Jack Weatherford: evaluation

Transcript context

…There are estimates that Ghengis Khan and his Mongol Empire were responsible for an estimated 40 million deaths, approximately 10% of the world’s population. To put this number in the perspective of the modern day, that would be equivalent to killing about 800 million people in today’s population. How should we think about the brutality of numbers like these? The number itself is difficult to deal with. Millions of people were killed. For every family that lost someone, it’s a total loss. It doesn’t matter what the number is, it’s a tremendous loss. And there was tremendous loss of life, as in every war. I don’t think we should judge him any differently than other conquerors in history and other countries today that fight wars, including our own country. Whatever we are willing to permit our country to do, we should be able to understand why Chinggis Khan or the Mongols did it. You look today in the world, people are killing children, women, civilians, every day. Every day. And it’s always in the name of something, in the name of peace or in the name of God or in the name of our nation. There are always reasons for the killing. And the United States has certainly involved with that. Supplying the weapons for bombing people, invading Afghanistan, invading, fighting in Iraq, fighting in Syria. The United States is very involved in that. And it’s always, oh, but we’re defending democracy. Yeah, we brought a hell of a lot of democracy to Afghanistan. We killed a lot of people. You can even look back to World War II, our great moment of democracy and bringing freedom and democracy to Germany. We dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those were not military targets. We were not doing anything strategic against the country other than terrorizing the country by killing women and children. That’s America. That’s us. My father fought in that war. In fact, he fought in all. He fought in Vietnam. He fought in that war, and he fought in Korea. And he was a good American. I mean, there was nothing wrong with it. And I don’t even condemn America, but I’m saying, how can we condemn one set of people for doing it and then excuse it in ourselves? But we tend to do that. We, especially barbarian people, people from steppe for example, we tend to demonize them. Or any enemy we have, we tend to demonize them. You said a lot of interesting things there. One is just the very nature of war. That war is hell. That sometimes things like dropping the atomic bomb, which is an act of essentially terror, in the same style as Genghis Khan, in an attempt to prevent further war.…

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