Lol, this seems a bit naive. It's hard to rape and pillage people you like.
Do you think we've lost the plot a little bit when you have to do these mental gymnastics to distinguish between murdering an entire nation out of some "approved" reason, vs say out of ethnic reasons.
Surely the real crime is murdering a nation.
“Total war” wasn’t a thing in premodern history because every war was a total war.
Total war in particular usually involves civilians as targets, and most civilians were far from the battlefield. WWII changed that, when bombers could reach deep beyond the front lines. Without bombers (and missiles), London would have been untouched by the war, for example.
What I described is tied to the resources and power of the person in charge. I don't see how that's only European?
Total war is a separate concept from genocide. Though both can be practiced in the same war, targeting economic and political support for war does not necessarily mean systemically eliminating a population.
Never forget that history is written by the victors. The Mongol Empire was replaced by the Russian Empire.
If we go purely by deathrates then we should pick communist china or the soviet union.
If we go by barbarity the mongol empire, the timurids, and the japanese empire (talking the one from ww2) are all good contenders.
Imperial japan was so bad that the nazi ambassador to china in nanking did his best to save as many civilians as he could out of sheer disgust for their behavior.
imperial japanese soldiers used to bayonet babies and do beheading contests for fun.
literally, their newspapers had them even keeping score over who could do more beheadings.
they melted people, literally ate people on one occupied island, they did multiple genocides, they tested gasses.
Imperial japan is what I consider the worst by barbarity.
the commies killed far more than anyone by numbers and in barbaric ways, but their brutality was beaten by those who killed less in more gruesome ways.
the mongols excelled at both but I argued by brutality imperial japan was a bit worse.
Which didn’t remain so neutral when applied to fresh populations.
Native Americans simply weren’t playing host to as many diseases, and persisting virulent ones
Maybe an oversimplification to assert "the Europeans didn't topple any empire in the Americas"?
Imagine a hit man showing up to work one day, only to find his targets already dead along with their entire town... and only much later finds out that it's because he'd been an asymptomatic carrier for weird space germs when he was casing the joint the previous month.
The intent in this case existed alongside unintended causes, but it was still there.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conquest_of_the_Aztec_...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conquest_of_the_Inca_E...
it also erases our allies killing and starving the yemenis and the starvation in afghanistan post-war we caused by freezing all their funds.
clearly loosely defined ideals erase human suffering.
It's interesting that 2/3 are central asian steppe empires/civilizations. What is it with that area and producing psychopathic tribes, not to mention being the origin point of several plagues.
When it comes to the number of genocides, it is probably difficult to beat out the British, but they were always quite jolly about it, so I guess it wasn't that bad.
Google tells me the Timurids were Mongol descendents of Genghis Khan, so not really. 100% of that relevant data set is one extended family.
>What is it with that area and producing psychopathic tribes, not to mention being the origin point of several plagues.
The Mongols were little more "psychopathic" than many societies at the time, only distinctive in terms of their relative success, not their cruelty. Alexander the Great tortured and slaughtered people by the thousands, and Westerners don't consider him a barbarian or psychopath so much as a tactical genius and founder of the civilized world.
On the other hand, the United States committed genocide against an entire continent, was the only nation to drop atomic bombs in warfare (and did so against civilians) continued Nazi and Japanese human experimentation and bioweapons research going under MKULTRA and other secret programs (as well as recruited Nazi scientists for their space program,) raped, tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Vietnam and Korea (and used Agent Orange), and went on a 20 year temper tantrum of violence and war crimes across Iraq for no discernable reason other than Afghanistan not being enough to satisfy their post 9/11 bloodlust.
Not to excuse Imperial Japan or the Nazis or anyone else but ranking evil against evil is always a matter of perspective, and it's often less about which evil is greater than which evils you're willing to excuse and which not. A similar list of sins could be made about the Soviet Union, China, Britain, or just about any nation or empire in history. Humans are bastards everywhere.
The Mongols were a mix of modern and violent and ruthless before he (Chinggis Khan) died that you don't really see elsewhere.
20 years ago-ish, a book came out about Chingis Khan that extolled the virtues of his multicultural, pantheistic regime and totally glossed over the many genocides the Mongols perpetrated. Not to mention the guy probably raped more women than anyone else in history.
Edit: To add to this, a lot of what is written about Mongols in Chingis Khan's time is conjecture. They were not a literate people, so there are almost no records. They were nomadic and buried their leaders in secret locations, leaving scant archeological evidence. Many conclusions that have been drawn about the Mongols are speculative. Fast forward to the Yuan dynasty where there are records in Chinese. That era and locality have better documentation.
Most of those things you said can apply to the Assyrians, the Romans, the British, or any other similar empire, and people still idealize those places today. If your empire holds together long enough to get a period of Pax named after you, it means you've made it in the eyes of history.
I didn't see any wholistic judgment of the Mongol empire in the article.
The Mongols did tons of amazing, fascinating, and great things. They also did terrible and atrocious things.
The later should not preclude curiosity and appreciation of the former.
People tend to ignore their ancestor's warcrimes. Even if they admit they were evil they can't bring themselves to hate them.
This applies to most old empires, many people can't bring themselves to hate the entire empire despite their barbarity.
There is a lot of fascinating literature about differences in gender roles between western and eastern Germany behind the iron curtain.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/01/05/suffra...
Intersectionality cuts both ways.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_welfare_in_Nazi_Germa...
The world is a bizarre place and humans are unfathomably complex.
This should be cause for curiosity and investigation into history and The Human Condition
In 1943, up to four million Bengalis starved to death when Winston Churchill diverted food to British soldiers and countries such as Greece while a deadly famine swept through Bengal.
Talking about the Bengal famine in 1943, Churchill said: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” [1]
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atroci...