June 2012
39 posts
“Stalin so famously said, ‘One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.’
This professor, whose courses I’d taken a few of, he was the professor who taught the Chinese history courses. I was gonna write a paper, and I thought he was the closest adviser to consult on this because he was Chinese. The paper was on Mongol military tactics, probably the greatest army of all time. I spent a whole semester focusing on this paper, really long research sessions based around tactics and strategies and the theories behind what they did. I turned it into this professor to evaluate and he handed it to me a week later with the grade he’d given me on it; it was a whole grade lower than I thought it should be. I was leafing through, and all over he’s written, in red ink, ‘What about the civilians? What about the deaths?’ You know, all over he had made it about the nasty things the Mongols had done. So I asked him why this had lowered my grade, because the paper didn’t have anything to do with that - it was a paper on tactics and strategies. He said ‘How can you divorce the military that made all of the Holocaust possible from the Holocaust itself?’
We’re in a period of revisionist history. I’m reading books that brush off 30 to 50 million deaths. Brush them off! A sentence here or there that says, ‘Yes, the Mongols did great damage in some places, but that’s dwarfed by their impact on globalisation and trade and commerce!’
There was a great line uttered about the Roman empire, during the time of the Roman empire: ‘the Romans create a wasteland and call it peace.’” —Dan Carlin (via acolderwar)
This professor, whose courses I’d taken a few of, he was the professor who taught the Chinese history courses. I was gonna write a paper, and I thought he was the closest adviser to consult on this because he was Chinese. The paper was on Mongol military tactics, probably the greatest army of all time. I spent a whole semester focusing on this paper, really long research sessions based around tactics and strategies and the theories behind what they did. I turned it into this professor to evaluate and he handed it to me a week later with the grade he’d given me on it; it was a whole grade lower than I thought it should be. I was leafing through, and all over he’s written, in red ink, ‘What about the civilians? What about the deaths?’ You know, all over he had made it about the nasty things the Mongols had done. So I asked him why this had lowered my grade, because the paper didn’t have anything to do with that - it was a paper on tactics and strategies. He said ‘How can you divorce the military that made all of the Holocaust possible from the Holocaust itself?’
We’re in a period of revisionist history. I’m reading books that brush off 30 to 50 million deaths. Brush them off! A sentence here or there that says, ‘Yes, the Mongols did great damage in some places, but that’s dwarfed by their impact on globalisation and trade and commerce!’
There was a great line uttered about the Roman empire, during the time of the Roman empire: ‘the Romans create a wasteland and call it peace.’” —Dan Carlin (via acolderwar)
