I recently finished the 5-part series on the Mongols, cheekily entitled "Wrath of the Khans." To begin it, the host, Dan Carlin asks the question: what if someone wrote a revisionist history of the Nazis, extolling all of the "good" things they did for society?
The question is raised as a starting point to discuss how as time grows distant between the present and the past, historians tend to white wash and downplay the horrible genocidal acts and other atrocities carried out by history's "great men" like Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and of course the topic of the show, Genghis Khan.
While the Mongol conquests established permanent communications between Europe and Asia, and may have been a catalyst for the Renaissance, it's estimated that Genghis Khan and his successors may have murdered up to 50 million people. Carlin does what he can in five parts to keep us from forgetting that. As he describes it: "In one of the most violent outbursts in history a little-known tribe of Eurasian nomads breaks upon the great societies of the Old World like a human tsunami. It may have ushered in the modern era, but at what cost?"
