Historical Arsonists

[miniboes]

This is something Dan Carlin talked about on his podcast on the Mongols which is really interesting to me.

So we got these great conquerors of history; Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. These guys are referred to in quite a positive light; Alexander spread Hellenism, Genghis Khan did this creative destruction of the Asian world allowing for a new world to blossom. Yet both of these guys were motivated not for spreading a culture or revolutionizing the world, they just wanted to conquer for the sake of having a larger empire. Napoleon and arguably Julius Caesar seem to fall under the same category.

They were by all means evil, responsible for many slaughters, yet seem to be regarded as some kind of weird heroes in history books. We tend to focus on what they did to bring the world to the next stage of history rather than the evils they committed. Once the deaths are as far away as they are now they are just statistics and don't seem to matter anymore.

Dan Carlin started the podcast by saying (paraphrasing) 'If you want to get attention, write a book about the positive effects of the Nazi regime and the second world war'. He argued that one day, it may very well be that Hitler is just one more historical arsonists; the people who burn down the old world for a new, better world to arise. Now the slaughter is recent, there are people alive who experienced what is what like and many people have recent ancestors who did. But how would that be in a thousand years, when the human race cannot relate to these people so well anymore?

What do you guys think of this? Would Hitler perhaps not be seen as a force for evil in a thousand years? Can you think of more historical figures we seem to judge by the long term effects of their actions rather than their intentions?

[brimstoneSalad]

It's an interesting idea.

But I think if you read some of the work of these people (like Alexander and Napoleon), you find they're very different from Hitler, and came from an age of more diplomatic warfare and conquest. They fought and conquered for what seem like pretty different reasons.

The French revolution was pretty nasty itself, but I think there are subtle distinctions in how war played out and was viewed even in those days that paved the way for these people to be seen as heroic that just aren't true of Hitler. Things changed a lot after World War I - war stopped being a friendly disagreement that played out as such, and became something else entirely. Photojournalism was part of that, for bringing it to the public, but it was also nastier because of the deeper ideological conflicts involved.