Mongolia and Conservatism in the US

Over the weekend I was finishing up Robert P. Newman's "Owen Lattimore and the 'Loss' of China" (UC Press 1992), and I came across the following passage:

Sokolsky reviewed the "great power of Ghengis [sic] Khan, which in the 13th Century conquered China and conquered much of Europe, east of Germany. It held Russia for a prolonged period. It held India and the Mongol Empire in India. It is Mongolia which is being revived as a power in this attempt to force upon the world the United Nations. This peril which is really greater than one imagines because, to us, the name Mongolia hardly means anything anymore and yet, out of that desert land has come this great power which at one time dominated much of the world and which can do it again if armed and given the direction and guidance that could lead to that. This, then, is our peril at the time." (pg. 507)

The passage is a transcript from a radio broadcast on ABC July 16, 1961 in which conservative columnist George Sokolsky was reacting to news that Owen and Eleanor Lattimore were in the People's Republic of Mongolia on a study tour at the same time the Kennedy administration was exploring the possibility of diplomatically recognizing Mongolia. According to Newman, a firestorm was unleashed by the coincidence of these two events among ultraconservatives, causing people like Sokolsky to make fatuous comments like the one above. Surely only the truly ignorant and uneducated at the time would have accepted the recognition of Mongolia as first step in reviving the Mongol Empire under the auspices of the United Nations?

Yet, these sorts of musings unfettered by reality and basic research seem to still find their way into conservative media in the United States. The above passage reminded me of a full page ad printed last year in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) by Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF) expressing real and immediate concern that Mongolia was backsliding in its commitment to protect private property rights and democracy, implying that it was moving down a path ideologically hostile to the foreign policy of the US. True, the ad was not an editorial, so it did not necessarily represent the views of the newspaper. But, WSJ still printed the ad, which called for punitive action against Mongolia in the form of removing its Millennium Challenge Account funds if progress was not made in its allegedly deteriorating record of upholding the rights of private businessmen.

I believe the very same week an article was printed in the Washington Times painting Mongolia as a significant player in a worldwide sea born smuggling ring of illicit materials to rogue states. The Times article is an amusing read because it comes across as a similar attempt to Sokolsky's passage above to construct a conspiracy from one's readers' active imaginations without reference to common sense or basic fact. I do not contest that Mongolian ships have occasionally been used for nefarious purposes (I have not researched this, so it could be true), but taking it to the level of geo-political maneuvering sort of defies logic. I would not be surprised to learn that 9 in 10 Mongolians and an equal ratio of parliamentarians are unaware that Mongolia even has a maritime fleet. It is more likely a criminal matter than a geo-political matter. The government can hardly enforce the traffic laws in Ulaanbaatar, should we be surprised that it is unable to control who flies the Mongolian flag on international waters on occasion? The argument in the editorial seems very far fetched and construed to support a particular agenda.

This entry is not intended to be a survey of US conservative views on Mongolia but rather a reflection on historical and modern examples of the strange views on Mongolia that can make their way into print in the US. It is altogether possible that liberal outlets also have an odd predilection to present fantasy about the situation in Mongolia, but so far I have only seen the really weird stuff come from the right. It makes one wonder what the fascination with Mongolia is and why there is little effort to actually do even the most rudimentary research to support conjectures about the country. The simple answer probably involves the desires of business interests seeking to reap profits or ideologues seeking to promote particular beliefs in a world that matches that which is invented for the pages of newspapers. Understanding reality, in the case of Mongolia's reality, may not be nearly as attractive for those particular people. It's not exactly mass denial or outright lying but rather a wishful attempt to use the power of argument to bend reality to conform to the requisites of one's own agenda.

One conclusion that I have come to from reading Newman's book is that Owen Lattimore's biggest crime was actually doing research (e.g. learning local languages and customs and interviewing regular people in Inner Asia) and then reporting the truth back to power. One can see recent parallels in other geo-political hot spots in the world in which prominent people have suggested listening, showing empathy, doing field research, and reporting the truth about people who inhabit those areas to make better policy decisions. When there is big money involved, though, it is fair to surmise that it is easy for people with active imaginations to paint a picture they want policy makers and the public to believe is true. It does make one pause and consider that with $100 billion worth of copper and gold sitting in the Gobi Desert, it behooves everyone--Mongolians and foreigners with a vested interest in Mongolia alike--to be educated about the basic facts of the world and Mongolia's own history. Otherwise, even ideas as ludicrous as Sokolsky's above or the Washington Times editorialist's can potentially gain traction in the absence of credible and forceful arguments based on facts and reality.

Re-evaluating Chinggis Khaan

Dr. Rossabi gave his lecture yesterday evening entitled: Recent Re-Evaluations of Chinggis Khaan and Khubilai Khan. Before the lecture the School of Foreign Service at the National University of Mongolia conferred on him the title of "Honary Doctor" and presented him with a doctoral robe, medal, and diploma. It was a well attended event with more than 60 people.

If anyone expected Dr. Rossabi to pull punches during his lecture out of deference to the occasion, they were proven wrong. He gave a rather candid reassessment of his book Khubilai Khan and the recent deification and "vulgarization," as he put it, of the popular image of Chinggis Khaan. It was a brave position to take given the politics involved, but he expressed his concern about exalting the positives of the Mongol Empire and attempting to conceal the negatives of the Mongol conquests. Noting that, of course, this is a response in some respect to a long history in the West of portraying the Mongols unfairly, still he insisted that honest and factual examinations of history are of paramount importance in scholarly research. The facts indicate that there were positives and negatives associated with the Mongol conquests of Eurasia.

It was not an easy argument to make, especially in Mongolia. It made me think of someone standing in front of a group of Americans and suggesting that the way forward in truly understanding American history is accepting, even embracing, the uncomfortable facts about slavery. For many people that would be tantamount to heresy, and in Mongolia suggesting that Chinggis Khaan was a great leader but he was also a ruthless and brutal leader can be very dangerous, indeed. I think Dr. Rossabi was making a very trenchant observation about the need for all people to embrace both the positives and negatives of their history in order to give lasting resilience and credibility to the image that is presented to the rest of the world. Americans who ignore the legacy of slavery risk being branded hypocrites on issues of human rights, and Mongolians who ignore the brutality of the Mongol conquests risk having people not believe the factual positives of Mongol rule.

Dr. Rossabi also added that in re-evaluating Mongolian history, he is somewhat troubled by the fact that other great Mongolians are often neglected in the national consciousness. Mongolian currency, for example, has images of Chinggis Khaan and Sukhbaatar, but not of Natsagdorj, Zanabazar, or others. But, at the same time, he said it was understandable because Chinggis Khaan and Sukhbaatar are Mongolia's great generals, and other countries also find it hard to give space to leaders of the arts and sciences. Hero worship of military leaders is a common phenomenon around the world. I remember the first time I saw a German 5 Mark bill and it had a portrait of Carl Friedrich Gauss. I was impressed to see a mathematician receiving such an honor. But, maybe Germany is one place generals are best left unremembered. In the rest of the world we have a tendency to measure greatness in terms of conquest of the physical environment as opposed to the human mind.

Overall the lecture was enjoyable, most especially for Dr. Rossabi's candid thoughts. He certainly elicited numerous questions at the end of the lecture which poured into the reception afterwards. Congratulations to you Dr. Rossabi for your award and thank you for an informative lecture.

Dr. Morris Rossabi to Give Lecture

Dr. Morris Rossabi of City University of New York and author of numerous books on Khubilai Khan and the Yuan Dynasty will be giving a lecture entitled "Recent Re-evaluations of Chinggis Khan and Khubilai Khan" at the ACMS Speaker Series this week April 23rd, 2009 at 5pm. The National University will also confer an honorary doctorate on Dr. Rossabi before the lecture for his contributions to the understanding of Mongolian history. The lecture is open to the public, and will take place in Room 305 of National University of Mongolia Building No. 5. Hope to see you there.

National Museum and Presidential Politics

My wife and I went to the National Museum this weekend in search of a new display which contains artifacts discovered in Khotont Soum in Arkhangai Aimag. Khotont is where I spent my Peace Corps days, and I had numerous opportunities while living there to hike through areas with Turkish era monuments and artifacts. Our visit to the museum was a sort of expression of local pride. The soum is right on the southern edge of the Orkhon Valley, and in recent years more and more archaeologists have begun venturing into the soum looking for more evidence to understand the intricacies of life on the steppe in the first millennium. Alas, we did not find the display, but we did find that the museum has undergone significant changes over the last year.

Many of the display halls have been renovated and display cases for the most part are very nicely arranged. I have always been a fan of the national costume hall, and I was pleased to see that it had been renovated and, in fact, the museum is adding more costumes to the display cases. But, among the many changes, the most interesting change was the 20th Century History hall which was the last display area before exiting the museum. It has transformed into the Democratic and Free Market Transition hall with displays of protests in the early 1990s, economic and social changes throughout the last two decades, and commemoration of individuals who took part in bringing about the change. Throughout the hall there were speakers pumping in sounds of speeches at rallies, the noises of crowds, and, of course, the national anthem.

I asked the museum worker when the hall was changed. She indicated that the Democratic Party or Democratic Union (she wasn't sure who) gave money for the renovation a few years ago. It must have occurred recently, though, because my last visit to the museum in June 2008 still had the old display cases. I thought the hall was a great improvement over the previous hall, and it included some really interesting information like a satellite image of Ulaanbaatar with marks indicating where underground pro-democracy youth movements operated in the 80s and the official declarations for acquiring personal passports under the law of the Mongolian People's Republic and present day democratic Mongolia.

This weekend was the start of the presidential campaign season in Mongolia, and it was somewhat fitting to make the "discovery" of the new hall at the museum this very weekend. The presidential race will be a rematch of the 2005 race. There might be a lot to be cynical about with that fact. However, the museum did remind me, at least, that a lot of pride remains in Mongolia about the county's history and future. These are not easy choices to make and these are not easy times in Mongolia (if ever there were), but people in general seem to remain with an overall positive frame of mind. This belief was reaffirmed as we passed Zorig's statue after leaving the museum and we saw that someone had put a string of flowers around his neck. The ideal is alive and well in the minds of people even if the execution is sometimes flawed in reality.

Lattimore Conference Web Pages

The ACMS Library has created a dedicated section of the library website to showcase information and digital materials related to the ACMS conference entitled “Owen Lattimore: the Past, Present, and Future of Inner Asian Studies.” To see these web pages please visit www.mongoliacenter.org/lattimore.

The Headless State by David Sneath

In April David Sneath of the Inner Asian Studies Unit at the University of Cambridge gave a lecture at the ACMS that drew from his then forthcoming book "The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia" (Columbia University Press). Over the Naadam holiday I had an opportunity to read the book.

This is hardly an academic review of the book, but rather one lay person's impression of the work. Overall I was quite intrigued by the main argument Dr. Sneath builds throughout the book supported by evidence in many instances that debunks what he considers long held but inaccurate interpretations of society at the aggregate levels of community or within distinguishable polities in Inner Asia. The traditional Anthropological descriptions of Inner Asian Society, according to Dr. Sneath, have been used to support theoretical models which describe "pre-state" polities as clan or kin based tribal systems.

Within these models, the tribal society creeps towards non-kin based forms of administrative organization that is indicative of the modern state. These are theories of political evolution in which tribal society is an inferior precursor to the more evolved and resilient nation state. As a consequence, the historical interpretations of societies in Inner Asia have often been framed in terms of underdevelopment and approaching but ultimately receding from being a state-like entity back towards an ideal form of nomadic and pastoral society which is suited for the harsh environment of the steppe. These models, however outmoded or possibility discredited in certain areas of social science, seem to continue to find their way into historical and popular understanding of Inner Asian society. What Dr. Sneath argues, convincingly to me, is that the political and social order on the steppe has and continues to be far more complex than the perennial perception of egalitarian nomads living freely and rather haphazardly on the plains, only occasionally organizing themselves under a charismatic leader into a state-like entity of marauding hordes.

The book is interesting on many levels, but one of the points that resonated with me was his description of the Great Mongol Empire not as a singularly unique event or a revolution on the steppe under the charismatic leadership of Chinggis Khaan, but rather as an exceptional form of many of the administrative and state like systems in use before the Mongol Empire and even after its decline. The reason for this resonating with me was a comment a faculty member from the University of Missouri's School of Journalism made on a recent tour of sites related to the Mongol Empire. He said that the history of Inner Asia he learned in school often gave the impression that people such as Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan sprang from nowhere and after a time their empires receded back to nowhere. But, standing where Temujiin was crowned as Chinggis Khaan, the son of a great Khan himself, it became clear to this faculty member that at the very least an aristocratic order existed.

Dr. Sneath drives this very point home throughout the latter half of his book, presenting historical evidence to demonstrate that steppe society has been marked by a complex aristocratic order and political intrigue that has been generally reserved for historical treatments of Western civilizations before modern nation states formed. The evidence presented in the book points to a highly administrative social structure with fluid movement of aristocratic groups at the top of these societies. In other words, the history of Inner Asia has not been the supplanting of one tribe by another, but rather the supplanting of one aristocratic order by another with the rest of society, and more importantly the administrative structures used to control the society, remaining relatively unchanged.

Overall the book is an interesting read, and Dr. Sneath offers a compelling argument supported by historical evidence, logic, and instances of proof by contradiction with numerous points of accepted wisdom. I recommend the book if you have any interest in Mongolian history or nomadic societies.