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If you have specialist skills, you count as tribute and will be taken to the capital to be permanently settled there or given to one of the various generals. Also those generals are debating whether killing everyone in particular regions to make more pasture for horses and aheep is a good idea.

You’re too kind. you’re just saying ethnic cleansing in a nicer way

Vaclav Havel made that point once — dissent is seen as much more of a threat when the government claims We Rule Because We Have The One True Answer To Everything.

Which is equally crazy because they're arguing this nonsense to defend the Russian invasion, which is itself explicitly trying to ethnic cleans a multi-ethnic state. Just baby brain shit all the way down.

(this is surprisingly tricky to write about without having the two different words for the two different ways you can be russian)

Also luckily everyone else in the Middle East is super supportive of ethnic and religious minorities - especially if they can claim a long history wherever they are located.

Where in gods name do these idiots come from?

Granted, it was the Soviet Union, not the current Russian state, but they are exactly the reason that the Nansen passport was invented.

Russia not using phosphorus because they care about people claim is particularly funny. We're talking about Russia that shelled a Nuclear Power Plant in Zaporizhzhia? That Russia. It takes a very dense denialist to be able to take any *decade* of Russian history and argue for moral high ground.

And how does someone become a Mongol Empire truther? Like sure, some of the numbers of their victims are inflated but like they definitely existed.

Despite this or any other arguments these people make, the fact that they're doing apologia for a country that has murdered millions of people throughout its history and continues committing war crimes in Ukraine to this very day is really all you need to know about them.

that's only because they can't afford white phosphorous

I heard the Great Khan was just interested in setting up a postal system so he could send a letter from Budapest to Beijing. The empire and conquest were just a little byproduct of that.

It reminded me of the Gothic invaders of the Late Western Empire who would leave as much of the administration standing but placed themselves at the top of the tax collection mechanism. "We want the wealth, however you make that work".

I think the calculus there also changes a lot if we’re talking about the modern world versus the medieval and ancient world

With that in mind, one might even be able to circle back around to that "it's not colonialism" the argument under the premise that there's a dispositive (if purely semantic) distinction to be made between a tributary vassal and a colony.

They say that's one of the reasons the Romans were so successful. Wade in, kill the army, then go "oh you have a thunder guy called Zeus? Yeah, we have him, we call him Jove but whatevs, nice temple BTW, tatty-bye, marching on Gaul now"...and also why it fell apart after adopting monotheism

This can be your theme song m.youtube.com/watch?v=P_Sl...

Yeah, I was partially thinking of Byzantium here.