Now that the pope has praised him, can we stop pretending Genghis Khan was on the Right?
Dan Hannan
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Can we finally dump the phrase “to the right of Genghis Khan”?
In Mongolia, Pope Francis, surely the leftiest pontiff ever, heaped praise on the terror of the steppes.
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“May heaven grant that today, on this Earth devastated by countless conflicts, there be a renewal, respectful of international laws, of the condition of what was once the Pax Mongolica, that is the absence of conflicts,” he said.
It was an odd take on the man originally called Temujin. While Genghis Khan did indeed establish the Pax Mongolica across the largest contiguous empire in history, he did so by eliminating neighbors with a brutality that still shocks us 800 years later. The Mongols slaughtered between 40 million and 60 million people — around 10% of the world’s population.
Some lefties, Stalin-like, have a thing about breaking eggs to make omelets. Perhaps the pope, whose distrust of Western capitalism runs so deep that he cannot bring himself to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, thinks the ends justify the means. It’s an odd position for a pope to take, I’d say, but I’m no theologian.
The irritating saying “to the right of Genghis Khan” and its sibling “to the right of Attila the Hun” date from the 1960s. It may seem like a trivial thing to complain about, but it illustrates an asymmetry in our discourse, namely the way in which, for a lot of commentators, the term “right-wing” has simply come to mean “bad guys.”
Thus, for example, the hard-line ayatollahs in Tehran are “right-wing,” even though they abolished the monarchy, confiscated property, exiled the bourgeoisie, and declared war on the capitalist world. Soviet nostalgics are similarly “right-wing.” Terrorists of any kind are “right-wing.” The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the clue is in the name) was “right-wing.” The Genghis Khan jibe simply pushes that association to its conclusion.
It is hard to see how the Mongol emperor could, in any sense, be called a conservative. He destroyed the traditional social structures of both the Mongol tribes and their vassal peoples, replacing established aristocracies with what we might almost call a state bureaucracy. He had no time for national self-determination, seeking to blend and homogenize his conquered nations. He was even a decimalizer, organizing military and administrative units in blocs of tens, hundreds, and so on, in a way that would have met with approval from French revolutionaries or Bolsheviks.
But he committed genocide, right? So, according to the weird nomenclature of our age, obviously, he’s some kind of right-winger.
In reality, the worst genocides of the modern age have been carried out by revolutionary socialists. Put to one side the self-proclaimed socialism of Hitler and his followers. Forget that, when Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, Joseph Goebbels exulted in the opportunity to impose “der echte Sozialismus,” real socialism, in the place of debased Jewish Bolshevism. Even if we disregard all that, the Nazis killed 17 million people, the communists 100 million. Really, we should talk of antifa and their ilk as being “to the left of Genghis Khan.”
Except, of course, that we wouldn’t dream of doing that because right-wingers think their opponents are mistaken, not evil. This is the fundamental imbalance in politics. Conservatives might see leftists as woolly-minded and naive but not wicked. Leftists, by contrast, see conservatives as cruel, selfish, and bigoted.
Why? Partly because of the leftist saturation of popular culture. I have noticed that my right-wing friends are much more likely to have left-wing authors on their bookshelves than the other way around. Not because conservatives are more broad-minded but because most authors are on the Left. So are most screenwriters, comedians, and celebrities. If you’re on the Right, you can’t help getting a sense of what makes leftists tick. But the reverse is not true.
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There is also, behavioral psychologists have found, a difference in mindset. At the core of the leftist worldview is concern for the oppressed. Hence, for example, wanting to preserve indigenous culture in poor and primitive countries but to efface it in wealthy Western ones. Right-wingers understand sympathy with underdogs because they share it. But they balance it against other concerns, such as loyalty to faith and flag, intolerance of freeloading, reverence for tradition, and dislike of coercion. Because leftists generally do not share these concerns, they can assume that people who disagree with them lack compassion.
This matters because constantly likening people to Hitler, Genghis Khan, or Attila the Hun has consequences. There will come a point at which you stop thinking of them as opponents and start thinking of them as dangers to humanity. And that never ends well.