Chapter 3: But What About All The Other Ideologies? Part III

The modern historian Stuart Richards has researched this topic thoroughly, and I am indebted to his analyses for my understanding of the Mongols (Stuart Richards, "The History of the Mongol Khanates," YouTube, June 1, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw94tCgTyQY ) To summarize his findings, Genghis Khan established a "redistributionist barracks state" that united the steppe nomads of Eurasia under his rule for the purpose of plundering the settled lands of Eurasia. This state had a sort of nascent democracy among the nomads, who could elect their khan from among Genghis Khan's descendants, but it was brutal extortion for the non-Mongol peasants who had to pay the nomads' exorbitant salaries. Merchants were protected and patronized, because the nomads still needed to buy things with the money they stole. It was cradle-to-grave socialism for the nomads, and ruthless capitalism and imperialism for everyone else.

But the Mongol khan was still above the rest of the nomads, and the power and prestige of the khan was still so great that fighting over the throne, blatantly referred to as the "seat of joy," that the Mongol Empire didn't last in a united fashion for even one hundred years. A civil war raged between rival claimants of the throne, and although peace was eventually declared, the empire was never reunited. Then those fragment khanates went to war with each other, and their heirs fought civil wars among themselves, and they shattered into smaller and smaller shards until the last one fell to Russia around the same time as America declared its independence. The Mongol khanates were bougie atomization, brought about by utopianism and individualism, expressed through illiberal violence. That is the nazbol position, the rarest of all the political positions because liberals can usually co-opt their enemies somehow. It is the least durable of all the political positions save for fascism: Fascist regimes average five years after starting a major war; nazbol regimes can last for hundreds of years in a split and atomized form so long as they maintain the power of the soldiers in relation to the rest of society.

Furthermore, like the bougie liberals who are too few in number to ever win a direct fight against the other classes, the bougie nazbols likewise have to resort to tricks, propaganda, false consciousness, brainwashing, and killing at a distance in order to achieve victory. The Mongols slaughtered every city that resisted or revolted, in order to terrorize the survivors into acquiescing to their rule. Occasionally cities that surrendered still had their numbers culled, simply because the Mongol cavalry was too small to leave any viable resistance in its rear areas. The Mongols, like modern-day Americans with our Predator drones or British imperialists with Maxim guns and airplanes, killed at a distance and used strategems like the feigned retreat in order to husband their small numbers. The Mongol khanates, the British Empire and the American sphere of influence were, to paraphrase Mao, paper tigers that roared. Their numbers alone, their propaganda alone, their weapons alone, none of these things could have guaranteed victory. But in conjunction, it was enough to create a "Mongol century," a "British century," and an "American century."

Looking at the contemporary historian ibn al-Athar's "On the Tatars," he described the terror the Mongols instilled and the effect it had, and what could nonetheless be done about it:

"And I have heard that one of them took a man captive, but had not with him any weapon wherewith to kill him; and he said to his prisoner, "Lay your head on the ground and do not move," and he did so, and the Tatar went and fetched his sword and slew him therewith. Another man related to me as follows: "I was going," said he, "with seventeen others along a road, and there met us a Tatar horseman, and bade us bind one another's arms. My companions began to do as he bade them, but I said to them, "He is but one man; wherefore, then, should we not kill him and flee?' They replied, 'We are afraid.' I said, 'This man intends to kill you immediately; let us therefore rather kill him, that perhaps God may deliver us.' But I swear by God that not one of them dared to do this, so I took a knife and slew him, and we fled and escaped.' And such occurrences were many." (Edward Browne, A Literary History of Persia Vol. II, p. 431, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/1220al-Athir-mongols.asp).

Genghis Khan's propaganda was so much whimpering not to rise up or else, you guys, but a bit of organization of the oppressed and the Mongol yoke was easily broken.

To elaborate on this facet of the liberal/nazbol connection: if individualism, alienation, atomization, and the use of propaganda in lieu of force is the thing that connects liberals and nazbols, the difference between them is summed up by, of all things, the movie Donnie Darko. In a part of the movie, Donnie's bougie private school tells him that the range of human emotion can be summed up between fear and love. Donnie, being raised in a liberal society where both fear and love are vacuous shells of themselves, protests heartily that there is far more to human emotion than those two, but his bougie liberal teacher insists if he doesn't complete the assignment, he'll get a zero for the day. After he refuses in forthright terms, his bougie liberal principal argues with his parents about it. What is illuminating about this clip, and this vacuous concept, is that it really is the range of human emotions as bougies see them, simply because they are too fundamental to the human condition and class ideology for even their deadened souls to ignore. Liberalism reflects their vacuous love, nazbolism reflects their vacuous fear. Their propaganda can reflect that vacuous love, as the bae of pigs JFK's did, or it can reflect that vacuous fear, as seen with the Mongols. This vacuous love manifests as "the smug style in American liberalism." But as strange as it may be to say, some sort of love and some sort of fear are what divides the ideologies of every class.

Continue reading Part IV