war 8
- Genghis Khan's army was the greatest military force in history, and no power will ever repeat what it did.
- Anyone with a craft survived a Mongol conquest, whatever the craft was — skill was the one thing the Mongols never destroyed.
Jack Weatherford
Anthropologist and author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, and DeWitt Wallace Professor of Anthropology emeritus at Macalester College.
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What Jack Weatherford says most about
China 7
- There is no documented case of anyone crossing between China and Europe before the Mongols, and since Genghis Khan there has not been a single year without contact between East and West.
- The Mongol Empire was destroyed by the plague, which its own courier system carried out of southern China to the rest of the world.
America 2
- America keeps losing wars because it attacks the capital first; the Mongol method was to take the countryside and let the city starve.
- Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not military targets — they were acts of terror against women and children, and Americans should say so before condemning the Mongols.
family 2
- The real source of the feuding that tore the Mongol steppe apart was women, which is why Genghis Khan's first law outlawed kidnapping and selling them.
- The section of the Secret History in which Genghis Khan rewards his daughters was cut out of the surviving text.
government 2
- The Mongol Empire was the first modern empire, because Genghis Khan invented the idea of one supreme law under which every people keeps its own.
- Genghis Khan reached his laws through the practical experience of being hurt, never through ideology or the study of moral right.
Japan 2
- The Japanese defeated the Mongol invasions; the typhoon only sank the ships afterwards, and it deserves far less credit than it gets.
- Kublai Khan's invasion of Japan failed on its own terms but achieved its real purpose, which was cutting the Southern Song off from Japanese sulphur for gunpowder.
Russia 2
- Genghis Khan's army was the greatest military force in history, and no power will ever repeat what it did.
- A nation of a million people cannot rule hundreds of millions by warfare; the Mongol Empire lasted because it offered its subjects things they actually wanted.