Genghis Khan Revisionism

 Listening to the beloved Omnibus Project podcast today, I overheard one of the co-hosts observe in passing that "It turns out: Genghis Khan was actually good." This was presented—only half-seriously—as the emerging new consensus among historians; the trendy revisionist take on Genghis Khan that has now hardened into a new orthodoxy. And while I get that the point was made somewhat jokingly, this is still one of those historical takes that annoys me terribly. If there's anything we should agree upon, it is that Genghis Khan was in fact bad—bad enough to deserve his place in that Star Trek TOS episode, where he appeared as one of three holographic reconstructions of the worst specimens of human depravity in history. 

What was so bad about him? Mostly that he killed inordinate numbers of innocent men, women, and children. By some counts, he and his soldiers killed so many people that it caused a cognizable dip in the globe's total human population—something on the order of several percentage points. And even if these estimates are half-way exaggerated, and some of the contemporaneous tales of his atrocities inflated for effect—that's still a huge number of people. If Genghis Khan had killed all these civilians yesterday, or even twenty years ago, we would have no trouble condemning it. Does the fact that it happened in the distant past at this point make it much better? 

There is a certain knee-jerk relativism that kicks in once we start to think about events that happened several hundred years ago or more. Yet, my favorite part in Lord Acton's lecture on "The Study of History" is when he tells us: don't do that. Lord Acton's moral passion as a historian may seem quaint and very nineteenth century to us now; but I find it immensely endearing and refreshing. The best moment in the lecture comes when he pauses to consider the medieval crusaders, for instance. Actually, Lord Acton reminds us, we don't need to idealize them or make any special excuses for them. They were ignorant and barbarous men who mostly seem to have spent their time committing antisemitic atrocities. 

Can't we just agree the crusaders were bad, Lord Acton asks, without making any special apologia for them on relativistic grounds? As he wryly puts it, in protesting against the tendency of the historical profession to plead extenuating circumstances on behalf of the past: "The mission" of the moral relativist type of historian, he writes, "was to make distant times, and especially the Middle Ages [...] intelligible and acceptable[.] There were difficulties in the way; and among others this, that, in the first fervour of the Crusades, the men who took the Cross, after receiving communion, heartily devoted the day to the extermination of Jews."

I get that people, and especially historians, like to be contrarian. It's a way to distinguish oneself, and thereby feel superior. It is fun to spin out seemingly implausible ideas: such as that maybe Genghis Khan was actually a net benefit to civilization. Maybe, through all his conquests and bloodshed, he actually promoted the spread of cultural ideas and syncretism? Maybe he was actually better than some of his contemporaries, when it came to issues like religious toleration (and I'm sure he was—what is more tolerant than the mass grave?; what is less discriminatory than indiscriminate slaughter?) Sure, he killed a lot of people. But then, who didn't? 

So goes the contrarian, revisionist take on Genghis Khan, at any rate. Contemporary historians seem drawn to it, and perhaps we should not be surprised that this is the direction the profession would take. As Elias Canetti observes at one point, in his magisterial Crowds and Power, of another historical mass murderer: "Power has never lacked eulogists, and historians, who are professionally obsessed with it, can explain anything, either by the times (disguising their adulation as scholarship), or by necessity, which, in their hands, can assume any and every shape." (Carol Stewart trans.) This seems to be what is happening with today's generation of Genghis scholars. 

The answer to these apologetics, though, seems to be the same that Hugh MacDiarmid gave, in one of his poems. Reading A.E. Housman's "Epitaph for an Army of Mercenaries," MacDiarmid seems to have choked especially on the line: "They [...] saved the sum of things for pay." The Scottish modernist poet was appalled and disgusted. "It is a God-damned lie," he thundered, in a powerful rejoinder, "to say that these/ Saved, or knew, anything worth a man's pride./ They were professional murderers and they took/ Their blood money and impious risks and died." 

So it is with Genghis Khan and his marauding horde. They were professional murderers. The fact that there have been plenty of other, and possibly even worse, professional murderers before them and since does not argue anything in their favor. They took their impious risks by starting wars and should suffer whatever reputational damage in the eyes of posterity might provide some infinitely inadequate recompense for the thousands if not millions of people who suffered innocently at their hands. 

And, to the extent that modern revisionist historians wish to tell us otherwise—to the extent they would try to persuade us that no, actually, Genghis promoted civilization; he was a great patron of the arts—we reply: "it is a god-damned lie," and that the Great Khan never knew or accomplished "anything worth a man's pride." 

As MacDiarmid said of such men in conclusion—and we can do no better: "In spite of all their kind some elements of worth/ With difficulty persist here and there on Earth."