Bad Influence Blair

Blair was a really bad influence on Owen in "The Big Sneak"< November 15, 2019.

And it is not even so much what Blair urged Owen to do so much as who she held up as an example for Owen to follow.

She said that nobody ever heard of the man who followed all the rules, while everyone has heard of Genghis khan (c. 1162-1227), who "broke all the rules and conquered the World. And people are still naming restaurants after him." according to Blair.

Blair exaggerated a bit in both parts of her statement. There were some rules of conduct which Genghis Khan followed, though hardly enough. And Genghis Khan didn't conquer all the world, or any parts of Australia, Antarctica, the Americas, or Africa, just most of Asia and a big piece of Europe.

According to most lists of largest empires, the British colonial empire or thalassocracy ("sea realm") was the largest empire ever with a land area of 35,500,000 square kilometers or 13,700,000 square miles in 1920, while the Mongol Empire at its height in 1270 or in 1309 had an area of 24,000,000 square kilometers or 9,270,000 square miles, thus being a clear second place. And Genghis Khan died in 1227, while the Mongol Empire was still expanding and didn't reach its largest size until decades after his death.

However, in this thread in Historum: https://historum.com/threads/is-the-mongol-empire-really-the-largest-contiguous-land-empire-in-history.177536/ some posts claim that the Mongol Empire extended much farther north than most historical maps show, and that it was not only much larger than the Russian Empire, but also might possibly have been larger than the British Empire.

In any case the part of the Mongol Empire that Genghis Khan conquered during his lifetime was probably much larger than anyone else ever conquered, probably making Genghis Khan the greatest conqueror ever.

And the crimes of Genghis Khan were on an equally vast scale, putting them in roughly the same category as the crimes of Tamerlane (1336-1405), Hitler (1889-1945), Stalin (1878-1953), and Chairman Mao (1893-1976).

According to this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll, about 30,000,000 to 40,000,000 people were killed during the Mongol conquests during the reign of Genghis Khan and his successors, and many millions of those were slaughtered in brutal massacres that are considered war crimes today.

So Blair was urging Owen to be more like one of the most evil men in history, whose forces murdered millions of men, women, and children - including children just as young and innocent as Blair or Owen. Genghis Khan and his Mongols would have killed Blair and Owen, or would have killed Kaylin Hayman or Ramon Reed if those kids time traveled to where the Mongols were having a massacre.

So Genghis Khan was not a good role model, to put it mildly.