the Mongolian terror only predates Columbus by 200 years, killed a similar number of people as the colonisation of America – vastly more if the European death toll from the plague they spread is taken into account – and the people responsible are still idolised as national heroes today.
there are various reasons for why we judge the Mongols less harshly than the Spanish and the British, but none of them are very good ones.
I think we have less visceral hatred of the Mongolians because their slaughter imperialism has basically no impact on the world today.
There’s some Mongolians who have national pride in Genghis khan but that affects nothing. Mongolians have no power over other people. Mongolian is a geopolitically weak country, no existing country has a ruling class of mongols oppressing non-Mongols.
that sounds like we only care about bad stuff that we can use as leverage to obtain concessions in the present day, or bad stuff is only bad if it’s politically useful for it to be bad.
You’re kind of ignoring that literally the entire purpose of pointing out that something is bad is to push people towards enacting change to correct a current problem. If saying that something is bad doesn’t actually impact any real-world issue, then there’s no difference between that and saying nothing.
The term “virtue signalling” is overused by reactionaries to the point where it really just means “someone said something I don’t like”, but complaining about the Mongolian atrocities in a day and age where they don’t have any geopolitical relevance outside Mongolia fits the original concept of that. It might make you feel good, but in the end it doesn’t actually do anything.
Indeed, but many people don’t actually realise these examples are highlighted for political purposes, and it warps their understanding of the world, as Tumblr regularly demonstrates.
Knowing that is part of why I just don’t care as much.
Particularly, about things like “they’re occupying Native American lands! All of America belongs to the Native Americans! It’s stolen!”
First, collective ethnic land ownership is ethnonationalist, and they claim to be against ethnonationalism.
Second, collective ethnic responsibility ties strongly into identities that promote ethnonationalism, but they claim to be against ethnonationalism.
Third, they don’t care when others do it, particularly if they aren’t the “wrong” ethnicity.
So it’s mostly just a political cudgel and can be mostly ignored.