. The historian, Dan Carlin, once suggested that we can only talk about the positive and negative impacts of Mongol rule (like the expansion of the Silk Road and trade) because they ruled in the distant past. No current historian is trying to argue that Stalin's rule over Russia had a positive impact, for example. Do you agree with Carlin's assumption? Do you think that, in the very distant future, historians will be able to dispassionately discuss the positive and negative impacts of modern-day dictators like Muammar Gaddafi, Kim Jong-Un, or even Joseph Stalin?