Since writing posting 721. "The quintessential parallel between President Bush and Genghis Khan." I received a few interesting responses. In that posting, I drew a likeness between Bush's occupation of Iraq and his attempts to graft the American form of democracy onto an entirely different culture, with the historical fact that the Mongolian invasion of many countries in the 12th century never took root even though Genghis Khan was earnest in wishing to bring about reform and wise government. The only country in which the Mongolians stayed for the long term was in northern China, but there the governmental conversion occurred the other way round. The Chinese culture was far too rich and complex for the Mongolians to grasp. It was the Chinese who absorbed and changed the invaders' culture.
I've also come across another, much more recent, verdict on a misplaced American attempt at imposing an alien government. In his book, Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger, a former US Secretary of State, discusses Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon's attempt to graft American-type 'democracy' onto South Vietnam in the 1960s in order to thwart what the American administration thought was a Chinese-backed attempt at communism which would then bring down the rest of Asia like dominoes. (It now turns out that the Chinese at the time wanted nothing to do with Ho Che Min's communist offensive in South Vietnam. The Chinese administration had more than enough on its hands at home and, in any case, they'd had their fingers burned some years previously in trying to help the North Korean communists and had almost been embroiled in a total war with America.)
I have extracted a few portions of what Kissinger writes (pp648-9):
"By 1956, after France had withdrawn and South Vietnamese independence had been achieved, Kennedy was ready to join the prevailing orthodoxy: "This is our offspring -- we cannot abandon it." At the same time, he reiterated that the conflict was not so much a military as a political and moral challenge "in a country where concepts of free enterprise and capitalism are meaningless, where poverty and hunger are not enemies across the 17th parallel but enemies within their midst.... What we must offer them is a revolution -- a political, economic and social revolution far superior to anything the Communists can offer." Nothing less than America's credibility was at stake." ....
"The trick, Kennedy seemed to be saying, was to make the victim less prone to aggression. That approach was to spawn a new concept not previously found in the diplomatic vocabulary, which is still with us today -- the notion of "nation-building." ....
"... Kennedy's emphasis on reform led to growing American involvement in the internal politics of South Vietnam. The problem was that reform and nation-building in South Vietnam would take decades to bear fruit. In Europe in the 1940s and 1950s, America had bolstered established countries with strong political traditions by extending Marshall Plan aid and by means of the NATO military alliance. But Vietnam was a brand-new country and had no institutions to build upon. The central dilemma became that America's political goal of introducing a stable democracy in South Vietnam could not be attained in time to head off a guerrilla victory, which was America's strategic goal. America would have to modify either its military or its political objectives."
And, years later, President Nixon had to accept an humiliating defeat. The cultural and governmental gap between South Vietnam and America was simply too great to be bridged. I suspect that Bush's attempts at implanting American-type elections in Iraq will also fail disastrously in the coming months or years if he's foolish enough to keep on trying.
Iraq, of course, has institutions -- and very strong ones, too -- tribal and religious -- but they're totally different from American ones. Otherwise, the similarity between a rather institution-less South Vietnam (except for the Confucian culture) in the 1960s and present-day Iraq is quite close.
There's no doubt, however, that although Iraq (and other Middle East countries) may not be able to simulate American-type elections for a very long time to come, its own ordinary people quite definitely want the goodies that the American economy has been able to lavishly supply to its own people for the past century or so. Until recently, anyway.
And this, unfortunately, is what is going to be the big problem in Genghis Khan's own country of Mongolia. One of my list, Helene Whitson, has sent me this fascinating article from yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle and here, rather sadly in an otherwise encouraging article, is a clue to future trouble.
What is fascinating about it is that although Mongolians are relieved to be free of the domination of Soviet Russia, its young people are not going to be content to go back to the pre-communist way of life of their parents and grandparents -- that is, of an arduous pastoral life. This is only just hanging on by some older Mongolians. In a recent BBC documentary on Mongolia we saw a man and his wife -- with a large number of sheep -- relatively prosperous according to their values -- who were desolate because their children had left for the city life.
Although the lead singer in a group quoted below is now reviving traditional Mongolian throat singing, note that this isn't a village or tribal group of singers. This is a rock band and, without a doubt, they'll have all the usual accoutrements of rock bands anywhere in the West -- microphones, hi-fi speakers. electronic instruments and so on. When they perform, their audiences will be composed of young groupies, aching to copy the mores of young people in the West and probably wearing Coca-Cola T-shirts. Undoubtedly, this rock band will be cutting discs and being performed repeatedly on digital radio and able to be downloaded by iPods.
The Mongolians will have to live through and somehow survive the insidious temptations of consumerism and the mass dumbing-down of culture just as we in the Western countries have experienced in the last couple of centuries. In all the developed countries today, with increasing long-term unemployment, increasing breakdown of order among a growing underclass, dumbed-down state education, a growing social and income divide, and governments which are already in deficit and which are going to find it a problem to look after its old folk in 20 years' time, we are failing badly. Perhaps the Mongolians will go through it all very quickly and find the answer before we do.
Keith Hudson
<<<<
MONGOLIAN LEADER SEEN IN NEW LIGHT
Genghis Khan now regarded as great 13th century ruler
Jehangir S. Pocha
Ulan Bator -- "Genghis Khan wasn't really a bad guy," Elbegdorj Tsahkia, the Mongolian prime minister, said with a grin. "He just had a bad press."
He was only half joking. Ever since Mongolia emerged from the Soviet Union's shadow in the early 1990s, the lore and myth surrounding the khan, the original bad boy of history, have captured the imagination of the country.
A popular and official movement to reassess Genghis Khan's marauding image is being marshaled by admirers who say he was a truly great, if irascible, ruler.
"He is like a god to us," said Bat-Erdene Batbayar, who also goes by the name Baabar, a historian and adviser to Elbegdorj. "He is the founder of our state, the root of our history. The communists very brutally cut us off from our traditions and history and got us to adopt the ways and views of Western civilization -- with a red color of course, but still Western. Now we are becoming Mongols again."
This veneration of Genghis Khan is partly traditional in Mongolia, where most revere their ancestors and where he is considered the father of the nation.
But it is also a backlash. During the seven decades that the Soviet Union ran Mongolia, Moscow feared that deification of Genghis Khan would incite Mongolian nationalism, so even mentioning his name was forbidden. People were banned from visiting his home province of Khentii in the northeast; a Soviet tank base sat on the sole road connecting Khentii to the rest of the country.
Now, as Mongolia is reinventing itself as a free-market democracy, it is also searching its past for the means to define itself. And no one looms larger in its history than Temujin, who took the title Genghis Khan, or Universal Ruler, after forging the world's largest land empire in the early 1200s.
"Understanding how Mongolians view Genghis Khan throws light on how Mongolians view their own heritage and, to a certain extent, themselves," Ts. Tsetsenbileg, a scholar at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, said in an interview with the Harvard Asia Pacific Review. "Within this rapidly changing world, Genghis Khan, if we acknowledge him without bias, can serve as a moral anchor. He can be Mongolia's root, its source of certainty at a time when many things are uncertain."
Evidence of a renewed romance with Genghis Khan is everywhere. Children, streets, hotels, vodka, cigarettes, banks, candy bars, beer, products and businesses of almost every type carry his name. His face is on Mongolian money, stamps, official buildings and street corners.
Genghis Khan's comeback 778 years after his death is especially strong with young people. One of the country's top bands, Black Rose, sings his praises in anthems that combine raspy rock vocals with traditional Mongolian throat singing.
"I want people to feel pride in their past and remember the one Mongolian who left a mark on history," said Amraa Mandakh, the group's lead singer. "Earlier, this was a society that had no national pride, and people asked me why I liked Genghis. Now they come and embrace me when I say his name."
Historians in the West and in China, India, Iran and other nations that fell to Genghis Khan's horsemen in the early 1200s see the onslaught of the Mongol hordes as an apocalyptic event that threatened to end their ancient civilizations forever.
But Mongolians see it differently. "When we were young people, our parents used to tell us stories of Genghis, of how he was good and strong and kind," said Naramtsetseg Dolgormaa, 27, who teaches the Japanese language. "I'll never forget that."
Differing assessments of conquerors can roil emotions in Asia, where passions over history run high. But because Genghis Khan's legacy is free of living memory, it is proving easier to revise.
In fact, nations wanting to curry favor with resource-rich Mongolia are supporting its attempts to resurrect its past. Because Mongolians worship their dead and the location of Genghis Khan's grave remains unknown, both Beijing and Tokyo are trying to outdo each another in sanctifying his memory.
China is spending about $20 million to renovate a mausoleum it built to Genghis Khan in 1954 at Ejin Horo Banner on the Ordos Highlands in its province of Inner Mongolia. In October, a Japanese-financed research team searching for the tomb said it had found it at Avraga, about 155 miles east of Ulan Bator.
Many people in this pristine, beautiful country see such global support for the rehabilitation of their god-king as fulfillment of a longtime quest for international dignity.
"People should see Genghis Khan is great, not evil," said Uchral, 20, a painter who sells his watercolors of Mongolia's endless steppes, its exotic animals and its warrior-king, to tourists outside the gray Soviet-era Ulan Bator Hotel. "To us he is noble, strong. No one could touch us when he was there."
Uchral reached into his rolls of paintings and pulled out a portrait of Genghis. It depicts him as an imposing but contemplative man, quite unlike the bloodthirsty marauder who, Persian texts tell us, warned the ancient cities of Bukhara and Samarkand "All who surrender will be spared. Whoever does not surrender but opposes with struggle and dissension shall be annihilated."
Baabar said the savage image of Genghis Khan endures only because "his history was written by his enemies." The Mongols were not scribes, and the only comprehensive chronicle of his times, The Secret History of the Mongols, a 13th century account of Genghis Khan's life, was lost for centuries.
Even when it was rediscovered in the early 1800s by a Russian diplomat in China, its dissemination was tightly controlled, so most of the material on Genghis Khan comes from people he conquered. The historians present the picture of a brilliant but tempestuous and cruel man. He is said to have been so hot-tempered that he killed his half-brother in an argument.
A slow reconsideration of this fearsome figure has been taking place since 1982, when Francis Woodman Cleaves produced the first authoritative modern version of The Secret History of the Mongols.
Some newly found details, such as Genghis Khan's apparent fear of dogs, make him seem more human. Historians are also reassessing the nature of Mongol society and rule. New books say his empire gave citizens religious freedom, banned the slave trade, expanded a global economy and introduced several important international concepts, such as diplomatic immunity.
The extent of Genghis empire also led to greater contact between East and West, and these exchanges were carried further by his grandson, Kublai Khan.
It is estimated that Genghis Khan was responsible for the deaths of 40 million people across Asia and Europe, but some researchers cite evidence that he might have exaggerated his massacres to terrify his foes into submission, marking the first time an army employed such shock-and-awe tactics.
Researchers at the Genghis Khan University in Ulan Bator say that toward the end of this life he was trying to turn his empire into a civil state, based on a code of laws called the Great Yassa, which granted equal and defined legal rights for all citizens, including women.
But Genghis Khan's most astounding effect remains on the world's demography. In February 2003, the study "The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols," published by the American Journal of Human Genetics, estimated that Genghis Khan has more than 17 million direct descendants living today One in every 200 people is related to him. In Mongolia alone, as much as 16 percent of the population could have descended from the Khan, giving new meaning to the idea of nation as family.
San Francisco Chronicle -- 22 May 2005
>>>>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
