Posted on 09/13/2023 6:43:24 AM PDT by Twotone
Can we finally dump the phrase “to the right of Genghis Khan”?
In Mongolia, Pope Francis, surely the leftiest pontiff ever, heaped praise on the terror of the steppes.
“May heaven grant that today, on this Earth devastated by countless conflicts, there be a renewal, respectful of international laws, of the condition of what was once the Pax Mongolica, that is the absence of conflicts,” he said.
It was an odd take on the man originally called Temujin. While Genghis Khan did indeed establish the Pax Mongolica across the largest contiguous empire in history, he did so by eliminating neighbors with a brutality that still shocks us 800 years later. The Mongols slaughtered between 40 million and 60 million people — around 10% of the world’s population.
Some lefties, Stalin-like, have a thing about breaking eggs to make omelets. Perhaps the pope, whose distrust of Western capitalism runs so deep that he cannot bring himself to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, thinks the ends justify the means. It’s an odd position for a pope to take, I’d say, but I’m no theologian.
The irritating saying “to the right of Genghis Khan” and its sibling “to the right of Attila the Hun” date from the 1960s. It may seem like a trivial thing to complain about, but it illustrates an asymmetry in our discourse, namely the way in which, for a lot of commentators, the term “right-wing” has simply come to mean “bad guys.”
Thus, for example, the hard-line ayatollahs in Tehran are “right-wing,” even though they abolished the monarchy, confiscated property, exiled the bourgeoisie, and declared war on the capitalist world. Soviet nostalgics are similarly “right-wing.” Terrorists of any kind are “right-wing.” The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the clue is in the name) was “right-wing.” The Genghis Khan jibe simply pushes that association to its conclusion.
It is hard to see how the Mongol emperor could, in any sense, be called a conservative. He destroyed the traditional social structures of both the Mongol tribes and their vassal peoples, replacing established aristocracies with what we might almost call a state bureaucracy. He had no time for national self-determination, seeking to blend and homogenize his conquered nations. He was even a decimalizer, organizing military and administrative units in blocs of tens, hundreds, and so on, in a way that would have met with approval from French revolutionaries or Bolsheviks. You Might Also Like Recommended by
But he committed genocide, right? So, according to the weird nomenclature of our age, obviously, he’s some kind of right-winger.
In reality, the worst genocides of the modern age have been carried out by revolutionary socialists. Put to one side the self-proclaimed socialism of Hitler and his followers. Forget that, when Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, Joseph Goebbels exulted in the opportunity to impose “der echte Sozialismus,” real socialism, in the place of debased Jewish Bolshevism. Even if we disregard all that, the Nazis killed 17 million people, the communists 100 million. Really, we should talk of antifa and their ilk as being “to the left of Genghis Khan.”
Except, of course, that we wouldn’t dream of doing that because right-wingers think their opponents are mistaken, not evil. This is the fundamental imbalance in politics. Conservatives might see leftists as woolly-minded and naive but not wicked. Leftists, by contrast, see conservatives as cruel, selfish, and bigoted.
Why? Partly because of the leftist saturation of popular culture. I have noticed that my right-wing friends are much more likely to have left-wing authors on their bookshelves than the other way around. Not because conservatives are more broad-minded but because most authors are on the Left. So are most screenwriters, comedians, and celebrities. If you’re on the Right, you can’t help getting a sense of what makes leftists tick. But the reverse is not true.
There is also, behavioral psychologists have found, a difference in mindset. At the core of the leftist worldview is concern for the oppressed. Hence, for example, wanting to preserve indigenous culture in poor and primitive countries but to efface it in wealthy Western ones. Right-wingers understand sympathy with underdogs because they share it. But they balance it against other concerns, such as loyalty to faith and flag, intolerance of freeloading, reverence for tradition, and dislike of coercion. Because leftists generally do not share these concerns, they can assume that people who disagree with them lack compassion.
This matters because constantly likening people to Hitler, Genghis Khan, or Attila the Hun has consequences. There will come a point at which you stop thinking of them as opponents and start thinking of them as dangers to humanity. And that never ends well.
“to the right of Genghis Khan”
Never heard the phrase prior.
Smacks of leftist trope (and yet another distraction).
“They make a desert and call it peace.”
— Tacitus
Neither the Romans nor the Mongols were nice people. One might expect the Pope to understand that.
Rush Limbaugh was always an Attila the Hun man himself.
It’s “to the Right of Attila the Hun”
I know John Kerry used the name, but it might not have been that exact phrase.
THAT would figure!
But he is the national hero of Mongolia for cultural reasons, and Mongolia is currently a Communist country.
Conclusion: Pope kissing commie ass again, but no conclusion about Genghis Khan.
Aside from murdering millions, Chingis Khan did allow the free exercise of religion and a low flat 10% tax on trade.
So he had that going for him.
But George doesn’t have anything going for him except Sodomite “yes men”.
I do indeed also like Recommended by.
Other than the military leaders of the Israelites under God’s direction, Genghis Khan is my favorite of all time, no apologies ever. If you wanted to confront him or cause a problem, regret was the last thing you knew. People who got stomped by him deserved it for their evil, and even he himself said so.
That’s the phrase I’ve always used to describe my take on politics.
It was the Soviets who first start calling anyone who disagreed with them “right wing”, even those who were further to the left than the Soviets themselves.
And it is the ideological descendants of the Soviets who continue this practice.
Soviets used "Fascist" for that. They never used "Nazis", because Nazi was short for "National Socialist", couldn't admit they were fellow socialists.
Yes, in fact, the Soviets would often use terms like “Hitlerite” when they needed to refer to actual Nazis to avoid using that term.
The real left/right dichotomy is between collectivists vs individualists. Collectivism involves elites ruling (supposedly) for the benefit of the collective vs a decentralized system where individual rights are paramount. Of course Elites almost never govern for the benefit of the collective despite their claims and almost always govern to benefit themselves.
Genghis Khan, as an elitist, is therefore by current definitions left wing. Of course classic liberalism was once left wing but now is considered right wing by Marxists.
He is also the ancestor of 0.5% of the male population of the Earth.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.16767
Pope Francis is the first anti-Catholic Pope - much like Obama was the first Anti-American President. Both worked (and are working) to destroy the entity they are/were supposed to be leading.
>>Except, of course, that we wouldn’t dream of doing that because right-wingers think their opponents are mistaken, not evil.
That’s because most “conservatives” are rear-guard leftists. They agree on the destination of the left’s “progress”, and disagree only on how quickly we should get there.
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