Does Infamy Justify Remembrance?

The little town of Gori an hour outside the Georgian capital of Tbilisi is mostly known for one thing today.  It is the birthplace of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.  To most outsiders today, Stalin is known mostly for his unpredictable political purges and disastrous collectivization efforts, leaving hundreds of senior Soviet leaders and millions of its citizens dead.  But in his hometown, Stalin is still celebrated, not least for his contribution to defeating Nazism and turning the USSR into an industrial power within a generation.

Mongolians have the same attitude toward Genghis Khan, their historical leader from some centuries ago.  To many outsiders, the Great Khan is a destroyer of civilizations, a pillager responsible for massacring millions of civilians during his brutal conquests.  In the Mongol heart lands, however, he is still remembered for his ability to unify the different tribes of the grasslands, and then creating the greatest empire mankind has ever known.

From one perspective, neither Stalin nor Genghis Khan ought to be celebrated as heroes.  Their deeds, for whatever intentions, are essentially anti-humanist and self-serving, naked power grabs that consolidated their own respective positions by sacrificing millions of others in the process.  In today's efforts to build rule-based international order, such figures can only be seen as rogue dictators to be denounced, contained, and deposed, not people admired and to be emulated.

Yet, it also brings the question of whether they should simply be labeled primarily or mainly as villains.  After all, they lived in different eras where modern concept of humanitarianism was either not present or not universal.  To blame them strictly for what contemporary norms see as sins covers their other achievements of advancing economies, spreading cultures, or introducing political stability where they was none.  To be objective, the positive aspects of supposed villains should also be known to all.

However, Gori's cult of Stalin and the Mongolian cult of Genghis Khan are both fundamentally lacking in such objectivity.  They make little mention of how their respected unifiers brought suffering to millions in their processes of conquest, instead purely seeing the achievement as glory and demonstration of personal power.  Such one-sided is even more dangerous than portrayal of them as pure villains, by providing citizens with the misunderstanding of their wholly positive heroes as role models.

For a relatively uncelebrated people like the Georgians or the Mongolians, even great Infamy that comes with mass murderers are worthy of celebration if that would bring national pride and international recognition.  For the international community to just denounce their worshipping of figures like Stalin and Genghis Khan would be of great national affront seen as personal insult to the local populace taught of their heroes' greatness.

Instead, there needs to be international collaboration to find some sort of middle ground.   As historical figures, they should now be seen neutrally as protagonists shaping human civilizations in significant ways.  Their importance to historical changes should be recognized, along with their respective contributions to the identities of their respective peoples.  But it is also necessary to teach locals that their behaviors, while historically significant, are no longer appropriate in the present and future.

Only then can the likes of Stalin and Genghis Khan be put in the right place.  They should neither be cult figures worshipped as semi-religious beings bringing greatness to an otherwise unremarkable people, nor should they be seen purely as villains bringing only misery to human civilization without any sort of positive contribution.  Only then can these figures be celebrated rationally and simultaneously provide the future generations learning about them with more objective views of who they were and what had done.