Life, Death, and Resurrection
0312366248
John Man
Notes
He was a realist. He knew his rise to power had depended on the choices he made, in politics, in friendships, in strategy. In old age he could see the mistakes of his youth, and would have been concerned to point them out, telling stories against himself to underscore his growing maturity, and emphasize his themes. Divine protection, yes; but the Mongol god, Eternal Heaven, only helps those who help themselves. Success is the hard-won product of suffering and failure.
…these sailors on the ocean of grass needed their forest ports.
…to Genghis loyalty was the moral equivalent of gold; rare, hard-won, easily lost.
(Temujin / Genghis) knows what it is like to be poor and outcast. He knows the crucial importance of family,. He sees when to act, and acts decisively, but he has steady nerves, and can contain himself. Crucially, he can spot a potential ally, and understands how to build loyalty (Temujin would remember the crucial kindness of Sorkan-shira’s boys, and would make one of them a general). By the time he arrived back at his mother’s tent, he might have been eager for revenge, but overriding that impulse must have been a clear commitment to rebuild what had been lost. Revenge would be sweet, but only if it serves the most fundamental need: security.
The overriding consideration was conquest, because, for whatever obscure reason, that was the destiny imposed on Genghis by Heaven. Destruction was a matter of strategy. Sometimes this became personal, when a leader or city caused a particular offence, but it mostly remained coldly impersonal, born of a rock-solid sense of superiority, not over any one group, but over all. Racism is selective, and this the Mongols are not. Absolutely everyone else owed them deference (an attitude shared by a few other peoples at the height of empire, like the British around 1900, eighteenth century Chinese, neo-Conservative American in 2003). Cities, regions, kingdoms and empires tumbled with no other purpose than to assure the next victory, to which death and destruction were incidental. Whatever achieved victory was good; whatever delayed it was bad. Simple as that.
“I am not the author of this trouble; grant me strength to exact vengeance.”
He differed from most others in this: the closer you were to him, the more admirable he seemed…His personality was infused with the certainty of being divinely ordained for world leadership.
Samuel Huntington argues that there are nine players in the contest of civilizations:
- United States is the core of the western empire, of which western Europe is (at present) a part
- Islam
- China
- Orthodoxy (Russia)
- Latin America
- Africa
- Hinduism
- Buddhism
- Japan
The Ten Rules of Eternal Heaven Leadership
- Reward loyalty.
- Be austere.
- Exercise self-control
- Find talent where you can, and use it.
- Kill enemies without compunction.
- Oppose cruelty
- Adapt, and be open to new ways of ruling
- Know that you have divine backing.
- Make you followers and heirs believe it too.
- Respect freedom of belief.
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