Julius Ceasar, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and many more…
These people had beliefs and worldviews that were so horribly, by today’s standards, that calling them fascist would be huge understatement. And they followed through by committing a lot of evil.
Aren’t we basically glorifying the Hitlers of centuries past?
I know, historians always say that one should not judge historical figures by contemporary moral standards. But there’s a difference between objectively studying history and actually glorifying these figures.
Who’s “we”? I don’t glorify these people.
We also glorify horrible people from the present, so why not?
Do we glorify them, or do we just learn about them because they had a huge impact on the world?
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone holding Genghis Khan up as a role model.
Exactly. I was kinda confused when I read the question because I dont think they are glorified at all. They probably arent shamed as much as Hitler for example because they dont have such a direct impact on our lives.
In some countries, it’s so “machismo” that being a descendant of Genghis Khan gets you a consumer’s discount in some establishments.
Probably more people are descendents of Ghengis Khan than aren’t. Certainly nothing special.
The guy killed by the girl he was trying to rape becoming a symbol of machismo is oddly fitting.
Go to Mongolia and you will see it.
People with a breeding kink and weird desire to populate the world with their shitty sperm abso-fucking-lutely look up to Genghis Khan and the whole “so many people are related to Genghis Khan because he fathered so many children with so many women” thing.
See: Elon Musk. Or even better, don’t see him.
And Julius Caesar is literally known for being hated and brutally murdered by those closest to him because he was such a shit.
Genghis Khan isn’t as glorified as the rest, because, …, he’s not white/European. He’s glorified in Mongolia and some other Asian countries, but not in the western world.
But the rest of them? Yes, we do. Maybe not always so overtly, but the implied greatness of most of these figures is tied to how much wars they waged and how many peoples they subjugated. And if you simply go to any primary or middle school and ask the kids who are into history, you’ll find lots of boys (mostly boys) who will rave on about how this or that was the absolute GOAT.
We literally call Alexander “the Great”, and Caesar’s name was adopted as a title more than once by powerful rulers (e.g. Kaiser and Czar). Sounds like glorification to me.
…because that’s his name. It was how people referred to him. It’s not like people are going “He’s Grrrreat!” like Tony the Tiger.
Is this just a case of “great” having changed meaning subtly? Now it’s a superlative more than anything else, but in this usage I feel it meaning is much more about scale of what they did. Not a judgment on the morality of what they did.
Great doesn’t mean good nor does it mean benevolent.
I think it’s a publication bias thing. Because so much was written about these people in their day, they become mascots for the time period. And what they did, while objectionable, is impressive. They had a massive influence on recorded history.
My own theory is that there is so much written in these times because of the massive inequality then. Books, statues, etc are expensive. In times of ecomonic equality, especially before the press, people would be less likely to waste time and resources on such things. Thats money better spent on improving their and their communities lives. But when you have massive inequality and a narcisist in charge, you get books, statues, and massive projects dedicated to the men who can afford them.
I think you are right. But I don’t think that’s the whole story.
I think it is also just the fact that they were the winners of history. And we like winning more than we like being moral.
And we like winning more than we like being moral.
I wonder why when it comes to “humanity is awesome” variations of sci-fi, we always have to lean so hard on creating a fictional alien race that is somehow worse than humans to prove how “awesome” we are.
Maybe, just maybe, we’re kind of fucking assholes.
Those aliens also display a core experience that we have anxiety about: being colonized. Interestingly, Stargate, a franchise partially created by the US Air Force very accidentally portrays what interacting with alien species who didn’t establish a system of colonization might look like. There are multiple cultures humanity encounters in that franchise who don’t have weapons but have farming implements we can’t even imagine. That franchise shows a universe where Humanity leaves earth and discovers we’re a bunch of violent weirdos who don’t fit in with the rest of the universe. There’s some other colonial powers we encounter, of course, when Earth needs to be the good guys. But like… Think about that. We might be so steeped in a system that’s been inflicted on us that our first contact with a non-earthbound culture might see that culture being like “so the workers produce all the value, and you beat them up? Why? This doesn’t make any sense. Shouldn’t they be rewarded for the value they provide?”
I feel like the show does a good example of being entertaining while also showing those stark contrasts between the civilizations like you’ve commented. Even more so in the later part of “Stargate Atlantis” where it’s more “cowboys and indians” style. They’re trying to “save” all the planets in the Pegasus galaxy but tend to shoot anything they don’t understand and constantly undermine themselves by making poor decisions when it comes to relations and dealing with people. The inhabitants of the galaxy have continued being successful at trade and socializing (except for a few outliers who can still be known to show honor) even while being under constant threat for their entire recorded history.
You can always hop on over to !stargate@lemmy.ml for more discussions.
I think part of it also stems from our “colonization” of other species on Earth.
We exploit the living shit out of every other living thing while telling ourselves those living things are somehow different from us, don’t experience the same fears, the same pains, and so on. Those of us with an inkling of self-reflection can see how they are like us just by looking at how they react to similar stimulus. We aren’t different but we’ve spent a millennia telling ourselves that we are simply because we have language and can create tools. Both things other animals clearly have and do, but since we don’t understand those animals, instead we treat them as inferior.
I think part of the panic of colonization of other species comes from the deeply rooted realization that we have been brutal, violent executioners of millions of species who may have had similar reasoning capabilities as we do but simply don’t have thumbs so they can do things like write down their language or codify it in any way. Like how humans lived for millions of years without written language…
Anyway, yeah, visceral guilt for being real fucking bastards and killing off so many species that we literally kicked off a mass fucking extinction.
Actions we condemn today were often considered acceptable, even heroic, in their era. Many figures are celebrated for their accomplishments in fields like military leadership, politics, philosophy, or art.
Also national pride, these people become symbols of a nation’s identity and history, youre always taught they’re heroes. They also leave a lasting impact on culture, shaping the art of their era and therefore beyond. Look no further than Napoleon for this one. Or the Mughals.
Power and influence can be awe-inspiring, even if their methods are questionable. These are traits that have throughout history been associated with being morally good in a way. Fame, power, money makes you ‘good’ in many cultures over history. Kings are looked up to, they are seen as people with noble blood. Their actions are inherently correct. I genuinely believe our morality as a society has grown more stringent over time.
Sometimes, people are presented in a simplified, heroic manner without acknowledging their flaws. That’s just the nature of storytelling imo. They aren’t being critically analysed because they are stories. And we make art based on the stories and art that survive. We base stories of Alexander the Great on the art he allowed in his time.
This is brief, I have a lot of opinions on this matter lol.
Bootlickers have a need for daddy worship.
Probably for the same reasons Benjamin Netanyahu was glorified in U.S.A. Congress a few weeks ago.
The comparison to the H man is apt. One of the only reasons this is different is because we had the ability to record and see the outcome of those actions. They were just as brutal in the past, but we don’t have photos and videos of them.
The source of this quote is generally attributed to George W. Bush aide Karl Rove:
The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. 'We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.
I fucking loathe how right Rove was and is.
Curious to hear from more people on whether any of these were portrayed positively in their schooling. My memory of grade school history was that none of these were praised, just noted that they had a huge impact.
Heck, strongest memory of Genghis Khan from grade school is the factoid that 1 in 200 people are descended from him because he raped so many women as he slaughtered his way around Eurasia.
Julius Caesar? Dictator that became so hated by his own political allies, they assassinated him.
Alexander, titled “the Great” for his military prowess, nothing more. Known in my grade school history curriculum for being way ahead of his peers in military strategy. And the whole probably gay by today’s understanding but they probably didn’t have the same words and ideas about sexuality back then.
Edit: I also learned that Hitler was a hell of a politician. Lots of people in Germany at the time struggling in a post WWI mess, Hitler out-manuevered all other politicians to get to where he did with a substantial power base supporting him.
Because the powers that be and the systems they have in place (capitalism, Christian white supremacy, patriarchy, cis-heteronormativity) benefit in one way or another.
If they teach us that Julius Caesar was a bad guy and that it’s good he was defeated, then we might learn that our current leaders are often bad guys too, and that maybe we should do the same to them.
In the same way that if they teach us that Hitler took his inspiration for the holocaust from already firmly established American racism, we might learn that our own history is just as bad and should be fought against at all cost (which is also what we’re taught instead of the reality - the allies fought the Nazis because they threatened their own power, not because of an ideological disagreement).
That’s why we’re not taught (or only given a palatable token example) about working people fighting the owning class for basic rights, Black brown and Indigenous people fighting the Christian white supremacist establishment and winning, and other oppressed groups standing up to their oppressors.
Whitewashing history is always a deliberate act, and is always done in defence of the ruling class.
Xro pulled out the “capitalism, Christian white supremacy, patriarchy, cis-heteronormativity” for this comment!
Especially since their one example is Caesar, who lived in a time when basically everyone was gay!
Edit: and about 1.5 thousand years before capitalism was invented
Julius Ceasar wasn’t so bad. Parenti’s book The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome is an interesting read, looking at his assassination as a reaction from the ruling class who felt threatened by his reformist policies that benefited the lower classes.
In general though we do seem to value the lives and experiences of people in even recent history as lesser. I don’t know why, it’s a good question.
I think you have to ignore large parts of his legacy to consider a genocidal warlord like Caesar “not so bad”.
Pursuing the agenda of the populares may have made him less domestically odious than some of his fellow patricians from the optimates, but he was still a member of the ruling class monopolizing power in his person. On top of the whole brutal genocidal warlord thing.
The people whose deeds reverberate through history are the powerful. The powerful are almost always evil, it’s just how humans work.
Neuroscience shows that as humans get power, our brain’s ability to perform empathy is damaged. So as an organism, a human’s capacity and willingness to inflict misery on others tend to increase in lock step with each other.
You should be more worried about why we glorify horrible contemporary people, or from the more recent past. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Donald Trump, Ellen DeGeneres, the list is endless. There are a lot of people that even glorify Hitler himself.
And wrt Alexander the Great, having killed a lot of people does not make a person horrible. My grandfather killed a lot of people, probably hundreds. He never wanted to talk much about it. He was a great guy and a hero. Alexander the great killed a lot of people, but in doing that he eliminated the enemies of his people. He is recorded in history for spreading civilization, arts, education. He founded many cities that flourished, some of them even stand today. He freed a lot of cities that were ruled by his people’s enemies. His conquests are one of the major reasons modern western civilization exists. He did all that as a military leader and he killed a lot of people.
daddy worship spotted.
Heroes don’t kill hundreds of people, they save them.
Heroes don’t kill hundreds of people, they save them.
Ah, so the people killing Nazi’s in WWII aren’t Heroes anymore. They should have saved the Nazis instead!
Are you hearing yourself?
Bro that statement alone proves that poster is obviously like 12, or trolling. Why are you bothering with a response?
You never know, they could written something out without fully considering the ramifications. It happens.
But Alexander the Great literally has the Great in his name.
Not in every culture/language. It’s like knighthood, people are going to call a knight “sir” even if they are at odds with the British.
