans
- Egyptians
- Chinese
- Mongols
- Romans
- Macedonians
- Persians
- Russians
- Omayyad Caliphate
- Ottoman Empire/Turkey
- All african tribes who sold their brethren into slavery
- French
- British
- Portuguese
- Spanish
- Dutch
- Germans
Pretty much any civilization that has ever existed has committed atrocities.
What they did was brutal and there's no excusing this, but they also did good. You can deny it all you want but this is a fact.
Yes. They have the luxury of my judgements having absolutely no impact on them. As their good acts do not compensate for the atrocities, we should be ashamed of what they've done, and try not to do the same in the future. Remembering the good without keeping that in mind leads to the same tragedies playing out again.
For the Portuguese, you probably have to look at Africa and Southeast Asia; I don't know much about them.
Care to respond rather than downvote?
Columbus Day is still very much a thing and Queen Elizabeth is still very much of a celebrated Queen of England and a source of pride. Many more examples abound.
now their memories are faded and people are free to lionize without a lot of outcry.
The mongols didn't exterminate the people they conquered and settle the land with mongols.
> Why is one OK and the other not?
For the same reason why nazi germany was exceptionally evil.
The mongols weren't good. They were empire builders. But they didn't set out to exterminate people.
The difference between western imperialism and mongol imperialism is that russians, chinese, koreans, turks, central asians, arabs, persians, siberians, etc still exist.
Now compare that to what happened to the native americas, inuits, aborigines, etc.
Well... they sort of did. It's just that their selection criteria amounted to "those who oppose us" rather than "those of ancestries we consider bad".
On the macro-scale, there's little difference.
Extermination wasn't their goal, but IIRC they had a policy of exterminating any who resisted them, as a lesson to others. That wasn't standard policy for all empire builders.