#Twitter rages over supposed call to ‘cancel’ Ghengis Khan

A statue of Ghengis Khan in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.
AP Photo/Andy Wong

Twitter is raging over a supposed call to “cancel” Ghengis Khan — all prompted by a woman who had merely pointed out that the fearless, 12th Century Mongol conqueror had also killed an awful number of people.

“Ghengis Khan did to central Asia what Islamic invaders did to India, maybe worse,” user @Priya_27_ had tweeted on Thursday, sparking an online firestorm.

“He single-handedly killed 11% of world population at the time. Yet some want to glorify him as a hero conqueror. That’s your personal choice,” she tweeted, reasonably enough.

“But objectively, Ghenghis Khan was a barbarian.”

The tweet did not call for Khan to be “cancelled–” however impractical that would have been anyway for a ruler who died in the year 1227, and whose only major statue is located on a remote plain in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

Still, the resulting pro- and Khan thread went viral the next day, some time after user @GarlicCorgi retweeted @Priya_27_, and responded “Ghenghis Khan is CANCELLED.”

By end of day Friday, outrage over an imaginary movement to “cancel” Ghenghis Khan was trending, with a growing outrage thread gaining at least 4,000 retweets and 7,000 likes.

“I left twitter for a few hours and i come back to the news genghis khan is Cancelled,” tweeted @MorganGodfery.

By Saturday, @Priya_27_, maybe feeling a bit cancelled herself, had taken down her Twitter and Instagram accounts.