Well, just in WWII alone, the Japanese committed a number of war crimes including the Nanking Massacre, the use of comfort women, the Bataan Death March and Unit 731. There’s many others, but those are the most well-known.
What’s worse is unlike Germany and other former parts of the Axis, discussion of this is frowned upon. And while it’s not quite official, many in the government downplay these events or worse, out right deny they even happened.
And look at the crap that the Taliban did, especially to women.
True, but the key point here is that there isn’t something intrinsically different about Europeans that causes them/us to commit atrocities. Being born in Europe didn’t make all those people “monsters”. Throughout history there have been a lot of monsters all over the world. Europeans just had the technology to be monstrous on a larger scale (and even that’s debateable).
In the pre-Columbian Americas the natives were engaged in all sorts of extremely brutal practices. When the Spanish turned up they and the natives engaged in extremely brutal practices on each other. When at last the Spanish effectively “won” they continued to engage in brutal practices. That the Spanish managed to kill more people than the natives did doesn’t exactly qualify the natives for a “Nice Guys of the Year” award.
I generally agree – people are people, and people with power very often mistreat those they have power over. The best explanations for variations in which groups have killed more people, or dominated more people, etc., are details of geography, resources, plant and animal life of various regions, random chance, and the like. But that doesn’t absolve anyone from the bad things they’ve done.
But I’ll bow out of this discussion, since I don’t like anything close to mass apportionment of blame, or blame for the sins of one’s ancestors, etc.
Just focusing on just this one item in an excellent list - the Mongols were slaughtering and enslaving tens of millions back when the entire world only had ~300 million people in it.
Now think about the fact that the Mongols are just ONE big bad thing that’s happened in Asia, which has had a huge portion of the world’s population for millenia, and has been prone to large scale wars, coups, and empire building for all that time.
I’ll agree Europeans haven’t been among the kindest and gentlest of neighbors, but you can’t with a straight face try to put them up as a uniquely bad race / culture compared to all the others out there. If anything, people are uniquely bad, no matter where they were born.
I don’t think they are analogous. Gunpowder was invented in China in 700AD and made it’s way to Europe by the 13th century where the lines of development changed substantially. Mao was born in the late 1800’s, only a year or two after Marx died, and before the Russian revolution. He was heavily influenced and funded by the Soviet Union by leaders and writers that were his contemporaries. In order to make your analogy work, you’d need China actively helping and funding Europeans in their use and further development of gunpowder, which didn’t happen.
Uniquely bad, no. But they were unique in that their special circumstances and histories put them into position to carve out and dominate empires that were literally global in scale, allowing them to impact (both positively and negatively) a wider range of people than was possible in the past, even when we talk about the Mongols. Unlike the Mongols, they were able to have that impact and to utterly dominate for relatively long periods of time as well.
You can still see this in effect today, as one has but to look at how pervasive western culture is throughout the world. And it’s not just culture that has and continues to impact much of the world but a host of other things as well.
Part of the issue with the Mongols is that there were never very many of them, and they weren’t that culturally advanced, so in order to expand their empire they had to incorporate more and more foreign peoples into their armies/elites and more and more foreign cultural innovations to the point there wasn’t much “Mongolian” about them any more.
The Mughal Empire in India was in its heyday quite a major economic, cultural and political influence on the world scene, and its ruling dynasty claimed patrilineal descent from Genghis Khan (I think), but they weren’t actually a “Mongol” state in any meaningful sense (they were more a cultural outgrowth of Persian civilization than anything else).
Sort of. Although since the Mongols were running that part of Crimea before the Italians were, you could argue that it’s the Genoese who were the ‘invaders’.
No, it’s really not…I note you didn’t address the actual point (which is that Mao was directly affected and in direct contact with the founders of Soviet Communism and was directly influenced by them and it, as opposed to a large gap in history between the introduction of gunpowder and how the Europeans eventually used it…which was the rather lame correlation you were trying to make, that they are somehow on par), but if you wish to move on, that’s fine by me. Such is life.
I don’t see the contradiction. Mao chose to use something someone else had invented to kill lots of people. So have the people who’ve used gunpowder to put bullets into people, as opposed to just using it for pyrotechnics. I just propose that if we’re going to blame the inventors (and we need not necessarily do so), let’s be consistent.
Mao learned something directly from those who created and formulated it AND he got direct, tangible aid in making it happen in China. The Europeans basically stumbled on a recipe for something and then figured out for themselves how they wanted to use it and for what purpose…the Chinese didn’t tell them to make better and better guns and helped them do it then funded their use in war. If you don’t see why these two things aren’t analogous then I’m not sure where we go from here. If OG figured out how to make fire he isn’t responsible for how the next tribe over might or might not use it. If he creates a new religion that preaches wiping out other tribes AND he helps the next tribe over adopt it AND helps them start their pogroms, well, he’s a bit responsible for what happens. Don’t you think?
The “bit” is trivial to nonexistent compared to the degree of responsibility owned by Mao himself, so… no, not really. Is it a specific goal of communism or Marxism to kill tens of millions of people, or is that just a consequence of trying to force its implementation and being either indifferent to the harm or happy to hand out death sentences to scapegoat people for the lack of success? In any case, Asians are demonstrably more than capable of slaughtering each other in the millions regardless of any outside influences, and however arbitrarily one defines “outside”, since the Soviet Union was clearly not a European power, but a Eurasian one.
Well, except for the whole they enabled him part. They gave him not just the philosophy but the means…money, weapons, advisors, technology.
To be sure they can, and I’d chalk up their various slaughters and massacres on their own scale. I won’t chalk up, say, every crossbow death on their plate, say, because they invented it. Or every gunpowder one either.
Well, it seems we are at an impasse here so no sense continuing to beat this dead horse.
Or someone who realized early on that idea of grouping hundreds of millions of people across continental-sized areas over hundreds of years and then trying to see which group was the worst was an inherently silly exercise, coupled with the confidence that mega-events like the Taiping Rebellion are likely to be overlooked.
Nope, still haven’t realized this, if this was directed at me. While I admit readily that grouping a lot of different countries into ‘Europeans’ is, itself a bit silly, I think that broad conclusions can be drawn on the global impact of the group commonly associated with that label. I’m open to someone making similar broad arguments over similar broad groups of people generally lumped together. I just haven’t seen any compelling ones. Which leads to this…
I didn’t overlook a single event like the Taiping Rebellion, but that IS a nice try and shifting the goalposts. I do find it ironic that you’d say such a thing after trying to handwave out of the discussion with your goalpost change post earlier, though. If we broadly lump in all of ‘Asia’ they certainly have quite a bit on their tally. And since the Mongols would be included, I could see an argument on them as roughly comparable from a global or broader perspective (i.e. they did ‘damage’ outside on a broader or even global scale…though this would not be including a lot of the world in that argument), depending on if we are strictly talking about body count as a percentage of the overall population when the event happened. But you aren’t making that argument, seemingly, just muddying the waters.
Did you really want to just keep beating this dead horse? I mean, I’m happy to oblige if you want to. Or we could go back to the broader discussion and you can think your earlier argument made sense (and I’ll do the same). Whatever you like really.
If we broadly lump in all of ‘Asia’ they certainly have quite a bit on their tally. And since the Mongols would be included, I could see an argument on them as roughly comparable from a global or broader perspective (i.e. they did ‘damage’ outside on a broader or even global scale…though this would not be including a lot of the world in that argument), depending on if we are strictly talking about body count as a percentage of the overall population when the event happened. But you aren’t making that argument, seemingly, just muddying the waters.