Pocahontas Redux - Stolen Land? Genghis Khan And The Inevitability Of Empire

Genghis Khan was a charismatic and fearsome figure.  He and his armies were known for their cruelty and barbarity, and the sight of them advancing across the battlefield in a storm of dust, the earth shaking with the thunder of 50,000 hooves, was enough to send enemies into retreat. 

The thought alone of this terrible, bloodthirsty, and mighty warrior was enough to rout enemy armies. Genghis Khan was a man of absolute will and power, a frightening presence of power and vengeance.  He was a horseman of the Apocalypse.

There have been many successful armies in the world.  Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, Pompey the Great, and Marcus Agrippa were as brilliant generals as Genghis Khan, and brought Roman organization, discipline, and management to the battle.  

They won because of superior ability, armaments, and military thinking; yet it was Genghis Khan who, with an almost untamed savagery, conquered the world.  At its height the Mongol Empire extended from far eastern China to the Danube, the biggest empire the world has ever seen. 

Genghis Khan was a brilliant strategist, canny politician who through tact, intimidation, and offers of great spoils, enticed the warlike Turkic tribes to join his armies, nearly doubling their strength.  

However, it was not only the might of his imposing armies, nor his ability to manage, discipline, and control such a large and diverse military force; nor even his tactical acumen and understanding of calculated risk which assured victory.  It was his indomitable, absolute, unalloyed will. 

Khan had no qualms, moral reservations, or ethical hesitancy.  Wars were for winning, civilians were complicit enemies, and total annihilation of any opposition was his modus belli. Not only would defeated populations be without the wherewithal to mount a resistance or counterattack, they would never dare to incite the bloody, murderous, savage wrath of the conqueror.

Name the empire - Persian, Ottoman, Roman, Mongol, or British - and you will find 'stolen land' which is why the controversy over the native property rights of American Indians is nothing but tears and flapdoodle, the predictable breast-beating nonsense of the easily offended.  

Of course Americans, filled with the heady sense of Manifest Destiny - the conviction that lands from coast to coast were to be theirs - made their way west, settling, and colonizing Indian land.

The Indians were savages, after all, good fighters and horsemen, but painted tribal primitives who were in the way of a great unstoppable force. The vision of the new Americans was of a land of prosperity, Christianity, and development; and no feathered, war painted redskins were going to get in the way. 

The English settlers of the New World were of course not the first to rid the land of indigenous populations.  The Spanish conquistadors in the Americas for gold, silver, and colonization had no intention of inviting the Aztecs, Mixtec, Tehuantepec or any other indigenous group into their new colonial community.

If colonial Americans are guilty of stealing land from native populations, then Britain, Iran, Turkey, and China among others have money to pay. 

The hoopla over stolen land, and the immediate bandwagon of celebrity sympathizers, is nothing but historical revisionism, the same ignorance which has promoted the equally fanciful notion of reparations,  Of course American colonists had slaves. Who didn't?  Every civilization since Ancient Greece and Rome was slave-owning.  

Africa was a a nexus of slavery, as warring tribes enslaved the conquered, then bartered and sold them.  If any cultural group owes reparations to former American slaves, it is Africans without whom the European slave ships would never have sailed.

It is also easy to forget that free labor was virtually unknown in the world during most of human history and that serfdom, indenture, and slavery were universal.

In the preceding three centuries [prior to 1492), slavery in the Christian Mediterranean had been identified with so-called Slavs, many of them from Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia, who had been purchased by Italian merchants and sold in both Christian and Muslim markets (and the Western European words for “slave”—esclavo, escravo, Sklave, esclave, schiavo—stem from the Latin for Slav, sclavus).

In 1670 or 1710, an Englishman would almost certainly have referred to fellow white countrymen who had been seized on the English coast or on ships by Barbary corsairs and transported to Muslim North Africa for heavy labor or sometimes ransom. 

For some three centuries Muslim raiders, often aided by European renegades, enslaved English, Irish, Scottish, French, Iberian, American, and even Scandinavian and Icelander captives, who joined other slaves from Russia, Italy, the Balkans, and sub-Saharan Africa in the Maghreb. From 1600 to 1750 at least 20,000 British and Irish were held as slaves in North Africa.

 

Some historians have suggested that American political liberalism - the political philosophy behind faux compassionate revisionism - is the stepchild of the Oneida colony and the Utopian, naturalist movement of the 19th century and the influence of Rousseau and American naturalists. 

Utopianism of course had earlier European roots and the works of Francis Bacon and Sir Thomas More were influential in suggesting that idealism was not fantasy, but an actionable notion. A belief in idealism is itself idealistic, but progressives never admit to being caught in a tautology.

Conservatives on the other hand, accept human nature for what it is and do not shy away from its competitive aggressiveness which, they say, is the real engine of progress. Competitive, free enterprise, has created wealth, opportunity, and distinction not only in America but in China and India, two formerly impoverished nations which, once they had jettisoned old Soviet-style command economies quickly became world economic players.

Yes, conservatives say, this aggressive, territorial, self-interested human nature will be the cause of future armed conflict between interest groups, regions, and nations; but that is as it has always been.  Arming rather than disarming is the only reasonable, historical move in a hostile world.  Wars will inevitably happen, and victory should always be the goal.

Conservatives are content with the legacy of Genghis Khan and have no issue with the Crusades, the Persian Empire, the Seleucids, or Gao.  Europe, China, Japan, and India were at constant war for centuries, and while there were winners and losers, there was no moral consequence.  History was simply reconfigured. 

All of which is to explain conservatives’ bemusement at progressive utopianism, an ill-conceived, ahistorical, idealistic political philosophy.  There is no doubt, these conservatives conclude, that the current reformist hysteria will die down, progressivism will go the way of socialism and communism, and America will return unabashedly and unashamedly to its Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian principles.

'Get over it' is the historian's reply to revisionism and the compulsion to moralize over history's events.  There is no such thing as one, universal, permanent, innate, and unchangeable code of morality, and to apply a modern interpretation on ancient history is simply ignorant. 

History has no morals.  It simply was, like it or not.  The more generously moralistic insist that we can learn from history's mistakes, but there are no such things.  Nations and tribes have acted from the same aggressive, opportunistic, territorial impulses since the first human settlements. 

'Stolen land"? A totally irrelevant a concept.