book review
I recently finished "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" by Jack Weatherford. Overall, really good book, I highly recommend it. But I had one of those moments where I was basically yelling at an inanimate lump of paper.
The Mongels have united most of Asia and finally turn on Europe. They invade Russia, then Poland, then Hungary. They keep winning in exactly the same way, because the Europeans keep making precisely the same mistakes. And you want to root for home team, so you keep thinking "Stop letting the Mongels pick the battlefield! Stop falling for those false retreats! Stop trying to outrun them when your armor weighs many times what theirs weighs, and they have fresh horses waiting and you don't! And for pete's sake, stop killing their envoys that come to talk terms with you--really, they don't find that intimidating so much as reprehensible."
Again, the Europeans do the same thing over and over again, and continue to be defeated to a degree that they haven't experienced in centuries, by a foe they don't recognize. Obviously, they need to try something different. So they turn to each other and go: "What if we tried killing some Jews?" That's right, the Mongels must be the Jews fault. Let's throw a pogrom.
Fuck medieval Europeans. Fuck them right in their reliquaries.
The Mongels have united most of Asia and finally turn on Europe. They invade Russia, then Poland, then Hungary. They keep winning in exactly the same way, because the Europeans keep making precisely the same mistakes. And you want to root for home team, so you keep thinking "Stop letting the Mongels pick the battlefield! Stop falling for those false retreats! Stop trying to outrun them when your armor weighs many times what theirs weighs, and they have fresh horses waiting and you don't! And for pete's sake, stop killing their envoys that come to talk terms with you--really, they don't find that intimidating so much as reprehensible."
Again, the Europeans do the same thing over and over again, and continue to be defeated to a degree that they haven't experienced in centuries, by a foe they don't recognize. Obviously, they need to try something different. So they turn to each other and go: "What if we tried killing some Jews?" That's right, the Mongels must be the Jews fault. Let's throw a pogrom.
Fuck medieval Europeans. Fuck them right in their reliquaries.