May 06, 2005

5/6 - Shifting baselines of history: Osama Bin Laden's Perspective on Baghdad

There's a very good article in last week's New Yorker (April 25) taking Osama Bin Laden to task for his statement a couple of years ago that the U.S. had destroyed Baghdad worse than Hulagu of the Mongols in 1258. That's Hulagu whose Mongol horde killed 1.6 million people with arrows, clubs, and swords in the city of Herat in northwest Afghanistan in 1222. And when he took over Baghdad, after leveling the place, he ordered his 90,000 soldiers to each bring him a skull which they then made into a pyramid. How many skulls were U.S. soldiers ordered to gather?

What can you say other than "shifting baselines." Somehow Bin Laden's baseline of violence is a bit shifted. Not that I'm any sort of supporter of the Iraq war, it's just nice to keep track of how the past gets distorted. And I loved the quote a decade ago when Oliver Stone made, "Natural Born Killers," and said in an interview, "we live in the most violent society that has ever inhabited the planet." Duh, really? Worse than feeding christians to lions? Need to keep those baselines intact.
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Hulago: his army makes American troops look like boy scouts

Posted by Randy Olson at May 6, 2005 12:36 AM