When and why did we stop celebrating mass murder and conquest?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Alexander, Genghis, Xerxes, Napoleon, Richard – hailed as “the greats” for consolidating power and staging countless invasions. Then you have Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Bush, Mingh, etc. who are considered sociopathic murderers for doing essentially the same thing.

Why the change in public perception? When did conquest stop being cool?

2

One reason is that Hitler lost. Winners write history.

3

Well, Mao won, Mingh won, Napoleon lost, etc.

4

I would disagree on Stalin - he is very much a national hero in Russia.

5

A lot of the glory in war went away with the American Civil War and World War I.

6

Really?Can you provide some insight on this.

7

Thucydides was on the losing side of a famous war and he also wrote a very famous book about it. I can assure you that there are plenty of German historians who have written extensively on WWI and WWII. Then there’s the Lost Cause of the Confederacy popularized by the losing side of the American Civil War. Losers write plenty of history.

8

The meme, “history is written by the victors,” is not a claim that the losing side never records anything. It means that the prevailing understanding, the wide cultural view of the conflict’s meaning in succeeding ages, will be that of the winning side. Apart from maybe Thucydides (whose work may have survived to be exemplary for different reasons), your examples fit with this.

9

I think it goes hand in hand with increased understanding of human psychology. People no longer recognize that stuff as a sign of health, but as a sign of mental pathology instead.

10

Since this will depend in part how one defines “celebrates,” “mass murder,” and “conquest,” let’s move it to IMHO.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

11

Same way outlaws like Jesse James, Billie the Kid and others from the old west are lauded. Al Capone the same.

12

Why?

I think it is when plundering and raping no longer benefit your populace and are seen as rewards, but actually lead to sanctions and other penalties.

13

Its one thing for soldiers to kill one another in battle but quite another to calculatedly kill defenseless non-soldiers in large numbers.

Yes non-combatants did die in days of yore but more as a side effect of battle. The spoils of war. Nasty but not deliberate extermination.

14

I’m sure the advances in military technology and mass media has something to do with it, but at what point that would have been I don’t know. Its true that a large percentage of the population of Europe celebrated the outbreak of the First World War, they weren’t celebrating at the end of it.

Is this a reference to Ming the Merciless or someone else?!?

15

http://www.bookofhorriblethings.com/ax01.html

You might be surprised to learn Genghis Khan exterminated something like 40 million people, probably the majority of whom were noncombatants…allegedly to increase pasturage for horses. Before being elected Pope, Robert of Geneva ordered the sack of Cesena in 1377, killing thousands of civilians. This is a complicated subject…while so-called primitive warfare was often almost ritual in character, with little bloodshed by 20th-century standards, there’s a long and rich history of wars of extermination.

16

Before mass media perhaps most people only heard is we took City A and not the day-to-day tolls it took to get there.
With the advent of media it became easier to get reports out faster so there had to be more reports. More reports of the costs that took place before, during, and after the taking of City A probably gives most people less reason to celebrate.

17

when we decided that killing a bunch of people to take their stuff was kind of impolite.

18

I misspelled his name, sorry. It’s Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam. Not terribly familiar with him but I think he united Vietnam, beat the Americans, and killed a bunch of his own people for various reasons – basically the Mao of 'Nam.

19

Well, sure, but what caused that change? It’s not like there was a particular UN meeting where they said “Oh, from now on, killing is impolite, k?” And it’s interesting that even with our modern sensibilities, we still discuss the ancients in a different light, with their greatness mostly unstained by their bloodlust. We don’t call them Alexander the Great Murderer, or Genghis the Rapey Slaughterer, or Napoleon the Vile.

20

WAT

Ho Chi Minh:

  1. Did not unite Vietnam; Vietnam was still very much divided when he died.
  2. Did not beat the Americans; in fact, he stepped down from day-to-day governance in 1965, and died in 1969, both while the Americans were very much still there and in the fight.
  3. While he probably purged some enemies, he wasn’t known as a genocidal guy; are you thinking of Pol Pot?

Sincerely,
Guy From Vietnam