Julius Ceasar, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and many more…
These people had beliefs and worldviews that were so horribly, by today’s standards, that calling them fascist would be huge understatement. And they followed through by committing a lot of evil.
Aren’t we basically glorifying the Hitlers of centuries past?
I know, historians always say that one should not judge historical figures by contemporary moral standards. But there’s a difference between objectively studying history and actually glorifying these figures.
Once they pass out of living memory, they can be whoever you want them to be. Or you could study them I guess, but that sounds like boring nerd stuff to most people.
Genghis Khan is actually an anti-example, since he’s vilified. It’s not at all clear other kings would have done any different given an unstoppable army, but yet he catches more shit than all his enemies combined.
“…not at all clear other kings would have done any different…”
Is that the standard now? Comparison? He is still unbelievably evil even by comparison to other evil people.
Him and the dynasty he created were one of the most destructive forces in human history and resulted in the horrific deaths of millions of people. By many metrics, they practiced genocide and ethnic cleansing on conquered populations. They destroyed the books of captured people’s and places of worship. They’re also well known for having destroyed farmland and aqueducts to starve out massive numbers of people. They were butchers. Mass murderers on a skill the world had never seen at that time. He erased entire civilizations from history, ones that we still barely know anything about.
Very well-said!
I’m starting to think this guy wasn’t very nice!
Most of the things you said are true. What is also true is that he and his descendents established a unified, peaceful empire from Korea to Hungary, from southern Russia to Iran. He unified China, then divided by civil war, and brought in economists and doctors from the Islamic World. He promoted Buddhism, Daoism and Islam, and his successors included Confucians and Christians. He guaranteed safe travel and trade across his empire, as well as religious tolerance and a common set of laws.
He killed thousands (the death tolls are inflated by both his enemies and his own followers - as a warning to those who they were going to attack next), but his actions benefitted millions. How can you form any moral judgement about such a figure? All you can do is try to find out the truth, report it, and let people reach their own conclusions.
So the ends justify the means? Inflicting untold suffering on one group of people is fine if it benefits another one?
All you can do is try to find out the truth, report it, and let people reach their own conclusions.
I bet you think you’re taking some sort high road to the effect of “oh I just state the facts, I’m not telling anyone what to think,” while conveniently ignoring the part where the way that you report these facts, or which ones you leave out can very much influence the conclusions people reach.
You stated that Alexander killed many people, but also his actions benefitted millions of people. These two things put together in the way that you did will lead an uninformed person to he conclusion that it’s fine that he killed people because it benefited many others. And maybe that could be true in some contexts, but you completely failed to mention the fact that he didn’t just kill a bunch of people, he executed defeated peoples and sold a whole bunch of people into slavery, which would naturally influence the conclusions a person could come to.
Any narrative will be biased, both in what it says and what it leaves out. But historians have to at least try to be impartial. I’m not a professional historian, so I can have whatever opinion I want.
You stated that Alexander killed many people
Chinggis Khan, not Alexander.
Oops, got my wires crossed with who I was talking about. But my point still stands.
You can have any opinion that you want, I haven’t said that you couldn’t. I was disagreeing with your opinion and expressing my own, you wombat. That’s how discussion works.
This is literally ancient history.
Yes, and? Have you not gotten to the part in your schooling where you look at history to see what can be learnt from it?
Ignoring the insult, we’re talking about Medieval times. They were famously awful to live in for everyone. I’m pretty sure the vast majority of readers won’t think I’m suggesting anything about that period should be replicated in the modern day, unless I explicitly say that.
To be totally clear, I don’t want to bring the Mongol empire back in 2024.
You’re missing the point entirely. The person I was originally responding too was saying that evan though awful things were done to people it’s fine, or justifiable because “millions” benefited from them. If you don’t understand how something like that at its base level can be applicable to modern times, that’s a you issue.
It’s not the specific actions taken or the setting/environment, but the attitude of the ends justifying the means if there’s a net positive.
I feel like you’ve entirely ignored the context I said that in.
If you actually want to argue pros and cons for academic purposes (they’re all long dead remember), the other person gave a good summery of the good sides of the Mongol Empire.
The Nazi’s created rocketry as we know it today and made many innovations in medicine and manufacturing.
Are we going to argue the pros and cons of the Nazi party?
This conversation wasn’t even about the Mongol empire it was about Genghis Khan
Hmm. I guess it seems hard to separate Genghis Khan and the Mongol empire to me. Pretty much everything we know about him for sure is as the guy in charge of the Mongol empire. There’s a few stories about him personally enemy chroniclers put down, but they all have that myth-y Washington and the cherry tree feel to them.
The people whose deeds reverberate through history are the powerful. The powerful are almost always evil, it’s just how humans work.
Neuroscience shows that as humans get power, our brain’s ability to perform empathy is damaged. So as an organism, a human’s capacity and willingness to inflict misery on others tend to increase in lock step with each other.
People glorify Winston Churchill. He was a piece of shit. He was just like Hitler wrt the countries england colonized. But he’s sooooo loved. I hope he’s a human centipede in hell.
The Churchill example I think demonstrates the OP’s misunderstanding, in that all of them did terrible things/were horrible people, but excelled at being effective leaders in the context they were in.
Churchill was a terrible human being, racist, abrasive, homophobic, a drunk etc etc. But he was an outstanding wartime prime minister, because he was a talented war strategist, a compelling speaker and, frankly, had enormous balls.
We can go back and try and just classify every human into the good/bad boxes, but that reduces away all the details that make them so interesting.
British people revere Cromwell too. It’s really something to behold for Irish people.
The British really do love a ‘charismatic’ murderer.
That would be absolute horrible punishment to the person behind him in the centipede.
Its hell. You can loop him around.
Then he’d be eating his own ass, that’s hardly punishment
I did not think of that aspect. But wouldn’t that just be the case in the human centipede too?
who does that exactly?
The British with Winston Churchill, US with Reagan.
Not everyone in UK or US is a brainwashed idiot. There’s plenty of people who know their history and are in good faith.
Regime does even need a majority, a solid 25-33% of hardcore larpers make the regime work as we see it today.
Plenty, yes. Majority? I doubt it
…The US with Winston Churchill.
—Actually I don’t know the history surrounding Churchill, I know someone once asked in a r/explainlikeimfive reddit post, but all that I really remember was that he was super-conservative.
What he did to India is akin to what Belgium did to the Congo. He was also extremely racist, said Indians are “a beastly people with a beastly religion”, Arabs are “a lower manifestation than the jews” who “only eat camel shit”. The Jews, who he thought implanted communism in Russia as part of a conspiracy to control the world (same thing the Nazis said).
When defending the Israel plan of displacing Palestinian people, he said:
I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race or at any rate a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it.
And of course Asians wouldn’t be left out: “I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails. I don’t like the look of them or the smell of them”
Alexander the great is glorified in egypt
I’d wager most Americans have favorable opinions about the slavers, genociders and occasional rapists who “founded” the country. And Columbus.
Also, monarchies in general have favorable opinions about terrible people.
Bootlickers have a need for daddy worship.
Conversely why do we act horrified that someone in the past didn’t act according to standards that only exist today and pressures that don’t.
We are horrified by our ancestors actions because we’re different than them, we don’t understand them. We have the benefit of hindsight and can see the results of their actions. We put ourselves into their world and view it with our standards of today, because we don’t want to think we could do the same now that we know better. I can be horrified by the actions of someone in the past but also know that the further back into the pastI look the less I understand of history people.
The source of this quote is generally attributed to George W. Bush aide Karl Rove:
The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. 'We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.
I fucking loathe how right Rove was and is.
I don’t think we glorify them, but we consider them significant figures in history. Remembering and talking/studying history and significant figures allows us to learn more about ourselves as well as learn how things can be done better than they once were. But I don’t really see these people glorified. Nobody calls them heroes or people to emulate.
Who’s “we”? I don’t glorify these people.
Probably for the same reasons Benjamin Netanyahu was glorified in U.S.A. Congress a few weeks ago.
Because for centuries, western society has valued one thing above pretty all else: winning.
If someone’s an asshole, but they’ve gotten on top in something, people may say, “They’re an asshole, but hey you gotta admire that they’re so good at [insert subject].”
That’s why so many people admire Ray Kroc. Yeah, so what if he brought McDonald’s to a position of national and international dominance? That doesn’t mean he’s worthy of our respect. If anything, the way he rose to the top, being as disgusting as it was, should mean he’s anything but worthy of our respect.
Victory in something by itself shouldn’t be respected; what you do to get to victory matters equally as much, if not more.
That’s right. They are not glorified as being enlightened or particularly great at things in general. Those figures are idolized because of the power they managed to obtain and their skill in military tactis and strategy.
Exactly.
How is simping them any different from calling them “basically Hitler from the past”? If you’re talking with your feelings, what you are saying is by definition not-objective, like with simps, but also with haters. I doubt you or OP are any more informed on history than the average Lemmy rando. By starting with the desired conclusion, rather than with arguments, the discussion is already beginning on subjective terms.
I think it’s a publication bias thing. Because so much was written about these people in their day, they become mascots for the time period. And what they did, while objectionable, is impressive. They had a massive influence on recorded history.
My own theory is that there is so much written in these times because of the massive inequality then. Books, statues, etc are expensive. In times of ecomonic equality, especially before the press, people would be less likely to waste time and resources on such things. Thats money better spent on improving their and their communities lives. But when you have massive inequality and a narcisist in charge, you get books, statues, and massive projects dedicated to the men who can afford them.
I think you are right. But I don’t think that’s the whole story.
I think it is also just the fact that they were the winners of history. And we like winning more than we like being moral.
please don’t use “we” as if it includes me.
And we like winning more than we like being moral.
I wonder why when it comes to “humanity is awesome” variations of sci-fi, we always have to lean so hard on creating a fictional alien race that is somehow worse than humans to prove how “awesome” we are.
Maybe, just maybe, we’re kind of fucking assholes.
Those aliens also display a core experience that we have anxiety about: being colonized. Interestingly, Stargate, a franchise partially created by the US Air Force very accidentally portrays what interacting with alien species who didn’t establish a system of colonization might look like. There are multiple cultures humanity encounters in that franchise who don’t have weapons but have farming implements we can’t even imagine. That franchise shows a universe where Humanity leaves earth and discovers we’re a bunch of violent weirdos who don’t fit in with the rest of the universe. There’s some other colonial powers we encounter, of course, when Earth needs to be the good guys. But like… Think about that. We might be so steeped in a system that’s been inflicted on us that our first contact with a non-earthbound culture might see that culture being like “so the workers produce all the value, and you beat them up? Why? This doesn’t make any sense. Shouldn’t they be rewarded for the value they provide?”
I think part of it also stems from our “colonization” of other species on Earth.
We exploit the living shit out of every other living thing while telling ourselves those living things are somehow different from us, don’t experience the same fears, the same pains, and so on. Those of us with an inkling of self-reflection can see how they are like us just by looking at how they react to similar stimulus. We aren’t different but we’ve spent a millennia telling ourselves that we are simply because we have language and can create tools. Both things other animals clearly have and do, but since we don’t understand those animals, instead we treat them as inferior.
I think part of the panic of colonization of other species comes from the deeply rooted realization that we have been brutal, violent executioners of millions of species who may have had similar reasoning capabilities as we do but simply don’t have thumbs so they can do things like write down their language or codify it in any way. Like how humans lived for millions of years without written language…
Anyway, yeah, visceral guilt for being real fucking bastards and killing off so many species that we literally kicked off a mass fucking extinction.
I feel like the show does a good example of being entertaining while also showing those stark contrasts between the civilizations like you’ve commented. Even more so in the later part of “Stargate Atlantis” where it’s more “cowboys and indians” style. They’re trying to “save” all the planets in the Pegasus galaxy but tend to shoot anything they don’t understand and constantly undermine themselves by making poor decisions when it comes to relations and dealing with people. The inhabitants of the galaxy have continued being successful at trade and socializing (except for a few outliers who can still be known to show honor) even while being under constant threat for their entire recorded history.
Again, who is “we”? Maybe you need some other acquaintances.
The comparison to the H man is apt. One of the only reasons this is different is because we had the ability to record and see the outcome of those actions. They were just as brutal in the past, but we don’t have photos and videos of them.
Mentioning those three names isn’t “glorifying” them any more than saying who was in charge of a country during a war was.
