Today¹ is Genghis Khan day in Mongolia.

Mongolia has an annual national holiday celebrating Genghis Khan. I am not the first non-Mongolian person on the internet to notice this. The History YouTube channel Premodernist made a video to commemorate the day in 2022, and a follow up video diving deeper into the topic. I want to summarize his points, and add my two cents to that conversation.

Premodernist’s main point is that history has multiple narratives, and that any attempt to write history involves picking and choosing what you include in that narrative. There’s an objective set of facts that happened, but it is usually impossible to know what those facts are and always impossible to tell the story of those facts in a completely unbiased way.

Genghis Khan illustrates this point well. His contemporary neighbors might have viewed him as a vicious warlord. Modern historians outside Mongolia might view him as a brutal but effective conqueror, and a product of his time.

In Mongolia, though, he’s the leader who united the Mongol tribes. The part where he conquered Eurasia was just his foreign policy – interesting perhaps, but not part of the main narrative. There are lots of reasons for this. One big one is that in the communist period, when Mongolia was heavily influenced by the USSR, Mongolian national identity was suppressed. Holding Genghis as a hero is in part a backlash to that suppression.

Conquering a continent and a half: just foreign policy?

Premodernist also warns us against judging the Mongolians without looking carefully at our own past. As an American, I agree with Premodernist that our foreign policy hasn’t been great for our neighbors, either – just ask Latin America. To add my own example, the firebombing of Tokyo (among other cities) during World War Two was at least plausibly as cruel as the Mongols sacking Samarkand (among other cities).

To be clear, even though I think that firebombing a defeated city is similarly cruel as sacking one, I do think Genghis Khan was a morally worse person than Franklin D. Roosevelt and his generals. America attacked Tokyo because Japan had just invaded many of its neighbors, while Genghis attacked Samarkand during his own war of conquest.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

But think about what factors affect Americans’ views of FDR today. FDR’s proponents praise his efforts to rebuild our economy during the Great Depression. His detractors criticize his attempts to pack the Supreme Court and grow the power of the Executive at the expense of Congress.

For most presidents, their domestic achievements mean much more than their foreign accomplishments. For FDR particularly, World War Two is a big part of his legacy. Still, we usually discuss his impact on the home front: our war industries and our morale as a nation. Certainly part of this is that unlike Genghis Khan, FDR never led troops in the field. Credit for our hard won victories in the field go to our military commanders, like Eisenhower or Bradley.

Napoleon Bonaparte

An even better analogy might be Napoleon. Napoleon was also a conqueror who led armies in the field, and was viewed by his contemporaries as brutal. War crimes are a less prominent part of Napoleon’s public reputation than they are for Genghis Khan’s reputation, but Napoleon did commit plenty, including executing thousands of Turkish prisoners of war, and looting Europe’s treasures to fill the Louvre. In Napoleon’s favor, he did create the code of laws that still serves as the foundation for justice in much of Europe (and beyond).

The French view of Napoleon today seems a bit more measured than the Mongolian view of Genghis Khan. In a 2023 survey, 34% of surveyed French adults had a positive opinion of Napoleon, another 34% had a neutral view, and 21% had a negative view (the remainder were unsure).² French President Emmanuel Macron intentionally called the ceremonies on the 200^th anniversary of Napoleon’s death “commemoration, not a celebration”.

Genghis Khan day may seem odd to us, or perhaps even callous to the victims of the Mongol conquests. But it definitely makes historical sense, and I don’t think it’s unfair for Mongolians to respect the man who united their nation. So this Genghis Khan day, think about how history has shaped your corner of society, and how your corner of society has shaped history.

Coming Soon: Designing a mechanical calculator