So often we publish lists that praise events in human history – tales of
victory over diseases, disastrous situations, and the like. But alas,
history is also replete with events that we must remember so as to not
repeat them, but we wish had never happened. This list looks at ten of
the worst moments in history when man showed that he can act with utter
contempt for the rest of man.
1. Roman-Catholic Sex Abuse
Sexual abuse of the naive and innocent by authority figures is
nothing new to human history, but what makes this example of it
especially heinous is that it has taken place under the unwatchful eye
of the most powerful Christian organization in the world. Child rape and
molestation are, in the common view, possibly the vilest, most
despicable sin (and felonies) a person can commit, precisely because
there can be no excuse for it. Add to that the sin of homosexuality (we
speak here in terms of Christianity), and it seems an impossible
situation for a child ever to be found in.
Priests ought to understand these sins better than most people, and
in Roman-Catholic cultures all over the world, parents highly revere
priests as authority figures, second fathers to their children, and
excellent teachers of morality. Hence, the question everyone has asked,
“How in God’s name could this have happened?”
It’s not just a matter of well kept personal secrets among the guilty
parties. The Catholic Church held meetings in the 1950s concerning
sexual abuse of minors by priests, and yet, apparently nothing was done
to prevent the growing disaster. Those people known to have a history of
committing sexual abuse against others were knowingly ordained and sent
to priestly duties all over the world, not just in the United States,
but in England, Ireland, Canada, Belgium, the Philippines, and many
other nations.
The scandal didn’t hit the mainstream media until the 1980s, raising
suspicion of Papal cover-ups to protect the image of Christianity.
Fortunately, Christianity’s image has not suffered a fraction of the
fall-out that the Catholic hierarchy has. Christ will never be torn down
because of man’s sin, or it would certainly have happened by now.
The
priests are, as of this list, still being hunted down, investigated, and
dealt with according to man’s law. God’s law will deal with the guilt
of every sinner involved, if you believe in Him, but in the meantime,
the Roman-Catholic denomination of the man many hold as the absolute
greatest good in history has suffered severe damage to its reputation.
Whether it is irreparable depends on how long a consecutive series of
superlative Popes the Catholic Church can elect, beginning with John
Paul II.
2. Great Chinese Famine
From 1958 to 1962, China experienced a monumental famine that killed
at least 45 million people. There are generally two causes blamed for
it: natural disasters and the communist policies of Mao Zedong. Chairman
Mao defined this period of his rule as the “Great Leap Forward,” and
implemented economic and social changes with epic consequences. This
entry is quite similar to #6 and #3.
Mao intended to turn China from an agrarian economy into a modern,
urbanized, industrial giant on par with the U. S. But forcing his Great
Leap Forward on the Chinese countryside led to nationwide crop
shortages. Then the Yellow River flooded in 1959, drowning or starving 2
million. The next year, 60% of China’s farmland received no rain at
all.
Mao’s idea of forcing farmers into industrial careers further
destroyed the harvests. The famine became so intolerable that in some
areas, people resorted to canniablism. Millions were tortured to death
for the crime of stealing food to feed their families. One man, Liu
Desheng, was found to have stolen a sweet potato, and he and his wife
and son were urinated on, then forced to eat large gulps of human feces.
They both died within weeks.
Mao and his officers meanwhile dined on $1,000 French meals and 20
year-old Scotch whisky. Mao is on record as having told his officers
that there would be many deaths due to his Great Leap Forward, but that
in the end, they would serve a greater good. The famine only ended when
the weather improved in 1962. 5% of China starved to death, drowned, or
were murdered
3. Forced Extinction of Species
Ecologists agree that Earth appears to be experiencing a mass
extinction at present. These have happened many times in the past. The
extinction of the dinosaurs is believed to have been caused most
directly by a comet or asteroid impact. That event was nothing compared
to the Permian-Triassic extinction, which may have been caused by a
Gamma Ray Burst. That event resulted in 96% of all marine life and 70%
of all land life dying.
What has happened to plant and animal species while modern man has
been on Earth pales in the shadow of these two events, and yet humanity
in general is doing terribly little to maintain critically endangered
species. Most humans seem to adore “cuddly” animals. Anything with fur
qualifies, and we have many tastes in what animals are beautiful. The
tiger is magnificent. In 2005 there were only 250 breeding Siberian
tigers in the Russian wild. There are well over 10,000 in captive
breeding programs around the world: some people are trying to save
species from extinction, while many others willfully poach those
endangered animals for the black market.
Tiger penis is considered the ultimate aphrodisiac in some places in
China. These magnificent animals are being killed, illegally and at
extreme personal risk, for money and sexual gratification. In 2011, the
Western Black Rhinoceros was declared officially extinct. They, like so
many other gigantic African marvels, had been hunted coldly, and
unsympathetically, by humans out for a cheap thrill and what they
thought was sport and danger.
Black rhinoceroses are extremely aggressive and have terrible
eyesight. They will charge headfirst into trees and termite mounds,
thinking they see a territorial challenger. Males weigh an easy 3,000
pounds. The record is 6,380 pounds. There are only about 4,000 left in
the African wild as of this list. The reason is two-fold: in 1900 there
were several hundred thousand in Africa, but English “hunters” toured
Africa to shoot down the Big Five: elephants, rhinoceroses, cape
buffaloes, lions, and leopards.
This lister goes hunting now and then for deer, squirrels, rabbits,
and doves, and these animals are very bountiful and fairly difficult to
outwit in the wild. The hunter must also be a good marksman. But in
Africa, elephants and rhinoceroses are too gargantuan to have natural
predators except the very occasional lion. So they stand still or charge
in the presence of humans. There’s no “hunting” involved. You can drive
up to either species in a jeep in the middle of day and take pictures.
And armed with a .700 Nitro Express, which propels a 1000 grain solid
bronze bullet at 8900 foot-pounds of force, there’s no skill involved.
Some people just enjoy killing these magnificent animals for the
empowerment it seems to instill. Also, rhinoceros horns are highly
sought after in Chinese “medicine” for their ability to cure disease and
impotence, neither of which the horn can do. It is made of pure
keratin, and so are your fingernails. Keratin comes from the Greek
κέρατος, which means “of the horn.”
There are anywhere from 470,000 to 690,000 African Bush Elephants
left in the wild, and they are protected from poachers, but not well.
They are poached for their ivory tusks, regardless of the international
illegality of buying or selling them. Gorillas are poached for their
hands, which are used as ashtrays. Then, of course, there is severe
habitat destruction in virtually every ecosystem on the planet, so we
can have our diamonds and gold, and build colossal megalopolis.
4. Fanatical Terrorism
Splinter-cell terrorism refers to acts of terror, especially
bombings, hijackings, and assassinations, committed by agents of
organizations operating all over the world free of direct link to any
organization. It is the ultimate example of guerrilla warfare, and as
the world has seen in the past 20 years or so, huge, powerful,
technologically advanced militaries have extreme difficulty stopping
these criminals.
Splinter-cell terrorists are responsible for the September 11, 2001
attacks against the United States of America. Before that, the U. S.
remained generally aloof to the global war of attrition being waged
against these fanatics (lunatics). U. S. embassies were bombed in Africa
in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000, and all the while, efforts were underway
to find the leader of the primary aggressor against global
civilization, al-Qaeda. That leader, Osama bin Laden, could not be
found, until after 9/11, when the U. S. began hunting him down in
earnest. It took a decade to catch him.
In the meantime, other fanatics
the world over were perpetrating atrocity after atrocity against
innocent, unarmed civilians of dozens of countries, for the avowed
purpose of eradicating Jews and Christians from Earth. Stopping each of
these terrorists once they make their presence known can never put an
end to the problem.
Islamic terrorists are not the only culprits, as Theodore Kaczynski
and Timothy McVeigh prove. It is impossible to make these fanatics
respect any military might, since to begin with, they are not afraid to
die in the process of killing others. How civilized humanity can put a
total end to this terrorism is still debatable, of course. Whether it
even can be stopped is also debatable.
5. Khmer Rouge Regime
The Khmer Rouge were members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, and
during their 4-year reign of terror, from 1975 to 1979, they completely
destroyed Cambodia, economically, politically, and demographically.
They took advantage of the chaos following the Vietnam War to overthrow
the Republican government and set up what their leader, Saloth Sar, who
named himself Pol Pot, called “agrarian socialism.” It was, in reality, a
forced relocation of every single Cambodian citizen from cities to
farms where they were forced to farm regardless of skill or health. They
were starved to death, beaten to death, overworked to death, and
tortured to death.
Anyone deemed “intellectual” was immediately murdered to protect the
regime. Anyone wearing glasses was deemed intellectual. These people
were taken out into “killing fields” and hacked to pieces with machetes.
Every single book that could be found was burned, as was all money. All
banks and even hospitals were shut down. The citizens were no longer
given more than two bowls of rice soup per day. All religion was banned,
and those adhering to any religion were prime targets for murder,
including Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims, anyone educated in western
universities, and any ethnicity other than Cambodian.
The most notorious details of this sorry moment in human history come
from S-21, now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. It was a high school
before it was taken over. The Khmer Rouge guards forced the prisoners to
eat the guards’ feces. The prisoners were forbidden from drinking water
without permission, and if they did, they were beaten sometimes to
death. They were water boarded, raped, their teeth and genitals
electrocuted, bled to death, drowned, and castrated with pliers.
The death toll of this regime cannot be accurately calculated,
because records were rarely kept well. The most reliable estimate is 2.5
to 3 million murdered. That was 21% of Cambodia’s population. Pol Pot
died on 15 April 1998 of what was claimed to be heart failure. He might
have been poisoned, or committed suicide, since he was about to be
arrested for his crimes.
6. World War One
One of only two wars to make this list, this one does because of the
hideous speed at which hostilities escalated in 1914, and because there
is no single villain to blame. Humanity in general is to blame for this
one. In retrospect, it appears as if every country in Europe was
harboring a festering hatred for one another, and everyone was looking
for an excuse to invade.
The act that touched it off was the
assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria-Este, by Gavrilo
Princip, whose motive was no more complicated than a desire to prove his
bravery to the Serbian army, which had rejected him for being too small
and weak.
Almost every nation in Europe had a treaty with another nation, and
these treaties all said the same thing: if anyone attacks you, we’ve got
your back. Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia, which prompted Russia
to declare war on Austro-Hungary, which prompted Germany and Italy to
declare war on Russia, which prompted the United Kingdom and France to
declare war on Germany and Italy. Spain and, of course, Switzerland
stayed out of it.
The United States stayed out of it until Germany waged total war on
international unarmed merchant ships, particularly Lusitania, and
because of the Zimmermann Telegram which Germany sent to Mexico, urging
it to declare war on the U. S. The British intercepted this memo, but
Mexico, to its credit, did not dare attack the U. S.
We can all agree that war is the epitome of human stupidity, and as
wars go, WWI may be insurmountable in exemplary idiocy. War theory, if
we may call it that, had progressed in terms of modern defense, but not
attack: both sides were armed with more or less the very same weaponry,
especially the Maxim machine gun, the first truly modern machine gun. It
is belt-fed, fires the .303 British, the 8mm Mauser, or the 7.62 NATO,
at a rate of 450 to 500 rounds per minute, sufficient to cut men in
half, which is precisely what it did tens of thousands of times for 4
years.
The British, French, Germans, Russians, and Americans all had them,
and for the first 2 and a half years, the trench warfare involved one
side charging out across 100 to 1000 yards of no-man’s land, through
shell craters, barbed wire, mud and mines, right into the waiting
machine gun lines of the enemy trenches.
Each time one side was beaten
back with severe losses, the other side thought there would be a
weakness and charged after them, right into waiting machine gun lines.
Kaiser Wilhelm sent a telegram in late 1914 to his cousin, Tsar Nicholas
II, that read, in Russian, “Nicky, how can we stop this?”
On the first day of the Battle of the Somme River, 1 July 1916, the
middle day of the middle year of the Great War, as it was called before
1939, the British conducted the European Slow March, walking, not
running, toward the Germans, on the theory that the slower they
advanced, the more difficult they would be to hit, and more fearsome
they would be to the enemy. After 12 hours, 19,240 British soldiers lay
dead in about 25 square miles. This was the most lethal day in the
British military’s history.
The Somme was begun in an attempt to draw men of both sides away from
the Battle of Verdun, so a decision there could be attained. Instead,
the Somme became an even larger battle in scale, and it and Verdun
remain the most epic of the War. 698,000 men died at Verdun, 70,000 per
month for 10 months. Over 300,000 died at the Somme. Each battle
resulted in over 1 million casualties, the debut of the modern
flamethrower at Verdun, and the tank at the Somme.
The Germans opened hostilities at Verdun with a 10-hour cannonade of
808 artillery pieces, firing almost 1 million shells, some as wide as
steering wheels. Around the French fortifications, the blackened
skeletons of trees were festooned with human and horse intestines. The
Germans also used ample supplies of mustard gas in both battles. Mustard
gas is essentially aerosol hydrochloric acid. One breath of it can kill
a man by internal drowning. It also severely burns and blisters skin
and blinds eyes.
Both battles ended in utter stalemate, because mobility had not
progressed on par with firepower, and that lack of mobility, especially
on the first day of the Somme, displayed more directly than any other
action in any war the utter futility and insanity of warfare. Neither
side could approach the other, but the Germans found their losses more
irreplaceable than the combined French and British.
When the Americans
showed up, the Germans simply could not cope with the overwhelming enemy
men and materiel for much longer. About 15 million, military and
civilian, died, unless we include deaths from Spanish influenza, which
was itself a direct result of the War. That puts the estimate at about
65 million.
7. The Black Death
There is no one cause to blame for the Bubonic plague’s rise to power
in 1346 or so, but Europe in general can be criticized strongly for its
primitive belief in witches. Because “witches” were hunted down
wholesale by reason of an insufferably pervasive fear of the Devil,
domestic and feral cats were also killed by the hundreds of thousands,
because they were thought to be witches’ “familiars,” that without one, a
witch could not adequately cast spells.
So once witch-hunts showed up in full swing and cats started
disappearing into the fires, the entire European world was ripe for an
epidemic of rats. And the rats showed up in full swing in 1346 in the
Crimea, via the Silk Road from China. There were no cats to check the
rats stowing away onboard merchant ships, and these rats were infested
with fleas. The fleas carried yersinia pests, better known as plague.
Today, this bacteria has been all but eradicated in most places
around the world, because cleanliness is next to Godliness. A regular
hot bath with soap will rid you of fleas, but such baths were not
regular in the Middle Ages. Once bitten by an infected flea, curing
yourself is really not difficult at all. Streptomycin prevents the
bacteria from replicating, which gives the immune system enough time to
tailor an antibody to kill it. Europe didn’t know about antibiotics, and
had they, they might have had fair results by eating moldy bread.
Without treatment, plague is one of only three known diseases with a
mortality rate of 100%. The other two are rabies encephalitis and HIV.
Given the primitive medical knowledge of the Middle Ages, the world
didn’t have a chance. Even the best physicians had no clue what to do to
protect themselves, much less the populace.
Doctors entered homes only after donning full-body leather armor,
helmets and masks shaped like hawk beaks, filled with aromatic herbs,
due to the miasmatic theory of diseases. According to this theory,
simply “stirring up the vapors” would cure the area of plague, while the
doctor would remain safe breathing in his mask. The masks had red glass
over the eyeholes, because even looking at an infected person was
thought to cause infection.
Ringing bells was thought to stir up the vapors. Or the sick person
could stand next to a latrine and inhale the stench. About the only
method that actually worked to a small degree was smoking tobacco,
because the smoke kept the fleas away. But the most infamous methods for
curing the plague were based on the principle that God was very angry
with the whole world.
The Flagellants began roaming the countryside by 1349, especially in
Germany, and they beat themselves bloody with Roman-style flails, the
same kind used to scourge Christ. The idea was that if they suffered
enough, God would relent and the plague would stop. It didn’t work.
So, like clockwork, God’s wrath was blamed on the non-Christians
throughout Europe, and that mostly meant Jews. In February of 1349,
2,000 Jews were hacked to pieces and burned at the stake in Strasbourg,
on the French-German border. But the plague kept coming. It killed 40%
of Egypt, 30% of the Middle East, about half of the 100,000 people in
Paris. The worst hit area was Mediterranean Europe, including Italy,
Spain, and southern France. There, about 75% to 80% died. The Pope,
Clement VI, survived by surrounding his throne 24 hours a day with
torches burning close to the floor. In the aftermath, his servants found
scorched fleas “like pepper” just outside the ring of flame.
England suffered about 20% dead. The total average was about 25% of
the whole world, as evidence indicates plague deaths in sub-Saharan
Africa, India, and the Orient. As much as 66% of Europe and Asia
succumbed. Approximately 100,000,000 people died in 4 years.
8. The Holodomor
Holodomor is the Ukrainian word for “killing by hunger.” It is now
the proper term for Josef Stalin’s forced starvation genocide against
the Ukraine from 1932 to 1933. The manner by which Stalin forced it on
the Ukrainian people is open for discussion, but most historians agree
that he knew what was happening in the Ukraine and refused to provide
relief of any kind, even ordering food shipments diverted from the
Ukraine and what food its population had confiscated, violently whenever
necessary. He imposed this particularly cruel death sentence on so many
solely out of retaliation for the Ukraine striving for national
recognition and independence.
Today, we refer to it as a country, Ukraine, with Kiev as its capital
city. But at that time, it was still referred to as “the Ukrainian
SSR,” or simply, “the Ukraine,” one of many areas of Russia. The famine
was manmade, an imposition directly from Stalin, but whether he
premeditated it beforehand is difficult to determine. Most of Russia was
experiencing a famine at that time, and Stalin may have seen this a
chance to make the Holodomor look, at best, like an accident, at worst,
passive justice.
The numbers are the saddest testimony overall in every one of these
entries. Records were not well kept during the famine, so the death toll
ranges from 1.8 to 12 million. Some scholars have narrowed this down to
about 4 to 5 million. The borders were closed by the NKVD, the
precursor to the KGB, and anyone attempting to flee to other countries
or Russian states was either shot or captured and brought back to
starve. 190,000 tried to escape the Ukraine after the first year.
Starvation may be the most awful cause of death. The commoners’ despair,
agony, and terror led tens of thousands to resort to eating their own
children. Many ate their own feet. It did not end until Stalin’s
implementation of forced collectivization of grain threatened to destroy
all of Russia, not just the Ukraine. Once the police and military
stopped stealing everyone’s grain, farmers were able to grow for small
communities, as they always had.
9. World War Two
This war can be blamed mostly on one man, Adolf Hitler. Let us take a
brief look at the motives by which he initiated global hostilities in
1939. Whereas, Stalin was patently paranoid that he would lose his
power, Hitler was not afraid. He simply carried a fuming rage which, in
childhood, he directed against nothing in particular.
He was imprisoned for his failed Beer Hall Putsch, an attempt to
overthrow the Kaiser government, in 1923. While serving 8 months, he and
Rudolf Hess wrote Mein Kampf, in which Hitler blamed absolutely
everything bad that had ever happened to Germany on the Jews, all of
them everywhere on Earth. Whether he actually believed this is open to
debate, but there is no denying that he saw in Jews an outstanding
scapegoat, one against which all non-Jewish Germans would rally.
It worked better than he could possibly have imagined. He emerged
from prison a national hero and 10 years later took control of the
government. What followed was a nationwide brainwashing: everyone began
hating Jews intensely. Many of the Jews saw the trouble coming and left
for England or America. Most stayed, hoping they would be saved. They
weren’t, until it was too late.
6 years later, Hitler made good on his promise to acquire
“lebensraum” for the German people, by invading Poland. Britain and
France immediately declared war on Germany. Russia made a pact with
Germany because Stalin knew he could not conquer Germany at that time.
Hitler bided his time before invading Russia 2 years later, in the
knowledge that Russia’s military was woefully inadequate. Japan invaded
China for its resources, and in September 1940 Japan, Italy, and Germany
became the formal Axis Powers, solely because they understood their
identical desires to conquer other countries.
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in retaliation for the U. S.
embargo on oil, iron, and machinery. The U. S. then declared war on
Japan, and there were declarations of war all around. Oh, what a merry
world it became so quickly. After 6 years, 71 million people were dead.
Rome, Paris, Moscow, Leningrad, and London were smoldering. Dresden,
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Stalingrad, and Manila were obliterated.
The most infamous aspect of the War will forever remain the
Holocaust. It is also referred to as HaShoah, which is Hebrew for “The
Catastrophe.” Much has been said about it already on Listverse, so let
us briefly examine Hitler’s methods, by which he remorselessly and
unsympathetically attempted to eradicate an entire race of humans.
His seething, abiding rage found in Jews the perfect target, and he
set about in his political ambitions, surrounding himself with men who
agreed, some for power, some out of rage or delight, all out of hatred,
that the Jews as a race needed to, and could, be extinguished. The
Wehrmacht, for its part, had nothing at all to do with the Holocaust,
and had very little idea it was going on. They were an honorable
institution, if honor, just as compassion, can be found in war.
The Schutzstaffel, or SS, carried out the murder of 6 million men,
women, and children, by poisonous gas, shooting, beating, torturing,
“scientific” experiments, systematic starvation, and overwork, on the
pretense that “Aryans” were superior humans, and that Jews were no
better than cattle, in which terms, the question was asked, “Do we feel
bad when we slaughter cows for food?”
1.1 million were murdered at Auschwitz, 700,000 to 800,000 at
Treblinka, 600,000 at Belzec, 360,000 at Majdanek, 320,000 at Chelmno,
250,000 at Sobibor. Merely because they were Jewish. Meawhile, at least
750,000 soldiers and civilians died in 199 days in Stalingrad. That was
only one battle of the War.
10. The Crusades
Whereas, Stalin never offered any political explanation for, nor a
formal admission of, attempting to starve all of Ukraine, and Hitler
explained the Holocaust as “a necessary step” in the process of
purifying and strengthening the “master race,” the Crusades were
undertaken by both the Christians and the Muslims for the openly
expressed purpose of exterminating the opposing religion along with all
its adherents, solely to glorify God. It remains the blackest moment in
the history of all religion.
It lasted from c. 1063 until c. 1434, when handheld gunpowder weapons
were first used to good effect in combat. Keep in mind, before you
denounce God for allowing or causing it to happen, that doing so is
foolishly dismissive. Assuming there is a God, the Crusades were not his
fault. They remain humanity’s fault by two causes: first, the refusal
to tolerate differences; and second, the active enjoyment derived from
hurting things, especially other humans, since they can best voice their
disapproval of such actions.
The use of the word “God” in any language to justify one’s actions of
violence is but a means to an end, and also sweetens the enjoyment of
another person’s pain, since by denouncing that person as an infidel,
the malicious party can believe that person is also destined for eternal
agony, after the agony s/he is forced to suffer on Earth. Sounds
appetizing, doesn’t it? Because we all get angry at other people for
various perceived offenses, deep down doesn’t it sound appetizing to
believe those people are going to Hell, regardless of how much they
suffer in life? No one would ever admit to it, of course, but it’s a
primitive passion innate in every human, and precisely the heart of the
Crusades.
In 1099, the 1st Crusade ended in “Christian” victory, when knights
and soldiers from France, England, Germany, and Apulia (southern Italy)
successfully besieged Jerusalem from 7 June to 15 July. They were
opposed by the Islamic Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt, under Iftikhar
ad-Dawla, who had 400 cavalrymen and a garrison of Muslim and Nubian
troops comparable in size to the invaders, about 13,000 for each side.
Inside the city there lived over 60,000 unarmed civilians, mostly
Muslims and Jews.
Once the city fell, the invaders stormed in, ransacked every building
and murdered every single man, woman, and child within the walls.
70,000 people were hacked to pieces “in the name of Christ.” The horses
waded in blood up to their knees. Probably half the women were raped,
and most of everyone was tortured by varying methods. It was unbridled,
bacchanalian sadism. About 500 Jews fought alongside the Muslims, then
took refuge in a synagogue. The French burned the synagogue to the
ground, with everyone in it.
88 years later, Salah ad-Din successfully took Jerusalem back for
Islam and allowed all those inside to return unharmed to their homelands
provided they paid a ransom. Those who could not afford it were sold
into slavery. Two years later, Richard I of England (the Lionheart)
arrived with Phillip II of France and Frederick I of Germany. Richard
was not the chivalrous hero he is frequently depicted as in films. He
spent barely 6 months of his 10-year regency in England. He lived in
France, spoke only Langues d’Oil and Langues d’Oc, two dialects of Old
French, did not speak any form of English, and used England as a money
machine to finance his conquests. He loved the sport and glory of
overpowering other nations. His Crusade, the 3rd, ended in an uneasy
stalemate.
There would be 6 more Crusades, with the Holy Land changing hands
several times, costing hundreds of thousands of lives, all in the name
of one god or another. All the while, both bibles stated, “Love your
enemies.”
by
Flamehorse
Article source: http://listverse.com 
