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there are genuine “the Mongols didn’t actually invade anybody” truthers on this FREE website that’s entertainment no LLM could generate

I guess I can see why you wouldn’t think Russia was waging a brutal colonialist war in Ukraine if you also put scare quotes around the word “colonialist” in reference to the literal Mongols, lol

I’m actually a big fan of Mongol history and find them to be fascinating but like, I’m pretty sure they themselves were very clear on the whole “yup, we’re 100% conquering you guys by the sword and the horse” thing

specialists would have better takes on this but i also got the sense the Mongols being pretty straight-forward about their goals being “acquiring land and resources” without wasting much time on ofty religious/moral justifications was also a key reason they were pretty religiously tolerant

in quite a few ways you’d rather have a conqueror who just wants your stuff and to extract tribute going forward - and who isn’t really interested in the Moral Fabric of Religious And Racial Purity

Byzantium is an interesting study of this too. That era of conquest was pretty different from later empires; that so many ethno/religious nationalists see themselves as liberation projects today proves the fallacy in retrofitting power theories. See also: Viking raiders vs the Raj England became.