Our Arbitrary Fascination with Conquerors

Who is your favorite conqueror?  Is it Napoleon?  Or perhaps Julius Caesar?  Or maybe Alexander the Great?  Probably not Hitler.

Much of the way that we are informed about the history of our world is through stories of conquest and empire.  Sadly, that seems to be the most interesting aspect of human development for many of us.  In some cases, it is a morbid fascination.  But history has a way of glorifying or condemning conquest in a rather arbitrary manner.

Conquest is generally a pretty dirty business.  People are not eager to be conquered and they tend to resist.  So conquerors attack or lay siege to the places they want to conquer.  It isn’t pretty.  People are slaughtered, raped, tortured and enslaved.  The butcher’s bill for conquest is never a small one and often mind-boggling.  There are no saintly conquerors.

But somehow, we tend to have soft spots for certain conquerors while being horrified by others.  We build monuments and dedicate statues to celebrate the favored ones, and graphically depict the brutality of those out of favor in paintings, stories and movies.  We admire Alexander the Great and his vast empire, yet we despise Attila the Hun.  We celebrate the clever military achievements of Julius Caesar, but we abhor the cruelty of Genghis Khan, whose military accomplishments were probably just as clever, or perhaps more so, than Caesar’s.

Closer to home and the current epoch, we give a pass to British conquest and imperialism as if it were just jolly good fun and an effective way to establish commerce. We also romanticize our brutal removal and quasi-genocide of Native Americans from the lands that we coveted and ultimately conquered.  And the French still revere Napoleon, whose conquests left a trail of misery and death across Europe.  

For many years we also celebrated Christopher Columbus, whose legacy is one of exploitation, slavery, and mass murder.  The other so-called conquistadors, despite their greed-driven, monstrous acts, were also generally treated rather gently by history until recent times.

On the other hand, we are indignant over the conquests of Hitler, Mussolini and Japan that precipitated WW2, and categorically condemn the Soviet and Chinese conquests associated with the spread of communism.

It seems that the beauty of conquest is in the eye of the beholder.  If the beholders are the ones being conquered and annihilated, the beauty is somewhat diminished.  There are, to be sure, no monuments to Custer on Indian reservations.

The real question isn't why some conquerors are revered and others are reviled, or even whether one is more despicable than the next.  The real question is why we don't recognize that all conquest is detestable and cease glorifying any aspect of it.