Mongolia’s Surprising Legacy

 David Beard
Excerpts from an article in Today’s World

For some people Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon’s recent emphasis on the role of the Mongolian peoples is a bit puzzling, even disconcerting. Why Mongolians, of all people? Can the people of Genghis Khan really play a role in bringing about a world of peace?

In recent years both historians and anthropologists have taken a fresh look at the entire history of the country and its people, both before and after the empire of the warrior king whose name was once synonymous with unchecked power and ruthless rule. More is now emerging about Genghis Khan’s good contributions to the world. But for a long time this was not the case.

For example, a search in the archives of the Time magazine for articles printed in the 1970s that contain at least one reference to Genghis Khan produced twenty-two, none of them positive. There were four random references, such as when “Genghis Khan” was the name of an actress’ Lhasa Apso dog; four historical facts; one misstated historical allusion; four comments on leadership; two on conservative politics; and a slur of the Chinese people by a Russian. Genghis Khan was also used in descriptions of an autocratic homosexual ballet troupe founder, Adolph Hitler, killer bees, sadistic elements in the Iranian military, a torturer by his victim and a slaughter of students by soldiers.

In some respects Genghis Khan’s reputation in the West has suffered from an anti-Eastern bias. We learn of Napoleon’s contributions to modern French law or the contributions to road building and architecture made under the Roman Caesars, yet how often have we heard that it was the Mongols that first unified China [The misstated historical allusion in Time in the 1970s referred to Mongolians living in modern China as once having been ruled over by Genghis Khan, when in fact these are descendants of Mongolians who ruled all of China under Genghis Khan’s grandson Kublai Khan.] or that they introduced paper currency and the concept of diplomatic immunity? Most conquerors have both accomplishments and atrocities attributed to them. Alexander the Great is characterized as a “great military tactician” and Napoleon Bonaparte a “brilliant military strategist.” Which global conqueror other than Genghis Khan is commonly designated “a barbarian”?

The Mongolian “Spot”
Three generations of continual warfare in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries conducted by the family of Temujin, the Mongol man who was given the title Genghis Khan, yielded a people connected globally by a shared physical trait, the appearance of blue spots on their buttocks during babyhood.

A 2003 report in the American Journal of Human Genetics, entitled “The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols,” begins, “We have identified a Y-chromosomal lineage with several unusual features. It was found in sixteen populations throughout a large region of Asia, stretching from the Pacific to the Caspian Sea, and was present at high frequency: 8 percent of the men in this region carry it, and it thus makes up 0.5 percent of the world total. The pattern of variation within the lineage suggested that it originated in Mongolia—a thousand years ago. Such a rapid spread cannot have occurred by chance; it must have been a result of selection. The lineage is carried by likely male-line descendants of Genghis Khan, and we therefore propose that it has spread by a novel form of social selection resulting from their behavior.”

Non-religious scholars have a hard time explaining what motivated a man raised as a herder and hunter to expend so much effort conquering so much territory. Professor Morris Rossabi, a professor of Central Asian History at Columbia University, writes, “Thus, the rise of Chinggis Khan [There are various ways of rendering Mongol names and words into English script. Professor Rossabi is using the form most common in Mongolia, home of Chinggis Khan International Airport.] and the creation of a great Mongol confederation were aberrations. An ecological crisis, commercial conflicts with neighbors, and a reported belief or injunction from the Sky God to Chinggis to dominate the world probably prompted the Mongols’ explosion from Mongolia early in the thirteenth century.”

Father Moon’s straightforward explanation seems to be in line with the genetic report. As the Mongolian Empire spread, so did the lineage of Cain and Shem, the first son of Adam and the first son of Noah. He called the Mongolian Peoples' Federation for World Peace—representative of those lineages—“a movement to comfort God's heart of pain over Adam's family.”

Cain and Abel
To understand the significance of the Mongolian People’s Federation for World Peace in the struggle to secure permanent peace, one needs the perspective of its founder. To Sun Myung Moon, for a nation to move from a communist system of government to a democratic one is progress, but democracy alone is not satisfactory stopping point. His vision is of a human family that would have developed if our original ancestors had not fallen away from our Creator. If we are not striving to reach that point, to speak or dream of lasting peace is unrealistic and even self-delusional.

Father Moon sees the falling away of our long-ago ancestors as a two-part catastrophe: Adam and Eve’s original separation from God—tragic and heartbreaking in itself—was compounded by the murder of Abel by Cain. Abel was the younger brother, whom God responded to as if he were the eldest. Cain stood by as Abel’s offering was accepted. Cain apparently felt consuming resentment when—though he was the eldest son—his offering was seemingly not good enough to merit God’s approval. 

Through the offerings, God placed Abel in a situation representing relative goodness and Cain in a situation representing relative evil. If Abel had empathized with Cain instead of being smug when his offering was accepted, and if Cain had felt glad for his brother’s good fortune instead of nursing hurt pride, perhaps murder and thus war would be unknown to us. If Cain and Abel had managed to continue loving each other as brothers, the world would not be as it is today.

The Cain–Abel dynamic can be seen on different levels; surely many Koreans can relate it to their own divided nation. Even for non-Koreans, don’t the North and South resemble quarrelling brothers? The division of Europe following the Second World War can also be looked at in light of Abel and Cain. Interestingly, some people understood Europe’s division into communist and non-communist blocs as a distant effect of the Mongol Empire. In a 1950 column in the New York Times, we find, “The Mongols made a large contribution to the present unhappy state of the world in that they helped divide Europe into East and West sectors. Russians often tell us that they saved Europe from the Tartars [a term sometimes mistakenly used for Mongols] and they claim great credit for that feat, but the important fact remains that the Golden Horde [Mongols who occupied Russia], ruling from the Sea of Aral to the Carpathians, effectively cut off a gigantic slice of Europe from the life-giving influences of the Renaissance and turned the attention of the Russians toward the East.”

When Father Moon speaks about Mongolian peoples, he rarely speaks about Genghis Khan. An electronic search of the Korean computer files of  the three hundred printed volumes of Father’s Moon’s speeches reveals that Genghis Khan is only mentioned a few times and only incidentally.

Still, as a Cain-figure, there are eerie parallels between the life of Genghis Khan and that of Cain. As a young man, the future Genghis Khan killed his older half-brother [This is recorded in “The Secret History of the Mongols,” a book passed down through the ages that Mongolians today apparently deem accurate]. He became attached to an elder-brother figure and then struggled mightily when circumstances put him in a subservient position. Also, although he accumulated perhaps more power and more wealth than any man ever on earth, even before his death there were signs, which he surely recognized, that disunity within his family would tear his empire apart.

Among the many favorable qualities of Genghis Khan was tolerance for all religions; this stood out strongly when compared with the practices of the religious figures of his day. He forbade torture of any person and introduced tax exemption for clergy of all religions at a time when Muslims and Christians were killing each other over control of Jerusalem and the church had approved the use of torture by priests against suspected heretics.

Particularly interesting was the story of Genghis Khan’s birth. It is said that he emerged from his mother’s womb holding coagulated blood in his hand. According to tradition, this was a sign that he would become a great warrior. With Father Moon’s emphasis on bloodline, I wondered if it signified to him that this man was the seed of the global Cain lineage and that a second chance had come for a global-level Cain and Abel to embrace each other as brothers and rectify the past.