Those who do not learn from history are fools

"Kill them all. Let god sort 'em out."

I thought that flippant, macho line was just something jarheads said over a beer or was a line from some war movie.

But, while scanning an article in the Travel section of The New York Times today, I learned that this bloody admonition was in fact founded in historical fact. The speaker meant it literally.

In the early 13th Century the pope sent out an army to stamp out heretics. In the South of France the Cathars holed up in fortifications in the mountains but eventually were taken captive.

In Béziers, according to the Times, more than 15,000 men, women and children were slaughtered. When asked how to tell the heretics from the Christians, the crusader monk Armond Amaury is said to have uttered that awful order, "Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoset." Or, "Kill them all. God will know His own." I guest he figured the innocents would go to heaven and the heretics to hell and no stain on his soul.

I once heard a history professor say that human nature has not changed since the dawn of man, and that studying history is the best way to avoid the failings of the past and copy the successes.