Genocide, Part 1 of 2

7 Responses

1. I found this on Wikipedia in answer to how many heads can you put in a pyramid:

   “The Mongols also employed other gruesome terror tactics to weaken the will to resist. One infamous incident occurred during Tamerlane’s Indian campaign. Tamerlane, an heir to the Mongol martial tradition, built a pyramid of 90,000 human heads in front of the walls of Delhi, to convince them to surrender.”

2. I think it was in this doco (Dr Alice Roberts’ The Incredible Human Journey, available http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/incredible-human-journey/) that I heard it rumoured that Gengis Khan fathered roughly 10,000 bastards in his time, which also had a significant effect on demographics, in addition to all the killing, which I hadn’t realised had been so extensive. Surely if they’d taken 30m slaves that would have rivaled the 28m or so slaves that exist today, right?

   Very interesting and horrible episode. I’d heard the name Truganini before growing up but hadn’t ever picked who she was.

3. The Washington Redkins football team have been getting a lot of flack lately because their name in not politically correct. After listening to this show New Zealand’s rugby team The Maori All Blacks seems to take the cake.

   https://www.allblacks.com/index.cfm?layout=team_maoriAllBlacks

   1. The NZ national rugby union team, the All Blacks (not “The Maori All Blacks”) are named after their uniform and have many white players

4. Perhaps the best use (and non-use, in the case of Middle Eastern) of accents of any episodes.

5. Great episode guys! Though, I think you might be exaggerating a bit when it comes to the Tasmanian aboriginals. There seems to be great controversy concerning how many died from diseases and/or alcoholism and how many died from the colonizers killing them. Some sources say that only 118 were killed by the colonizers. I’m not saying that it makes it less tragic in any way, but it was not a deliberate genocide.

6. Don’t see how the Mongol and Timurid conquests can be categorised as genocide. They were certainly unprecedented in their slaughter of civilians but no different, other than in scope, than the military campaigns of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, etc.