Jack Weatherford: belief

Transcript context

…It seems that what people mean when they say that war is hell, that in some deep sense, everybody loses no matter the narrative you put on top of it. Yes, yes. I’m not a pacifist again, but I think war is acceptable in some situations, but the more controlled it is, the better. My effort is not to do away with all the things that happened under Chinggis Khan with the brutality and all like that, but it’s to measure it against what goes on today in the world today. And we have different images. There are two images of Chinggis Khan. One is our image. He’s a barbarian on a horseback killing people and raping women all the time. The other image is the Mongolian image. And when they finally built an official statue of him in this century, for the 800th anniversary of his founding of Mongolia, they had to think about how to present him to the world and to themselves, and they chose the Lincoln Memorial as the model. He was the late great law giver of the Mongol nation. And so he seated there in front of the Mongolian parliament. There’s another statue that’s better known, but it was a private enterprise that created him on horseback, but not with a weapon. But he’s on horseback out in the countryside. But the official one from the government is Chinggis Khan seated like Abraham Lincoln, and they issued stamps to show that he is the great law giver. And the truth is somewhere in between, I suppose.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.