It occurs to me that there is something else I wanted to add about Mongolia, but failed to in my discussion last month. We discussed the reasons for the Mongols military success but skipped the rest of the story– which is actually more important.
Military conquest is one thing, and it has immense long-term consequences. If it’s followed up by political conquest, the consequences are even greater. Cultural conquest can be greater yet, even though it’s completely non-violent. America is often accused of “cultural imperialism” by the chattering classes. Well, I understand the resentment of the intellectuals, but McDonalds has never tried to subjugate the natives. And even if the U.S. Marines did, there’s never been a conspiracy to insinuate ad-bearing T-Shirts, baseball caps and Hollywood movies into the farthest reaches of the planet. It happened because everybody (except the intellectuals, of course) actively reached out for those things. American culture has overwhelmed the rest of the world.
The most definitive type of conquest, however, is demographic. And it’s also the most problematic, because it can’t be undone. What do you do if you own, or thought you owned, a place like Kosovo, and millions of people from a different culture wind up living there? How can you get rid of them? The answer is that you can’t – short of what has come to be called “ethnic cleansing.” Actually, ethnic cleansing is mankind’s most time-honored solution to the rather intractable problem of what you do with the recalcitrant locals you just don’t want to deal with.
In primeval times, the most certain way to deal with the outsiders you couldn’t use as slaves was simply to kill them. It made some sense in a world where resources were looked on as a zero-sum game, where the fewer people there were to share with, the better off you were. That, and it made no sense to keep around the friends and relatives of people you killed, because they might resent it and return the favor, with extreme prejudice. What Hitler did to the Jews was actually no different from what conquerors have always done with people who didn’t accommodate themselves to the newest world order. Hitler’s viewed as a special devil not because his actions were so unusual, or even because they were an unwelcome anachronism in modern capitalistic times. Rather, it’s that he zeroed in on particular ethnic groups, unlike Marxist-oriented despots like Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, who killed absolutely anybody, based on belief alone.
In pre-industrial times, conquered minority people who kept their own customs and resisted integration were likely to be ethnically cleansed. Fortunately, in modern, secular, urban, capitalistic societies they are, or should be, a non-problem. Today’s society makes it easy for people to associate (or not) with whom they wish, intermarry, and even open restaurants with strange cuisines to profit from outsiders. So I’m optimistic that, notwithstanding its historic advantages, ethnic cleansing will be less of a problem as the world becomes richer. Genghis Khan, and Tamurlane (1336-1405), were notorious for ethnic cleansing. But the Chinese have perfected an even better way of spreading and perpetuating their genes – which is probably the basic reason people go in for this kind of thing in the first place.
The Mongolians may have conquered the Chinese militarily, and then politically; but the Chinese conquered the Mongolians demographically. The Chinese don’t cleanse an area; they submerge it in humanity. Everyone in human-rights circles is outraged about the Chinese conquest of Tibet in the early ’50s. OK, that wasn’t very nice, but it was completely unexceptional; that’s what countries do. But what made it different than most conquests, as well as permanent and irretrievable, is that Beijing caused millions of ethnic Han to populate Tibet. And they’re never going home, because most of Tibet’s residents are now Han who have been born there, and they substantially outnumber the “natives.” The human-rights types never mention that exactly the same thing happened in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, I presume because it’s so far in the past it’s pointless to protest.
“Mongolia” used to be one place until the mid-1600s, when the distinction between “Inner” (which is today just a province of China) and “Outer” (which is the independent country we’re discussing) was first made. The Mongolians have attempted to regain the lost territory, but when you’re dealing with demographic immersion, resistance is futile – unless you’re both incredibly powerful and ruthless.
Incidentally, there’s a lesson here for America, one that I’ve commented on before. Even today, there are a half-dozen states (prominently including California and Texas) that are closing in on less than 50 percent Anglo populations. There’s every reason why that trend is likely to accelerate; within most people’s lifetimes Hispanics will be majorities. Personally, I have no problem with it. In fact, from a strictly historical perspective, you can see it as the Hispanics retaking territory that was originally theirs; Anglos only really started laying claim to the southwest in the 1830s.
Of course, I see all these arguments about “our” land as spurious and ridiculous to start with; the land belongs to the individuals that own it, and their race is academic. But I recognize that’s not the way most people see it, so there will likely be problems of every type you can imagine as Hispanic and other non-European cultures demographically capture large portions of the U.S. in the decades to come. I actually expect we’ll see an “Inner” and an “Outer” Texas; Americans will get to feel like the Mongols.
It will likely turn into a huge political problem. People seem genetically programmed to prefer people of their own ethnic background to those of another genetic background. The more genes we share with people, the more we’re likely to treat them as brothers. The fewer genes we share, the more likely we are to treat them as “other.” That’s why we treat apes (with whom we share something around 98 percent of our genes) better than horses, horses better than fish, and fish better than nematodes (with whom we share about 50 percent of our genes) – because the greater the genetic difference, the less human (or like ourselves) they are. So, looked at from a strictly biological point of view, the “open door” policy of Western countries, welcoming massive immigration of different races, would seem to be asking for trouble.
A solution? Well, assuming it actually is a problem, the only solution I can figure is one that the Chinese wholly approve of: Make sure you’re wealthy enough to avoid being adversely affected by whatever happens.
Incidentally, the Mongolians are no fans of the Chinese, not least because of this history. It’s no accident that it’s quite hard for a Chinese to get a visa to enter Mongolia.
