Recent events in the Middle East are shocking, but they are not novel in our history. 

We did not have to wait for Stalin, Hitler or Mao to see sheer depravity.  We saw it in the nation that thought it was the most civilised in Europe, and therefore the world, in 1792 in France, in what are called the September Massacres. 

The French were threatened from outside and inside.  Here are extracts from Carlyle, The French Revolution.

So sit these sudden Courts of Wild-Justice, with the Prison-Registers before them; unwonted wild tumult howling all round: the Prisoners in dread expectancy within.  Swift: a name is called; bolts jingle, a Prisoner is there.  A few questions are put; swiftly this sudden Jury decides: Royalist Plotter or not?  Clearly not; in that case, Let the Prisoner be enlarged With Vive la Nation. Probably yea; then still, Let the Prisoner be enlarged, but without Vive la Nation; or else it may run, Let the prisoner be conducted to La Force.  At La Force again their formula is, Let the Prisoner be conducted to the Abbaye.—‘To La Force then!’  Volunteer bailiffs seize the doomed man; he is at the outer gate; “enlarged,” or “conducted,”—not into La Force, but into a howling sea; forth, under an arch of wild sabres, axes and pikes; and sinks, hewn asunder.  And another sinks, and another; and there forms itself a piled heap of corpses, and the kennels begin to run red.  Fancy the yells of these men, their faces of sweat and blood; the crueller shrieks of these women, for there are women too; and a fellow-mortal hurled naked into it all! …….

Man after man is cut down; the sabres need sharpening, the killers refresh themselves from wine jugs.  Onward and onward goes the butchery; the loud yells wearying down into bass growls.  A sombre-faced, shifting multitude looks on; in dull approval, or dull disapproval; in dull recognition that it is Necessity.  “An Anglais in drab greatcoat” was seen, or seemed to be seen, serving liquor from his own dram-bottle;—for what purpose, “if not set on by Pitt,” Satan and himself know best!  Witty Dr. Moore grew sick on approaching, and turned into another street.—Quick enough goes this Jury-Court; and rigorous. The brave are not spared, nor the beautiful, nor the weak……

In the dim Registers of the Townhall, which are preserved to this day, men read, with a certain sickness of heart, items and entries not usual in Town Books: “To workers employed in preserving the salubrity of the air in the Prisons, and persons “who presided over these dangerous operations,” so much,—in various items, nearly seven hundred pounds sterling.  To carters employed to “the Burying-grounds of Clamart, Montrouge, and Vaugirard,” at so much a journey, per cart; this also is an entry.  Then so many francs and odd sous “for the necessary quantity of quick-lime!”  Carts go along the streets; full of stript human corpses, thrown pellmell; limbs sticking up:—seest thou that cold Hand sticking up, through the heaped embrace of brother corpses, in its yellow paleness, in its cold rigour; the palm opened towards Heaven, as if in dumb prayer, in expostulation de profundis.  Take pity on the Sons of Men!—Mercier saw it, as he walked down “the Rue Saint-Jacques from Montrouge, on the morrow of the Massacres:” but not a Hand; it was a Foot,—which he reckons still more significant, one understands not well why. Or was it as the Foot of one spurning Heaven?  Rushing, like a wild diver, in disgust and despair, towards the depths of Annihilation? Even there shall His hand find thee, and His right-hand hold thee,—surely for right not for wrong, for good not evil! “I saw that Foot,” says Mercier; “I shall know it again at the great Day of Judgment, when the Eternal, throned on his thunders, shall judge both Kings and Septembers……

But the Constituted Authorities, all this while?  The Legislative Assembly; the Six Ministers; the Townhall; Santerre with the National Guard?—It is very curious to think what a City is.  Theatres, to the number of some twenty-three, were open every night during these prodigies: while right-arms here grew weary with slaying, right-arms there are twiddledeeing on melodious catgut; at the very instant when Abbé Sicard was clambering up his second pair of shoulders, three-men high, five hundred thousand human individuals were lying horizontal, as if nothing were amiss.

But of course, the horror got so much worse when the government orchestrated the killing in what is known as the Terror – which led I think to the term ‘terrorist.’  That just about tipped Carlyle over the edge.

One other thing, or rather two other things, we will still mention; and no more: The Blond Perukes; the Tannery at Meudon. Great talk is of these Perruques blondes: O Reader, they are made from the Heads of Guillotined women!  The locks of a Duchess, in this way, may come to cover the scalp of a Cordwainer: her blond German Frankism his black Gaelic poll, if it be bald. Or they may be worn affectionately, as relics; rendering one suspect?.   Citizens use them, not without mockery; of a rather cannibal sort.

Still deeper into one’s heart goes that Tannery at Meudon; not mentioned among the other miracles of tanning! “At Meudon,” says Montgaillard with considerable calmness, “there was a Tannery of Human Skins; such of the Guillotined as seemed worth flaying: of which perfectly good wash-leather was made:” for breeches, and other uses. The skin of the men, he remarks, was superior in toughness (consistance) and quality to shamoy; that of women was good for almost nothing, being so soft in texture! —History looking back over Cannibalism, through Purchas’s Pilgrims and all early and late Records, will perhaps find no terrestrial Cannibalism of a sort on the whole so detestable. It is a manufactured, soft-feeling, quietly elegant sort; a sort perfide!   Alas then, is man’s civilisation only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?  Nature still makes him; and has an Infernal in her as well as a Celestial.

In France the issue involved crown and caste.  In the Middle East, God and the tribe are there.  Third parties in all.

But the misery blights mankind.