But I'm sure that wouldn't be a high enough body count for the greens today.
I'm sure they advocated something on the order of...two or three hundred million.
More like killing off 6,800,000,000 to save Gaia.
The 40M that this article claims for the Mongols is quite possibly low. However, it is relevant that even this number was something like 10% of the world’s total population at the time. An equivalent today would be something north of 600M.
BTW, the Mongols ended civilization over large areas of Asia. Much of Central Asia, Iran and Iraq had been densely populated and hosting thriving civilizations continuously for thousands of years, based on irrigation. In the case of Iraq for something like 5000 years.
Conquerors came through every century or so, destroying the irrigation systems. These were quickly rebuilt by the peasants.
The Mongols had a more direct approach. They destroyed the irrigation systems and killed all the people, quite possibly upwards of 80% of the population of Central Asia, Iran and Iraq. With nobody left to rebuild the irrigation systems, these areas collapsed and have never fully recovered.
It is amusing that western historians focus on the death and destruction of the crusades, taking place at about the same time. By comparison to the Mongol impact on Islam, the Crusaders were an itsy-bitsy flea bite.
Keep going, ideas from some of the more radical green groups want the planet to host no more than 10 million humans.